• Autistic people tend to have “spiky skills profiles”.
• Spiky Profile: a phenomenon whereby the disparity between strengths and weaknesses is more pronounced.
• The spiky profile may well emerge as the definitive expression of neurominority.
• Spiky profiles exist for a reason.
• Disability and difference are engines of innovation, collaboration, and collaborative niche construction.
• Autistic people have built many niche communities from the ground up.
• People with disabilities are the original life hackers.
• Collaborative niche construction allows people to participate in the evolution of a living system.
• Special interests feed niche construction.
• Understanding spiky profiles, learning terroir, collaborative niche construction, and special interests is critical to fostering neurological pluralism.
• Let’s be weird.
• Let’s be proud of what we are.
• Difference is a teacher.

• Monotropic minds tend to have their attention pulled more strongly towards a smaller number of interests at any given time, leaving fewer resources for other processes. 
• Monotropism provides a far more comprehensive explanation for autistic cognition than any of its competitors.
• This interest model of mind is ecological, embodied, and exploratory.
• Monotropism offers a valuable lens for understanding and working with the intense interests of autistic students.
• Entering flow states “or attention tunnels“ is a necessary coping strategy for many of us.
• Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivation.
• Flow allows us to recharge.
• Embrace the obsession. Special interests are intimately tied to the well-being of autistic peoples.

• Cavendish Space: psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work and intermittent collaboration.
• Inform spaces with neurodiversity and the social model of disability so that they welcome and include all bodyminds.
• Provide quiet spaces for high memory state zone work where students can escape sensory overwhelm, slip into flow states, and enjoy a maker’s schedule.
• Create cave, campfire, and watering hole zones.
• Develop neurological curb cuts.
• Fill our classrooms with choice and comfort, instructional tolerance, continuous connectivity, and assistive technology.
• Make spaces for both collaboration and deep work.
• The best solutions come from “intermittent collaboration” — group work punctuated by breaks to think & work by ourselves.
• Design education “to the edges” and take into account the jagged learning profile of all students.
• Design is tested at the edges. We design for everyone when we design for neurodiversity and disability.
• Design for our spiky profiles.
• Edge cases define the boundaries of who and what you care about.
• Design with, not for.
• Neurodivergent & disabled students are great flow testers.
• There are great opportunities for project & passion-based learning in giving students agency to audit their context and design something better.
• What do kids see? What do they feel? What do they smell? What do they hear? What is their experience as they move through your school?

• The place where we belong does not exist. We will build it.
• The need for anti-ableist learning space for neurodivergent and disabled people is now.
• My kids have been kicked out of many, many places for being different—just like I was.
• The question is simple: Is there room for disabled kids at a piano school? On a swim team? In most classrooms? The answer, right now, seems to be no.
• Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America.
• A humane education is one whose organizing principle is the innate capacity of students to be critical, empathetic agents in their communities and on the global stage.
• A human-centered classroom is needed now more than ever.
• We have created a system that has you submit yourself, or your child, to patient hood to access the right to learn differently. The right to learn differently should be a universal human right that’s not mediated by a diagnosis.
• Neurodivergent and disabled learners need anti-ableist space, and we need it now.
• In anti-ableist space, there is no segregation of “special”.
• The word “special” is used to sugar-coat segregation and societal exclusion – and its continued use in our language, education systems, media etc serves to maintain those increasingly antiquated “special” concepts that line the path to a life of exclusion and low expectations.
• Special Education continues to be marinated in behaviorist assumptions and practices despite the fact that numerous resources for teachers, therapists, and parents offer alternatives to behavior control.
• In anti-ableist space, there is no behaviorism.
• ABA is loathed by autistic adults who are able to describe their experience with it.
• Autistics have been excluded from all committees, panels, boards, etc., charged with developing, directing, and assessing ABA research and treatment programs.
• The most restrictive virtual straitjacket that educators face is behaviorism.
• The value of any book, article, or presentation intended for teachers (or parents) is inversely related to the number of times the word “behavior” appears in it.
• The more our attention is fixed on the surface, the more we slight students’ underlying motives, values, and needs.
• Trainers are rejecting behaviorism because it harms animals emotionally and psychologically. What does that say about classrooms that embrace it?
• We cannot replace agency with response to stimuli.
• I make the right mistakes, and I say what I mean. Spare Me From The Mold!
• Our non-compliance is not intended to be rebellious. We simply do not comply with things that harm us. But since a great number of things that harm us are not harmful to most neurotypicals, we are viewed as untamed and in need of straightening up.
• In anti-ableist space, there is no “earning your token”
• “When I was a little girl, I was autistic. And when you’re autistic, it’s not abuse. It’s therapy.”
• Too much autism research has been done without autistic input.
• The failures of autism science are not random: they reflect systematic power imbalances.
• The problems associated with ABA run very deep. It is a human rights violation to continue to ignore and discount the voices of Autistic people about deeply traumatising and harmful “therapies” such as ABA.
• Behaviorism is a repudiation, an almost willful dismissal, of subjective experience.
• Current research has suggested ABA as causing a severe level of trauma from childhood participation.
• Bring voice into empirical constructs. Translate voice into academic comprehension.
• ABA has never been shown to be even slightly efficacious for the nonverbal Autism population.
• Research in ABA continues to neglect the structure of the autistic brain, the overstimulation of the autistic brain, the trajectory of child development, or the complex nature of human psychology.
• The conditions created by ABA foster psychological ill-being.
• ABA is negatively affecting the autistic population.
• Adult autistics who have undergone ABA have described as violating the fundamental tenets of bioethics, as well as the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
• Until ABA updates its scientific methods, its functions of behavior, and incorporates modern day psychology – including neurology, child development, educational psychology, and other vital research – it cannot be considered to be a safe, effective, or ethical field.
• I don’t need a cure for me.
• In anti-ableist space, we are active agents in our own embodied experience.
• I am not a manifestation of stimuli and response. I am agential. I am Autonomously Autistic.
• Despite progress toward new models of disability, Autistic subjectivity is still locked within medical pathologies and assumptions of deficit.
• Self-Determination Theory positions itself as directly and unapologetically antithetical to behaviorism.

•  Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes
•  Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids
•  Niche Construction
•  Cognitive Diversity Exists for a Reason
•  Social Buffering and Collaborative Morality
•  Interdependence and Collaboration

The Need: Space without Behaviorism, Segregation, or Ableism

•  In anti-ableist space, there is no segregation of “special”.
•  In anti-ableist space, there is no behaviorism.
•  In anti-ableist space, there is no “earning your token”.
•  In anti-ableist space, we are active agents in our own embodied experience.

The Answer: Reframing, Respectful Connection, and the Presumption of Competence

• Instead of behaviorism, segregation, and therapies ingrained with ableism, we practice respectful connection.
• Instead of deficit ideology and the pathology paradigm, we reframe.
• Instead of presuming incompetence, we presume competence.
•  Instead of behaviorist control, we pursue self-determination, intrinsic motivation, and flow.

The Feeling: Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion

•  We create crip space that evokes the electrifying feeling of belonging.
•  We foster the feeling of access intimacy.
•  The Learning: Passion-Based, Human-Centered Learning Compatible With Neurodiversity and the Social Model of Disability
•  Come As You Are to Cavendish Space
•  We Create Anti-Ableist Space
•  We Find Our People and Co-create Ecologies of Care
•  Stimpunks Foundation Presents: Stimpunks Space

The Learning: Passion-Based, Human-Centered Learning Compatible With Neurodiversity and the Social Model of Disability

The Gift: Learning Disabilities Reframed