Building Anti-Ableist Learning Space is a five-part series on what neurodivergent and disabled learners actually need — and what it takes to build it.

This is part three. It names what it feels like when it works.

Anti-ableist space isn’t just the absence of harm. It has a texture. A charge. When a space is genuinely built for you — when your nervous system doesn’t have to fight the room — something opens up. s.e. smith calls it soaring inclusion. We call it electric belonging. This part is about cultivating that feeling deliberately, through crip space and access intimacy, through design that honors difference rather than tolerating it.

← Part 2: The Answer · Series Overview · Part 4: The Learning →

The Need

Space without Behaviorism, Segregation, or Ableism

The Answer

Reframing and Respectful Connection

The Feeling

Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion

The Learning

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

The Gift

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.

⚡️🦅🌈 The Feeling: Electric Belonging and Soaring Inclusion

Belonging isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a precondition for learning — and for most neurodivergent and disabled people, it’s been systematically withheld.

We recommend that schools adopt a definition of educational inclusion that focuses on, or at minimum includes, pupils’ sense of belonging in their school community. School belonging is an ‘umbrella’ concept, that can include “the extent to which students feel personally accepted, respected, included and supported by others in the school social environment” (Goodenough, 1993, p80), and also whether they “feel that teachers care about students and treat them fairly; get along with teachers and other students, and feel safe at school” (Libbey, 2007, p52). School belonging is measurable, and there is substantial prior research linking it to positive pupil outcomes (e.g. Allen, Kern, Vella-Brodrick, Hattie, & Waters, 2018).

We believe belonging is an essential concept for thinking about inclusion and planning successful policies—so important we included it twice! In addition to adopting a belonging-focused definition of inclusion in Change #1, one of our four planning approaches focuses on facilitating pupil belonging.

Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies

As our title signals, we focus on discussing and facilitating inclusion in terms of pupils’ sense of belonging, which is to say learners’ subjective sense of whether or not they are part of their school community, safe, and valued. This connects to a larger research on understanding school belonging, and how it impacts pupils. As discussed in more detail under Approach 1 in the Planning Guidance document, this body of research suggests that it may be an important contributor to pupils’ participation and achievement, rather than following from these later.

Focusing on inclusion-as-belonging emphasises the importance of school experiences, and positions the people in the school community as choice-makers and change-makers. All aspects of school policy matter for inclusion, not “inclusion policies” alone. School culture matters. Neurodivergent children and young people don’t exist in a vacuum, but are strongly affected by the knowledge, beliefs, and choices of those around them. For these many reasons, concepts related to belonging were at the heart of many of the original contributions at the 2022 workshop, and central to priorities for change.

Guidance Part 1: An Introduction to School-level Approaches for Developing Inclusive Policy – Belonging in School – a school-level resource for developing inclusive policies

I have written a lot about legibility as a social status. Being legible is a kind of situational privilege.

Legibility is not the same as visibility. We often confuse the two and our discourse is poorer for the conflation. Being legible is very relational. It happens in relationship to other people. That makes it about social exchanges, or that stuff that coheres our society. When I am visible, you can see me in the way you can see a dog or a lamppost. I am socially alive, as it were. I am a category and I exist.

Being legible requires other people to have the ability to make sense of me. That means I am a thing that exists but that is also supposed to exist, in a given space or conversation or exchange.

Why I Hate* California – essaying

🤲 We create crip space that evokes the electrifying feeling of belonging.

Crip space is what it feels like when a space was built for you — not adapted for you, not tolerating you, but genuinely yours.

It is very rare, as a disabled person, that I have an intense sense of belonging, of being not just tolerated or included in a space but actively owning it; “This space,” I whisper to myself, “is for me.” Next to me, I sense my friend has the same electrified feeling. This space is for us.

Members of many marginalized groups have this shared experiential touchstone, this sense of unexpected and vivid belonging and an ardent desire to be able to pass this experience along. Some can remember the precise moment when they were in a space inhabited entirely by people like them for the first time.

Crip space is unique, a place where disability is celebrated and embraced-something radical and taboo in many parts of the world and sometimes even for people in those spaces. The idea that we need our own spaces, that we thrive in them, is particularly troubling for identities treated socially as a negative; why would you want to self-segregate with the other cripples? For those newly disabled, crip space may seem intimidating or frightening, with expectations that don’t match the reality of experience-someone who has just experienced a tremendous life change is not always ready for disability pride or defiance, needing a kinder, gentler introduction.

This is precisely why they are needed: as long as claiming our own ground is treated as an act of hostility, we need our ground. We need the sense of community for disabled people created in crip space.

How can we cultivate spaces where everyone has that soaring sense of inclusion, where we can have difficult and meaningful conversations?

Because everyone deserves the shelter and embrace of crip space, to find their people and set down roots in a place they can call home.

“The Beauty of Spaces Created for and by Disabled People” by s.e. smith in “Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the 21st Century“

But no, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I got no other place to go
No, take me home
Take me home where I belong
I can't take it anymore

But I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall
And I kept runnin' for a soft place to fall

--Runaway by AURORA

Crip space creates the conditions. Access intimacy is what happens inside them — the relational experience of being genuinely understood.

👩‍❤️‍👨 We foster the feeling of access intimacy.

Access intimacy is what it feels like when someone gets your access needs without requiring you to explain, justify, or perform gratitude for basic accommodation.

Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access. Some of the people I have experienced the deepest access intimacy with (especially able bodied people) have had no education or exposure to a political understanding of disability.

Access intimacy is also the intimacy I feel with many other disabled and sick people who have an automatic understanding of access needs out of our shared similar lived experience of the many different ways ableism manifests in our lives. Together, we share a kind of access intimacy that is ground-level, with no need for explanations. Instantly, we can hold the weight, emotion, logistics, isolation, trauma, fear, anxiety and pain of access. I don’t have to justify and we are able to start from a place of steel vulnerability. It doesn’t mean that our access looks the same, or that we even know what each other’s access needs are. It has taken the form of long talks into the night upon our first meeting; knowing glances shared across a room or in a group of able bodied people; or the feeling of instant familiarity to be able to ask for help or support.

Access Intimacy: The Missing Link | Leaving Evidence

Non-disabled people in my life don’t know how to love me like disabled people do. I’m so thankful for all my disabled friends who know how to provide care, rest, support and love. Disabled love is critically different from my other interactions with the world.

I really wish non-disabled people could learn to love in the same caring modalities. Love looks like remembering my food intolerances. Love looks like saying “that sucks” when I complain. Love looks like calling to check in and telling me stories.

Love looks like someone bustling around at home doing everyday things that wanted to call just to be with me across time and space. Love looks like not trying to fix everything and just allowing bad days to be bad. Love looks accepting my need to isolate as much as possible.

Love looks like spaces for shared grief. Love looks like celebrating our mere existence and survival in a world so set on eradicating us. Love is everywhere in disabled communities.

@Nicole_Lee_Sch

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

Electric belonging and access intimacy aren’t outcomes we measure. They’re what we’re building toward — the felt experience of a space that was made for you.

Within our space of access intimacy, we practice niche construction and human-centered learning. Continue to learn more.