A zine or Why sheet is read; a broadside is carried, handed over, and pinned up. It goes into a room where nobody is going to open a laptop — a kitchen table, a clinic waiting area, a staff room, a door. It gets photocopied badly and folded into a pocket. The historical form is the same one, and we are not being clever by borrowing it: a single cheap sheet, posted where people would see it. Proclamations, ballads, manifestos.
Each one here is a single sheet, printed both sides, sized to come out of any printer uncropped. They are CC0: free to print, copy, change and share, with no permission needed and no attribution required. Print a stack and give them away.
Why these exist
The form is not ours. It is Alfie Kohn’s, and it is already what a Why Sheet is:
I imagined a set of handouts, each consisting of a single (double-sided) sheet that responded to a common question. The idea was to lay out the case briskly, making liberal use of bullet points and offering a short bibliography at the end for anyone who wanted more information.
Alfie Kohn, The Why Axis
Concision puts advocates at a disadvantage. Ideas that line up with power need no explanation and travel light. Ideas that do not are expected to bring evidence — and there is never time. A broadside is our answer to that on paper: the case laid out briskly enough to be read in a corridor, with the sources on the back for anyone who wants them.
Broadsides are a separate line from the Why Sheets, seeded from them. A Why Sheet is the argument. A broadside is the sheet you can put in a hand.
The sheets
Each one names the moment someone reaches for it. That is the part that decides whether a thing should be a sheet at all.
Eye Contact
The moment: it is about to be written into an IEP goal.
Forcing eye contact harms Autistic and Neurodivergent students. It can be physically painful, it competes with listening, and for many of us looking away is how we pay attention. An eye contact goal builds no communication and no learning — it builds masking. The face carries the case; the reverse carries what to do instead, what real engagement actually looks like, and the sources. Adapted from the Eye Contact Why Sheet.
Behaviorism
The moment: the behaviour is being called the problem.
Behaviorism attends only to what can be observed and counted. Thoughts, trauma, anxiety, sensory pain and motive cannot be measured from outside, so none of them are in the model — and distress gets filed as non-compliance. The reverse carries what it does to people, the bioethics, the dog test, and what to ask instead. Adapted from the Behaviorism Why Sheet.
Sensory Access at Work
The moment: you are going into an access conversation.
A catalogue rather than an argument, made to be carried in to a manager, to HR, or to anyone adjusting a shared space. The five external senses on the face; the three internal ones — proprioception, vestibular, interoception — on the reverse, where they get the room. Senses without folk names get argued down as preferences, so they are named. Adapted from the Sensory Access at Work Why Sheet.
Positive Greetings at the Door
The moment: door greetings are about to become policy — or already are.
Positive Greetings at the Door asks every student for eye contact, a touch, or a spoken greeting on the way in — on demand, in front of everyone, at the exact moment of transition. It comes out of PBIS, which comes out of behaviorism. The face makes the case that a doorway is not a checkpoint; the reverse says you do not need to do this at all, and if you must, lists every modality that should count — including no response at all, which is the whole argument. Adapted from the Positive Greetings at the Door Why Sheet.
Cavendish Space
The moment: you are about to design a space, or redesign one.
Caves, campfires, watering holes — the three kinds of place a person needs, and the vocabulary for building them. Side A is the three places, the part that gets pointed at in a room. Side B is who the conditions land on — dandelions, tulips, orchids — and how you build: collaborative niche construction, lily pads, clear paths and predictable rhythms. The only sheet so far that does not refuse something; it hands over vocabulary instead.
Developmental Pace
The moment: a child is about to be told they are behind.
A grade is a cohort of children born inside the same twelve months, taught the same body of content at the same time and marked on the distance between them and the timetable. Side A takes that ruler apart — grouped by birth date, readiness assumed rather than established, the gap recorded against the child. Side B is what to measure instead, what to ask for in the room, and what the sheet is not, because an argument against age-graded expectations is easy to mistake for an argument for lower ones.
Boring Technology
The moment: you are deciding what to buy, adopt, or move to.
Most software is rented rather than owned: it runs on someone else’s computers, and the work you put into it lives there. Side A is three questions to ask out loud in the room — where does the only copy live, can we actually get it out, and what happens if the terms change. Side B is the vocabulary you will hear (rentier, software as a service, technofeudalism, enshittification) and five things you can do about it. It is not an argument for leaving every paid service: renting the tool is fine, renting the only copy is not. Adapted from the Boring Technology Why Sheet.
Monotropism
The moment: a young person is being called defiant, disengaged, or obsessive.
Monotropic minds pull more of their attention into fewer things at a time, so attention behaves like a tunnel: inside it there is depth and detail, outside it things get missed, and moving it costs energy. Side A is six starting points for making sense of that, each one short enough to pin up. Side B is what to change at home and at school, the same behaviour described twice (obsessions → passions, disengaged → juggling attention resources), and five questions to ask in the room. Adapted from the Monotropism Why Sheet, itself adapted from An Introduction to the Theory of Monotropism To Support Autistic Young People by Fergus Murray and Helen Edgar, at their request. The six starting points are taken from ‘Starting Points for Understanding Autism’, written by Fergus Murray, January 2019.
Masking and Burnout
The moment: good grades are the reason help is being refused.
Masking is the work an Autistic person does to look like they are coping; Autistic burnout is what arrives when it has run too long. Grades measure output, and access is about cost — so a school that measures only output keeps finding no need until the child can no longer attend. Side A is that cycle: the mask, the debt, the collapse, and the way a record of coping becomes the reason no help arrived. Side B is what to say, what to ask, and the two IDEA regulations that already say passing grades are not a lawful basis for declining to evaluate a child.
What earns a sheet
Four rules, applied in order.
- It compresses something already argued at length, and points back at it. A broadside invents no claim its parent does not carry, and it inherits that parent’s sourcing.
- Side A is a face you would pin up; side B does the work. The face carries one thing, readable across a room. The reverse holds the what-to-do and the bibliography.
- You can name the moment someone reaches for it, away from a screen.
- It fits one physical sheet — 190 × 259 mm, two sides, no third page, ink on white.
Rule three is the one that does the filtering. If you cannot finish the sentence “someone picks this up when…”, what you have is a summary — and a summary belongs on the page it summarises. A proposal that fails rule three is not a weaker broadside. It is a Why Sheet, and it should stay one.
What this is not
- Not a poster. A poster is finished once you have looked at it. Every sheet here has a reverse, and the reverse is where the sources are.
- Not a summary standing in for the argument. Each sheet compresses a piece that exists in full, and points straight at it.
- Not merch. Nothing to buy, no scarcity, no numbered prints. If a sheet works, we would rather it circulate without us attached to it.
- Not a replacement for the Why Sheets. When you need the whole case with every citation, go to the Why Sheet. The broadside is the part you carry.
Printing one
Open a sheet, use the Side A / Side B buttons to read both faces, then press Print. The Print button gives you the sheet and not the website — no header, no menu, no sidebar, no footer.
Every sheet is 190 × 259 mm, the intersection of A4 and US Letter, so the same file prints uncropped in either country. Two sides, no third page. Print double-sided and it is one piece of paper — which is the whole idea.