DESPITE HIS ECCENTRIC COUTURE and the strange totem rising from his backyard, Henry Cavendish was not a wizard. He was, in eighteenth-century terms, a natural philosopher, or what we now call a scientist. (The word scientist wasn’t coined until the nineteenth century, when it was proposed as a counterpart to artist by oceanographer and poet William Whewell.) He was not only one of the most ingenious natural philosophers who ever lived, he was one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.

Silberman, Steve. NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity (p. 21). Penguin Publishing Group.

Since reading NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically and sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubbles” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privileges of nobility afforded room for his differences, allowing him the space and opportunity to become “one of the first true scientists in the modern sense.”

Let’s build psychologically safe homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Cavendish’s autistic ways of being offer insight on how to do that.

Our favorite tool for designing for whole bodyminds is “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes”.

“Campfires in Cyberspace” 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).

In Cavendish Space, learners move between these spaces on their own, and computer technology has a positive role to play in each of these learning spaces.

When students have developed a little bit of metacognitive language around their learning spaces, they are also able to take control of their learning and their learning spaces – they can move to the space that best fits the type of learning that they are doing, and be able to explain exactly why this space is going to help them in achieving their learning goals.

Re-imagining Learning Spaces to inspire contemporary learning – Part One: Models for Change – Linking Learning

We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite from an intense world designed against us.

Caves, campfires, and watering holes are…

• necessary to providing psychological safety and sensory safety.
• necessary to positive niche construction.
• necessary to intermittent collaboration.
• necessary to designing for neurological pluralism.
• essential to our conception of Cavendish Space.

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 

Developed by an alumni of Xerox PARC in its R&D heyday, “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” have spread to progressive education, progressive workplaces, and the neurodiversity movement. Stimpunk Ryan helped create and run a multi-billion dollar company and a global Open Source community using the ideas that would become Cavendish Space. “Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes” and “intermittent collaboration” provide core insight into how the creative teams Ryan worked on for 30 years operated. These are timeless patterns of human learning and collaboration that cannot be stifled without harm.

The path to escape the box of a sick society involves rediscovering timeless and minimalistic principles for coordinating creative collaboration.

Bettin, Jorn. The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations (p. 292). S23M Limited.

Could it be that humans have always occupied these diverse learning spaces, moving between them as needed?

From the Campfire to the Holodeck by David Thornburg

Cavendish Space = Timeless Patterns in Primordial Spaces

At our learning space, we use Cavendish Space to pursue special interests and intrinsic motivation. We use it to assist attention tunnels so that learners can slip into flow states.

Online and offline, we provide individual spaces as well as community spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity.

We use the timeless patterns and primordial spaces used by those who created laser printers, Ethernet, the modern personal computer, and the GUI. We use patterns and spaces that have been with humanity all along. These patterns and spaces are there at the heart of progressive, human-centered education. We repress these timeless patterns to our peril.

Although our coordinated neuroscientific and classroom studies are still in progress, educating for dispositions of mind is not new—in fact it is highly consistent with a century of educational research and theory (for example, Dewey, Montessori, Bruner, Perkins, Gardner), as well as with Doug’s decades of experience working with successful progressive public secondary schools.

But tying these dispositions to neural development, life success, and mental health gives this effort new urgency, and points us due north in an attempt to reimagine adolescents’ schooling. Evidence suggests that educators can learn to recognize, model, and support the development of these dispositions if they know what kind of narratives to listen for and what kind of learning experiences lead to these patterns of thinking.

Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains

New research on the connections between adolescents’ narrative building and brain development aligns closely with old lessons from progressive practices.

Building Meaning Builds Teens’ Brains

In short, progressive education isn’t just more engaging than what might be called regressive education; according to decades of research, it’s also more effective — particularly with regard to the kinds of learning that matter most. And that remains true even after taking our cognitive architecture into account.

Cognitive Load Theory: An Unpersuasive Attempt to Justify Direct Instruction – Alfie Kohn

In fact, much as they disagreed on many other things, as they did, Dewey and Russell did agree on what Russell called this “humanistic conception,” with its roots in the Enlightenment, the idea that education is not to be viewed as something like filling a vessel with water but, rather, assisting a flower to grow in its own way-an eighteenth-century view that they revived. In other words, providing the circumstances in which the normal creative patterns will flourish.

Democracy and Education on JSTOR

Outside space. Many people find being outside and in natural very calming. Space to move away from other people, internal noises and distractions can be a good way to self-regulate. 

“I think things that are useful for autistic people would be beneficial for everyone. It would have stopped a lot of distress for a lot of people if they can take themselves away and calm down.”
Emily 

A sensory room or de-stress room. Easy access to a quiet space to de-stress can be an enormously helpful tool for people to be able to self-manage. Ideally, this room will be away from areas where there is heavy footfall or other outside noise. Many people find neutral spaces beneficial, with the option of lights and other sensory stimulus. 

“I think you should just be able to walk into the sensory room instead of asking staff and waiting for them to unlock it.”
Jamie 

It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people

The reality is that if it exists, you can reasonably assume there will be an autistic person to whom that thing is the subject of intense obsession and time spent, from blankets to drain covers (both of these are special interests of people in my acquaintance) and pretty much anything in between. When engaging in a special interest, autistic people are typically calmer, more relaxed, happier and more focused than they would otherwise be – for many, it is a form of release or even self-medication: a well-timed foray into a special interest can stave off meltdown and be a generally extremely positive force in an autistic person’s life.

Learning From Autistic Teachers (pp. 30-31)

But one thing is particularly important to my purposes here: our hyperfixations adore company, and if an autistic person is given the opportunity to share their passion for the subject with friends, relatives or complete strangers, then you can expect high levels of enthusiasm, enormous amounts of data and information to be delivered, and impressive levels of knowledge. In short, if you want to be taught something, you can do a lot worse than be taught about it by an autistic person for whom it is one of their special interests. I have been taught about various subjects by openly autistic people and the experience has invariably been truly fantastic, and my understanding of the topic afterwards deep and thorough.

Learning From Autistic Teachers (pp. 30-31)

Many people with autism are stressed individuals who find the world a confusing place (Vermeulen, 2013). So how does someone with autism achieve a sense of flow? McDonnell & Milton (2014) have argued that many repetitive activities may achieve a flow state. One obvious area where flow can be achieved is when engaging in special interests. Special interests allow people to become absorbed in an area that gives them specialist knowledge and a sense of achievement. In addition, certain repetitive tasks can help people achieve a flow like state of mind. These tasks can become absorbing and are an important part of people’s lives. The next time you see an individual with autism engaging in a repetitive task (like stacking Lego or playing a computer game), remember that these are not in themselves negative activities, they may well be reducing stress.

If you want to improve your supports to people with autism from a stress perspective, a useful tool is to identify flow states for that person and try to develop a flow plan. Remember, the next time you see a person repeating seemingly meaningless behaviours, do not assume that this is always unpleasant for them – it might be a flow state, and beneficial for reducing stress.

What is ‘flow’?

“Down the rabbit hole” is an English-language idiom or trope which refers to getting deep into something, or ending up somewhere strange.

Down the rabbit hole – Wikipedia

Learning how to learn on his own proved one of the most important lessons of his life.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

“You go there, I will go with you”

A SOLE is a mildly chaotic environment of children, clustered around the Internet, in search of answers to Big Questions.

The teacher is a friend, on this journey….

The Future of Learning | Sugata Mitra | TEDxNewcastle

When learning is allowed to be project, problem, and passion driven, then children learn because of their terroir, not disengage in spite of it. When we recognize biodiversity in our schools as healthy, then we increase the likelihood that our ecosystems will thrive.

To be contributors to educating children to live in a world that is increasingly challenging to negotiate, schools must be ​conceptualized as ecological communities, spaces for learning with the potential to embody all of the concepts of the ecosystem – interactivity, biodiversity, connections, adaptability, succession, and balance. 

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Creating paths to equity and access for all children remains the grand challenge of public education in America.

Equity provides resources so that educators can see all our children’s strengths. Access provides our children with the chance to show us who they are and what they can do. Empathy allows us to see children as children, even teens who may face all the challenges that poverty and other risk factors create. Inclusivity creates a welcoming culture of care so that no one feels outside the community.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Sadly though, the social, political, and economic narrative of schooling in the past has been grounded in a “soft eugenics” belief that while some children have the capacity to become whatever they choose to be in life, others do not. This plays out in the decisions that educators make, often based on decontextualized data and confirmation biases that stem from immersion in traditions of education that did the same to us. Even if lip service is given to words such as equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships, schooling today is still far more likely to support practices from the past that have created school cultures in which none ​of those words define who educators really are, no matter what they aspire to be.

Consider how the “habitable world” concept developed by Rosemarie Garland‐Thomson, Emory University researcher and professor, sits at the core of the philosophy of educators who developed and now sustain the structures and processes of schooling that impact young people such as Kolion (Garland‐Thomson 2017b). Garland‐Thomson views public, political, and organizational philosophy as representative of one of “two forms of world‐building, inclusive and eugenic” (Garland‐Thomson 2017a). Unfortunately, often it’s the soft educational eugenics philosophy that is most often expressed in practice, if not in words, across the nation’s schools rather than the creation of habitable worlds that are inclusive of all learners.

If we want our schools to be learning ​spaces that reveal the strengths of children to us, we have to create a bandwidth of opportunities that do so. That means making decisions differently, decisions driven from values that support equity, accessibility, inclusivity, empathy, cultural responsiveness, and connected relationships inside the ecosystem. Those are the words representative of habitable worlds, not words such as sort, select, remediate, suspend, or fail.

Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

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.