Now we have the opportunity and understanding to move from emergency pandemic remote school and its pantomime of learning to purposefully designed online education spaces that are accessible, sustainable, and representative of the communities
Conference to Restore Humanity: The NeedWhat I have always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community.Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-First-Person-Stories-Twenty-First-ebook/dp/B082ZQBL98/ https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-Adapted-Young-Adults-ebook/dp/B08VFT4R9T/… More they serve. It’s time for the academic conference model to respond accordingly.
We’ll be iterating our Conference to Restore Humanity track, “DIYIn the arts, bricolage (French for “DIY” or “do-it-yourself projects”) is the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or… More at the EdgesFor me this space of radical openness is a margin a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at… More: Surviving the Bipartisanship of Behaviorism by Rolling Our Own”, up to the deadline while half our team is traveling across country for the next two weeks. Our regular trip from Austin to Boston Children’s so they can marvel at our neurodivergence
Neurodivergent, sometimes abbreviated as ND, means having a mind that functions in ways which diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of “normal.”NEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS Neurodivergent is quite… More is now. 😀
Conference to Restore Humanity! is an international invitation for K-12 and college educators to engage in a human-centered system redesign: centering the needs of students and educators toward a praxis of social justice.
Conference to Restore Humanity
We are providing educators with the proper tools to build classroom environments that value the humanity of all involved. Our goal is to create a space that breeds innovation through like-minded individuals who draw upon hundreds of years of history and countless research studies. Over the course of four days (and more, if needed), educators will learn at their own pace in an in-depth track on progressive educationProgressive EducationA movement based on connectivism & communities of practice -the networks we create for meaningful relationships, collaboration, & learning.A pulsating web of autonomous engagement.Growing and Expanding Progressive Education w/… More.
Thorndike won, and Dewey lost. I don’t think you can understand the history of education technology without realizing this either. And I’d propose an addendum to this too: you cannot understand the history of education technology in the United States during the twentieth century – and on into the twenty-first – unless you realize that Seymour Papert lost and B. F. Skinner won.
B. F. Skinner: The Most Important Theorist of the 21st Century
Despite that,
And neurodivergent and disabledThe label “disabled” means so much to me. It means I have community. It means I have rights. It means I can be proud. It means I can affirm myself… More students lost.
Behaviorism is everywhere. The All Means All of public education is made meaningless by the bipartisanship of behaviorism.
There’s just one problem with Lakoff’s theory. An awful lot of people who are politically liberal begin to sound like right-wing talk-show hosts as soon as the conversation turns to children and parenting. It was this curious discrepancy, in fact, that inspired the book you are now reading
There are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading.The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning Most schools and… More.
I first noticed an inconsistency of this kind in the context of education. Have a look at the unsigned editorials in left-of-center newspapers, or essays by columnists whose politics are mostly progressive. Listen to speeches by liberal public officials. On any of the controversial issues of our day, from tax policy to civil rights, you’ll find approximately what you’d expect. But when it comes to education, almost all of them take a hard-line position very much like what we hear from conservatives. They endorse a top-down, corporate-style version of school reform that includes prescriptive, one-size-fits-all teaching standards and curriculum mandates; weakened job protection for teachers; frequent standardized testing; and a reliance on rewards and punishments to raise scores on those tests and compel complianceNoncompliance is a social skill.Noncompliance is one of the most important social skills. Noncompliance skills make it possible to say no, even when others want your right to say no to… More on the part of teachers and students.
The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting
This widespread adoption of a traditionalist perspective helps us to make sense of the fact that, on topics related to children, even liberals tend to hold positions whose premises are deeply conservative. Perhaps it works the other way around as well: The fact that people on the left and center find themselves largely in agreement with those on the right explains how the traditionalist viewpoint has become the conventional wisdom. Child rearing might be described as a hidden front in the culture wars, except that no one is fighting on the other side.
The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom about Children and Parenting
Mooney notes that “No Child Left Behind was perhaps the most damaging form of public policy as it pertained to public education and learning diversity that has happened in our history of education policy, and that was a bill that was sponsored by Senator Edward Kennedy. It was a set of practices that was doubled down upon by the Obama administration.”
Normal Sucks: Author Jonathan Mooney on How Schools Fail Kids with Learning Differences
The neurodiversity
Neurodiversity is the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species.NEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS Neurodiversity is a biological fact. It’s not a perspective, an approach, a… More and disability rights movements well-understand the ubiquity of behaviorism, and its tremendous costs.
Behaviorist
Ultimately behaviorism provides a simplistic lens that can’t see beyond itself.Why is the doctrine of behaviorism still being used, at all?How can ABA be the gold-standard for autism when it… More education is ableist
able·ism /ˈābəˌlizəm/ nounA system of assigning value to people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normalcy, productivity, desirability, intelligence, excellence, and fitness. These constructed ideas are deeply… More education.
Stimpunks
Stimpunk combines “stimming” + “punk” to evoke open and proud stimming, resistance to neurotypicalization, and the DIY culture of punk, disabled, and neurodivergent communities. Instead of hiding our stims, we… More Foundation exists because of a bipartisan embrace of “Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of Equity
EquityA commitment to action: the process of redistributing access and opportunity to be fair and just.A way of being: the state of being free of bias, discrimination, and identity-predictable outcomes… More”. ReframingWhen we successfully reframe public discourse, we change the way the public sees the world. We change what counts as common sense. Because language activates frames, new language is required… More away from behaviorism is urgently needed and essential.
Therefore, eugenics
Empty Pedagogy, Behaviorism, and the Rejection of EquityEugenics is the scientifically inaccurate theory that humans can be improved through selective breeding of populations.Eugenics is an inaccurate theory linked to historical and present-day forms of discrimination, racism, ableism and… More is an erasure of identity through force, whereas radical behaviorism is an erasure of identity through “correction.” This all assumes a dominant culture that one strives to unquestionably maintain.
We’ve been on quite a journey over the past 15 years, navigating increasingly ableist, behaviorist, and underfunded systems while contributing to the Neurodiversity movement and building community compatible with us.
We rolled our own education, because we had too. We built something compatible with neurodiversity and the social model of disabilityIn the broadest sense, the social model of disability is about nothing more complicated than a clear focus on the economic, environmental and cultural barriers encountered by people who are… More using the tools of distributed work and indie ed-tech.
We received a lot of help from human-centered educators along the way.
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