Positive Niche Construction–practice of differentiating instruction for the neurodiverse brain

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

Positive niche construction is a strengths-based approach to educating students with disabilities.

 Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

Collaborative niche construction allows organisations and people to participate in the evolution of a living system and results in resilient social ecosystems.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Niche Construction

In Nature: Helping to ensure the thriving of an organism by directly modifying the environment in such a way that it enhances that organism’s chances for survival.

In Culture: Helping to ensure the thriving of a child by directly modifying the environment in such a way that it enhances that child’s chances for success.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom

In his book, Neurodiversity in the Classroom, Thomas Armstrong argues that the concept of neurodiversity is a “concept whose time has come.” What he means by this is to re-imagine how special education is constructed in our education system. The idea Armstrong highlights in his book is called, “positive niche construction” (PNC). Armstrong proposes this idea as an alternative to the more classic idea of “least restrictive environment” (LRE).

 Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

The fundamental point here is that changing one’s environment can be just as effective – and often far more effective – in aiding that navigation than simply looking inside the head for solutions, or trying to – often forcibly – alter behaviours.

PsyArXiv Preprints | Smart Environments for Diverse Cognitive Styles: the Case of Autism

Niche Construction and Biology

We see many examples of niche construction in nature: a beaver building a dam, bees creating a hive, a spider spinning a web, a bird building a nest. All of these creatures are changing their immediate environment in order to ensure their survival. Essentially, they’re creating their own version of a “least restrictive environment.” In this book, I present seven basic components of positive niche construction to help teachers differentiate instruction for students with special needs (2012).

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life

Positive Niche Construction in the Classroom

Armstrong identifies the seven components of positive niche construction in the classroom as:

When we embrace a strength-based paradigm grounded in differentiated instruction and positive niche construction, however, we embark upon a path that uses the widest range of student-centered interventions and builds upon each student’s core capacity of strengths.

Because neurodiversity is essentially an ecological perspective, I also develop the related concept of positive niche construction—that is, the establishment of a favorable environment within which a student with special needs can flourish in school. This concept, taken from the fields of biology and ecology, serves as a more positive and constructive way of talking about the federal mandate that students be placed in the “least restrictive environment.” Instead of spending all of our efforts in trying to make students with special needs more like “normal” students, I propose we devote more attention to accepting and celebrating their differences.

This strength-based approach can serve as a new way to enrich the field of differentiated instruction by ensuring that we develop teaching interventions that address what is unique and positive about each individual student.

In the neurodiversity model, there is no “normal” brain sitting in a vat somewhere at the Smithsonian or National Institutes of Health to which all other brains must be compared. Instead, there are a wide diversity of brains populating this world. The neurodiversity-inspired educator will have a deep respect for each child’s unique brain and seek to create the best differentiated learning environment within which it can thrive. This practice of differentiating instruction for the neurodiverse brain will be referred to in the course of this book as positive niche construction.

Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life

For an autistic person ‘it’s about finding the right niche’, because ‘if you have a particular interest, you can really thrive in a particular niche.’

Happier on the outside? Discourses of exclusion, disempowerment and belonging from former autistic school staff

Niche Construction and Evolution

Evolution by natural selection achieves fitness only through a very inefficient process that does not involve foresight, an ability to plan, an ability to remember and thereby learn from past experience, an ability to survey the environment and decide what changes are likely to prove beneficial and then put them into effect, or an ability to utilize feedback from the environment via conscious trial and error or other experimental methods-in short, an ability to set goals, recognize or invent what needs to be done to achieve them, and do it.

Put in this way, it seems obvious that an organism that was in fact able to do all these things in the course of its phenotypic life would be able to run evolutionary rings around almost any competitor that lacked such abilities. While I do not speculate about how or when in evolutionary time these capacities emerged, it is self evident that the genome of Homo sapiens did develop such capacities, just as it developed the human ability to cooperate effectively in groups. So the next question is, how does culture make these feats possible?

An answer offered by dual inheritance theorists is that humans’ enormous capacity for social learning enables adaptive information to be passed from one generation to the next, and that the human brain has evolved under natural selection to allow learners of culture to model their own actions on those of already enculturated “teachers” (though without the implication that they necessarily “teach” in any self conscious or explicit way).

Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Society

Evolution now includes niche construction, as well as natural selection, as a second inheritance system: ecological inheritance as well as genetic inheritance.
An ecological inheritance implies it’s the inheritance by descendant organisms of selection pressures previously changed by ancestors.

How niche construction affects inheritance systems in human evolution | University of Oxford Podcasts

• 🎧 Listen: How niche construction affects inheritance systems in human evolution
• PDF: Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students With Special Needs Succeed in School and Life, 2013 Annual COSA Conference Special Education Pre-Conference, Seaside, Oregon, June 19, 2013
• PDF: Neurodiversity in the Classroom: Strength-Based Strategies to Help Students with Special Needs Succeed in School and Life

Collaborative Niche Construction

The unique human ability to adapt to new contexts, powered by neurodivergent creativity and the development of new tools, enabled humans to minimise conflicts and establish a presence in virtually all ecosystems on the planet. This level of adaptability is the signature trait of the human species.

NeurodiVentures are a concrete example of an emerging cultural species that provides safe and nurturing environments for divergent thinking, creativity, exploration, and collaborative niche construction. NeurodiVentures are built on timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating trusted collaboration that predate the emergence of civilisation.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Niche Communities

Autistic people created the concept of fandom. In his book NeuroTribes, Steve Silberman describes how Autistic nerds in the early 1900s traveled across the country by car, on foot, and even by hopping trains in order to meet people who shared their niche interests.

Autistic people are also a foundational part of most fandoms and conventions centered around shared hobbies—we devote a lot of energy to finding and creating spaces where we can interact with people who share our interests, and within nerdy fandom spaces, social norms tend to be more forgiving and relaxed. It turns out that special interests aid us in becoming more outgoing, well-rounded individuals.

This frequently plays out in fandoms and nerdy communities, where neurodiverse people with mutual special interests find one another, socialize, and sometimes begin to unmask.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 153, 218)

Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

The three primordial learning spaces – Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes – are essential to niche construction.

Futurist David Thornburg identifies three archetypal learning spaces— the campfire, cave, and watering hole—that schools can use as physical spaces and virtual spaces for student and adult learning (bit.ly/YvRuWC)

Australia’s Campfires, Caves, and Watering Holes: Educators on ISTE’s Australian Study Tour Discovered How to Create New Learning and Teaching Environments where Curriculum and Instructional Tools Meet the Digital Age, UNCG NC DOCKS (North Carolina Digital Online Collection of Knowledge and Scholarship)

About 11 years ago I wrote a book called Campfires in Cyberspace that explored the idea that humans have always occupied one of four primordial learning spaces at any given time, ranging from the Campfire (home to the presentation of information by a teacher) to the Watering Hole (the domain of social learning from peers), the Cave (home of reflective construction) and Life (home to the construction of artifacts based on what we have learned). We explore the idea that, in an ideal setting, students will move between these spaces on their own and that computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

Holtthink: Where Interwebs and Edtech Combine on Tumblr: Interview with David Thornburg author of “From the Campfire to the Holodeck: Creating Engaging and Powerful 21st Century Learning Environments.”

Campfires are a way to learn from experts or storytellers; Watering Holes help you learn from peers; Caves are places to learn from yourself; and Life is where you bring it all together by applying what you learn to projects in the real world.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

A Space of One’s Own

This is my space. It allows me to have control over one small part of a traumatic and offensive world.

AuDHD and me: My nesting habits – Emergent Divergence

In schools, we find that the cave form of learning is never a priority. This is a serious problem because the millions of dollars spent on many new schools will do little to improve educational outcomes if they are built without cave spaces.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

…it is in solitude that students assimilate, synthesize and internalize learning so that it becomes knowledge and (sometimes) wisdom.

 The Language of School Design : Design Patterns for 21st Century Schools : Nair, Prakash 

When we operate within a space over which we feel ownership—a space that feels like it’s ours—a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of a phenomenon known as the “home advantage”: the consistent finding that athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when they are playing in their own fields, courts, and stadiums. On their home turf, teams play more aggressively, and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance.

But the home advantage is not limited to sports. Researchers have identified a more general effect as well: when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they experience themselves as more confident and capable. They are more efficient and productive. They are more focused and less distractible. And they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively. A study by psychologists Graham Brown and Markus Baer, for example, found that people who engage in negotiation within the bounds of their own space claim between 60 and 160 percent more value than the “visiting” party.

Benjamin Meagher, an assistant professor of psychology at Kenyon College in Ohio, has advanced an intriguing theory that may explain these outcomes. The way we act, the way we think, and even the way we perceive the world around us differ when we’re in a space that’s familiar to us—one that we have shaped through our own choices and imbued with our own memories of learning and working there in the past. When we’re on our home turf, Meagher has found, our mental and perceptual processes operate more efficiently, with less need for effortful self-control. The mind works better because it doesn’t do all the work on its own; it gets an assist from the structure embedded in its environment, structure that marshals useful information, supports effective habits and routines, and restrains unproductive impulses. In a familiar space over which we feel ownership, he suggests, “our cognition is distributed across the entire setting.” The place itself helps us think.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

Living by her own rules has had a massive positive effect. She’s constantly making adjustments, finding new ways to make herself more comfortable. “Everything feels different, it really does impact everything. Like my body was masked!” she says. Now that her daily environment works with her body rather than against it, she feels physically and mentally free. Marta Rose writes that divergent design should honor the unique relationships Autistic people have to objects.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity (p. 16

It took me decades to learn how to change my environment to make myself comfortable.

@willaful

It took decades to learn I was allowed.

@steve_asbell

The place itself helps us think.

The colleagues invited to join him (Cavendish) for a dish of mutton must have seen something amazing: a house transformed into a vast apparatus for interrogating the mysteries of existence.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 27). Penguin Publishing Group.

The place itself helps us think.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

Constructionism, collaborative niche construction, bricolage, and toolbelt theory go great together.

Further Reading