In order for us to thrive in our modern society we have been forced to mask, to compensate, to change in order to survive. Those methods have more often than not actually harmed us, not helped us grow. Each of us has parts of ourselves hidden inside behind years and layers of accommodating society.

Many parts of our true selves, our true powers and strengths, are little known or unknown to us. I, like you, have been there. I have learned to thrive in a neurotypical world while honoring my autistic self and I want to help you thrive too by unmasking and discovering yourself. Unmasking leads to thriving and living life to the fullest extent possible. Let me assist you in showing you how via Autism Life Coaching and peer support. I offer both individual sessions as well as group workshops that have the extra benefit of connecting with your fellow autistic peers. I also offer numerous free discussion circles every month in order to create a supportive and thriving space for autistics worldwide.

The #ActuallyAutistic Coach | Autistic Life Coach | Autism Coach

Yet bolstering that intensity and passion is the deep understanding of a body of literature from subfields of neuroscience calling into question what the current popular model of “raw cognition” – represented by #cogsci, ResearchEd, and elsewhere in professional development – leaves out. As well as how its premature generalization into school settings – often wrapped up in language of “evidence-based” or “research-based” practice – is derived from evidence & research that excludes disability & neurodivergence. The consequence is a school setting whose values & measures, pacing guides, practices & interventions center the mythical “normal”.

Neuroinclusive Learning & the Brain w/ Michael Weingarth | Human Restoration Project | Podcast

“All brains compensate all the time, and they do it in ways that are absolutely unique. School pushes certain categories of compensation outside of its box and gives it a bad label.”

Neuroinclusive Learning & the Brain w/ Michael Weingarth | Human Restoration Project | Podcast

Our students are not surgically modified dogs nor are they pigeons in operant conditioning chambers attempting to learn nonsense words. No child enters a classroom devoid of emotion, interest, or prior knowledge. Owing to the key distinctions between the controlled laboratory and the living classroom, there simply may be no connection between what is taught and what is learned; or between the educational intervention and the desired outcome. This is why, in pedagogies centered on instruction drawn from the narrow view of “The Science of Learning,” behaviorism is a complexity control meant to reduce the number of possible variables between instruction and assessment; to better reproduce the uncomplicated relationship between variables in the Skinner Box. We know from listening to students themselves that there has been a persistent crisis in schools, even before COVID: students ask fewer questions the longer they remain in school, engagement plummets alongside mental health, and absenteeism surges. Ultimately, any science of learning matters far less than its implementation. Maintaining fidelity to what happened in, say, Pavlov’s lab matters significantly less if the practices derived from his work contribute to stress, anxiety, and alienation in students.

If the perfect education system requires that you dehumanize the people in it — adults and kids alike — that’s not a system that “works” by most metrics worth caring about. The kids in our schools have to be viewed as more than behaviorist subjects to be acted upon. If we at least admit that much, then the business of teaching gets far more complicated. Suddenly there are a number of other factors we must tend to that matter a great deal. I’ll quote again from apparent “pseudoscientist” Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” These are self-evident truths that we are finally beginning to explore the neurobiological basis for in ways that shatter many previous models of the brain that still hold cultural sway.

Beyond Pavlov’s Perfect Student | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth

Research increasingly recognizes that, as medical researchers Peter Stilwel and Katharine Harmon write, “Cognition is not simply a brain event.”(*) Drawing from their intuitive 5E model, we can better understand learning as a process of sense-making about ourselves in relation to the world that is:

Embodied – sense-making shaped by being in a body‍

Embedded – bodies exist within a context in the world

Enactive – active agents in interactions with the world

Emotive – sense-making always happens in an emotional context

Extended – sense-making relies on non-biological tools and technologies

Rather than rely exclusively on tests of memory and retention, as The Science of Learning would direct us, this holistic 5E model lives at the intersection of the multiple missions of school: to provide an emotionally and physically safe and productive environment, to promote social and emotional growth, to develop executive skills and self-regulation, and to improve the intellectual capacity of kids to be active agents in the world. Summarized beautifully by education, psychology, and neuroscience professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, “As human beings, feeling alive means feeling alive in a body but also feeling alive in a society, in a culture; being loved, being part of a group, being accepted, and feeling purposeful.” 

There is No Such Thing As “The Science of Learning” | Human Restoration Project | Nick Covington Michael Weingarth

Would You Like to Know More?

Annie Murphy Paul – The Extended Mind

Mary Helen Immordino Yang –  Emotions, Learning and the Brain

Naomi Fisher – Changing Our Minds

Andratesha Fritzgerald – Anti-Racism and Universal Design for Learning 

Luiz Pessoa –  The Entangled Brain

The quotes below contain links to our extensive glossary. We link to our glossary throughout our website.

There is no what works for everybody. There is no silver bullet in education. Education is relational. It’s contextual. It involves understanding the human beings in the room.

Nick Covington, Human Restoration Project Talks Professional Learning & Progressive Pedagogy

Hope is a platform for action.

Good digital pedagogy is accessible to everyone.

Nick Covington, MINDFOOD I: Top 10 Books Every Progressive Educator Should Read – YouTube

Make room for play. Play is learning.

Nick Covington, Play-Based Learning is learning! (with Lego) – YouTube

There is a point to taking these individualistic actions towards systemic change, because kids notice this stuff.

Restoring Humanity to Education w/ Nick & Chris of HRP | CTRH2023 – YouTube

Progressive education is research-based education. We have the research on our side. The traditional practices do not.

Restoring Humanity to Education w/ Nick & Chris of HRP | CTRH2023 – YouTube

Where behaviorism fails to foster agency it simultaneously creates a framework for excluding neurodivergent and disabled students while enabling the policing of students from non-dominant cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds.

A Human Centered Education: Ends Dehumanizing Practices – YouTube

At Stimpunks, we choose the margin, because design is tested at the edges. HRP likewise designs for those of us at the margins. That’s because they have joined us at the edges. They show up. They listen. They integrate. They practice good allyship.

This is exemplified throughout their work, including the implementation of the Conference to Restore Humanity, a conference model for the future compatible with us Stimpunks like no other. No one else includes us like HRP.

Conference to Restore Humanity! is an annual, designed-for-virtual conference centering progressive education, social justice, and preserving the humanity of classrooms. We strive to bring together the radicals reimagining their classroom spaces and demanding for a just future.

Conference to Restore Humanity

Reframing is a big part of our advocacy. Reframing ourselves and others is hard and important work necessary to all other work.

The long-term well-being and empowerment of Autistics and members of other neurocognitive minority groups hinges upon our ability to create a paradigm shift – a shift from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm.

Dr. Nick Walker

HRP helps create this paradigm shift with their handbooks and why sheets. HRP’s materials help us reframe people as we journey through our systems.

Finding HRP was like finding an oasis. They understand, and they help.

Autistic Realms offers many great resources written with clarity and compassion. Here’s a selection from their monotropism page.

The theory of Monotropism was developed by Dr Dinah Murray, Wenn Lawson and Mike Lesser (2005) in their article, Attention, monotropism and the diagnostic criteria for autism.  They stated “At any one moment the amount of attention available to a conscious individual is limited…. The authors suggest competition between mental processes for scarce attention is an important factor in the shaping of the cognitive process.”(Murray et al., 2005).

Monotropism is increasingly considered to be the underlying principle behind autism and is becoming more widely recognised especially within autistic and neurodivergent communities. Fergus Murray, in their article Me and Monotropism: A unified theory (2018), describes monotropism as a ‘pull’. Murray describes montropism as ‘resting on a model of the mind as an interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel’.

My experience of being monotropic feels like having a channel of energy that flows through the whole body mind, it is completely consuming. It feels like there is a force within monotropism that draws me into specific channels of thinking and enables me to hyperfocus, it can lead to high levels of engagement and motivation.

Monotropism can create a happy ‘flow state‘; a monotropic way of thinking and processing can sweep you along; much like a river, it has momentum and can have a deep intense current. It can be a wonderful experience of escapism and regulation. Engaging in monotropic flow states is like entering a happy state of mind,  where you may become so hyper-focused that nothing else matters or is even noticed around you. 

Monotropism is a good way of conceptualising how autistic special interests can support better mental health. By embracing the theory of monotropism, I feel we can gain an understanding of how flow states may help to recharge and regulate the sensory system. Embracing a natural state of monotropic flow can help to enable positive mental health, work and also learning outcomes for autistic people.

However, I also feel an understanding of monotropism could support a better understanding of the mental health difficulties that some autistic people may experience. When in a flow state it can be hard to shift attention channels to engage in different tasks, which may make daily life quite challenging. It is hard to pull out of / or switch channels of attention that are so consuming.  As much as monotropism can create a happy flow state, I feel it can also lead to darker, negative flow states and be exhausting to manage.

I firmly believe that a deeper understanding of monotropism may help reduce the impact of autistic burnout and could improve the mental health outcomes for autistic people. Research has slowly been emerging over the last few years, but this area still needs far more research.

Monotropism | Autistic Realms

In this video, Jessica discusses how she made her book more ADHD friendly.

We attempt all of these things on our website at stimpunks.org.

• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text. Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Add attention getters like selective bolding and pull quotes.
• Write in conversational style.
• Organize so you don’t have to read it.
• Flip open right to your struggle. Allow people to pick up and go right to what they need.
• Format is the same for every chapter.
• Make it so people can just read the headers.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Add in jokes and feelings.
• Put everything in one book so folks have one place to go.

How I Made My Book ADHD-Friendly 🧠📘 – YouTube

What would you do to make our scrollytelling style on stimpunks.org more ADHD-friendly?

We attempt some techniques from “Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History” on stimpunks.org.

A page of neat and tidy typed text in long paragraphs is the least memorable format known. You need to reduce it into small segments, each made memorable by flourishes and fancy layouts. Add colour and doodles. Highlight. Enclose with clouds. Write the whole portion backwards. Do anything to make each logical entity, each verse, distinct.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The efficacy of short sentences on a memorable page resonates with my experience as a teacher. I have found that students who read an entire paragraph of information quickly will often claim they didn’t understand it, but if they read it phrase by phrase, stopping at each comma or full stop to ensure they understand, the entire paragraph becomes meaningful. With short sentences, you are forced to engage with each element of the information and not try to grasp the whole in a single befuddling quest.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The important lesson for all of those wanting to memorise huge amounts of information is that the Navajo store this knowledge in their mythology. In stories. Vivid lively stories make information more memorable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

I’ll explain how these methods correlate with the most recent discoveries in neuroscience, which show that associating memory with place is hardwired into our brains. This common factor is why cultures all over the world have developed similar methods: they are working with the same brain structure. The neuroscience explains how we benefit from repetition and music, and in particular the value of memory palaces.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

One of the most important lessons I have learned from indigenous cultures is the value of strong characters in stories. I cannot emphasise enough how useful this is.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Indigenous cultures around the world don’t just use the vast landscape as a memory palace; they use a wonderfully integrated system of objects—portable memory devices—that are often simply referred to as ‘art’ and seen to have little practical purpose.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

many objects interpreted simply as artworks are mnemonic landscapes in miniature.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The wilder, the more colourful and active, the more grotesque, vulgar or erotic the images and stories you create are, the more memorable they will be. That is the secret to making knowledge memorable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

A memory palace is a structure, grounded in the landscape, offering a firm base on which to build a tower of knowledge to play with, analyse and think about—a way to ponder the big picture.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

As in classical times, memory training involved associating information with emotionally striking images in a set of ordered physical locations.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

But most important of all, the pages of the text had to stir the emotions to make the written word unforgettable.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

The elaborately decorated lists of numbers were written between illustrations of columns with arches above, reflecting the ancient memory advice to use inter-columnar spaces as locations for memory images. The vertical spaces between the columns were then divided by horizontal lines into small rectangular spaces, each holding no more than five items, the maximum number suggested for retaining in memory for a single location.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Laying out the narrative in a grid of images makes it more memorable. Your brain will remember where a given rectangle in the grid lies in the space and hence recall the information.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Many of the stories are painted in grids, some of the most famous examples being three cells by four cells, as in Plate 23. The images are not only unique but positioned in a unique location on the page.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Hugh recommended using grids of cells to memorise large swathes of text. For example, for the 150 psalms, he recommended that the beginning phrase of the first verse be placed in a cell. The cells were placed in a line of 150 locations. For each psalm, he then imagined another set of numbered cells, one for each verse.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Of course, you could get really enthusiastic and design stained-glass windows for your home based on the narratives of knowledge you want to share. Many church windows were laid out in grid structures to make the narrative easy to follow for the illiterate congregation. Medieval churches boasted glorious colourful images in sequences of stained glass, each telling a small part of the story. Staring at those superb windows week after week ensured that the stories of the Bible were well entrenched in medieval minds.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

Whenever you need to learn an abstract theme, give it a character.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

In the pious Middle Ages, violent, lewd and fanciful images were deemed highly inappropriate. I am delighted to report that Albertus justified their use because, ironically, they were so effective for memorising moral philosophies.

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

In her seminal work, The Art of Memory, Frances Yates wrote: ‘If Simonides was the inventor of the art of memory and “Tullius” its teacher, Thomas Aquinas became something like its patron saint.’1

Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory with the Most Powerful Methods in History

We love hyperlinks and use them extensively. We consider them a kindness to the reader and a potent weapon in the fight against disinformation. Many of our links lead to our expansive glossary.

We love Stimpunks, their Glossary is a rich source of information presented through an affirming lens. Be more Punk! 🤘🏻✊🏾 https://stimpunks.org/glossary-list/#h-all-glossary-entries

Pebble Autism on X

We use block quotations (blockquote) heavily. We quote our favorite passages and sources with hyperlinks signposting back to the original work.

We also heavily use “accordions”. Accordions contain more in depth information on a topic that you can reveal at your own pace.

We often break paragraphs of text down into bulleted lists that present one idea per line in plain language.

We provide content hierarchy, visual hierarchy, and tables of contents.

We group related elements together in color blocks.

We are iterating toward “digital stories” and “Web-Based Conceptual Portmanteau”.

Consume this content to the depth and breadth of your preference in whatever way and order works for you.

This website is a living document that you can contribute to under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license. Send us your suggestions and favorite quotes and resources.

We provide “Main Takeaways” on many pages. Main takeaways are presented with one idea per line in a bulleted list format. If you don’t have time or energy to read an entire page, reading just the main takeaways will give you what you most need to know.

Readers on the web scan for information, rather than reading everything line-by-line. Chunking your content into smaller sections, called out by larger headings, helps them find the information they’re searching for.

When I’m trying to find something quickly, there’s nothing more intimidating than jumping onto a site with a giant wall of unbroken content. 

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

Where possible, break down paragraphs into lists. Lists make scanning easier!

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

bold the most important part of a sentence to make sure that readers scanning through your content catch their eyes on what’s most important.

Show, Don’t Tell | CSS-Tricks – CSS-Tricks

Show, then tell. Start with concrete examples & pictures, then lay down the abstract definitions.

Nutshell: make expandable, embeddable explanations

Our Rules for Scrollytelling

• Accordions expand/infodump on a topic without interrupting the main flow.
• Accordions labelled “What is…” provide definitions, context, and further reading.
• Accordions labelled “In other words…” explain things in different ways, including easy read, one idea per line, and plain language summaries.
• One line inline definitions are offered.
• Explanatory items are grouped into “What does this mean?” blocks.
• Related items are grouped together on a colored background with a group title. This makes it easier to tell what’s in a group and skim past it.
• Pick colors for groups based on colors in included media, if any.
• Pick colors for groups of accordions based on themes like rainbow.
• Lots of whitespace.
• Every page/screen has something breaking up the text.
• Selective bolding of key sentences facilitates skimming.
• A table of contents is provided near the top of each page.
• Headings are used approximately every 5 screens (on a laptop) or less.
• 20 headings max.
• Put a “coming up” table of contents after 10 headings.
• Consider putting a “Bodymind Break” section after 10 headings.
• Spacers are used as pause points, fermata.
• Spacers are used before headings to accentuate the break.
• Long scrollytelling stories signpost to what’s ahead.
• Break up text with pull quotes, blocks, bullets, bolding, backgrounds, images.
• Use lists to present one idea per line.
• Make it so people can just read the headers, table of contents and get the gist of the page/section.
• Make it engaging and visual.
• Write in a conversational style.
• Add in jokes and feelings.

There’s more about our scrollytelling conventions in our explainer at “📚🌈♿️ An Encyclopedia of Disability and Difference”

The content on our website is designed to be engaging and accessible to a wide range of readers. We have adopted a multimedia, multi-modality, scrollytelling style, which means that information is presented in a visually appealing and interactive manner.

When you visit our website, you will notice that the main concepts are presented at the top of the page using simpler language. This allows you to quickly grasp the key ideas without getting overwhelmed by technical jargon. As you scroll down, you will find more detailed explanations and academic language for those who want to delve deeper into the topic.

We understand that everyone has different preferences when it comes to consuming content. That’s why we encourage you to read at your own pace and to the depth that you feel comfortable with. If you don’t have the time to explore an entire page or section, you can still gain a good understanding by focusing on the main ideas presented at the beginning.

We want you to have a flexible and customizable experience on our website. Feel free to consume the content in any way and order that works best for you. Whether you prefer to skim through the main points or dive into the nitty-gritty details, our goal is to provide you with valuable information in a format that suits your needs.

AI Disclosure: The summary above was created with the help of Elephas AI Assistant.

Here are AI guidelines from our AI vendor.

• AI output might be surprising or flawed. Due to the nature of AI, output could be inaccurate, offensive, biased, harmful, or just plain false. You’re responsible for any output you use, as if you were the original or sole creator, so you should always thoroughly review output before using it. For example, if you use an AI feature to help you write a description of a product you’re selling in your WooCommerce store, give it a read and edit to ensure it’s accurate! And keep in mind that the AI might not have been trained on the most current data; ChatGPT for example currently has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021.
• Be thoughtful about what data you put in. Your input will be shared with third party AI providers and may be used to train their models — more on that below.  Think twice before inputting any confidential or sensitive information. 
• We don’t claim any ownership over the content you generate with our AI features. Please note that you might not have complete ownership over the generated content either! For example, the content generated by AI may be similar to others’ content, including content that may be protected by trademark or copyright, and the US Copyright Office is still figuring out when AI-assisted content should get copyright protection.
• Please be transparent when you use content that was generated with the help of AI. We hope to be thoughtful stewards of AI, so we believe this is always a good practice, but this is particularly important when it’s possible that someone could potentially be misled or harmed by the content.
• Let us know if something isn’t helpful (or worse!). We’re constantly fine-tuning and enhancing these new and experimental features, so we’d appreciate your feedback. In some cases, you may be able to provide feedback within the product (👍/👎), but otherwise, please contact us.

AI Guidelines – Automattic