Cavendish Space: psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, intermittent collaborationThe best solutions come from “intermittent collaboration” — group work punctuated by breaks to think & work by ourselves.Daniel Pink Our cave, campfire, and watering hole moods map to the red, yellow,… More, and collaborative niche constructionPositive Niche Construction–practice of differentiating instruction for the neurodiverse brainNeurodiversity in the Classroom Positive niche construction is a strengths-based approach to educating students with disabilities.  Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche… More.

We provide Cavendish space of peer respite and collaborative niche construction where our learners can find relief from an intense world designed against us.

niche construction may be every bit as important for survival as natural selection 

Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

Cavendish Space

⛺️🔥 Caves, Campfires, and Watering Holes

Since readingThere are three types of reading: eye reading, ear reading, and finger reading.The Dyslexia Empowerment Plan: A Blueprint for Renewing Your Child’s Confidence and Love of Learning Most schools and… More NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work as “Cavendish bubblesCavendish Space: psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to zone work, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction. Since reading NeuroTribes, we think of psychologically & sensory safe spaces suited to… More” and “Cavendish space”, after Henry Cavendish, the wizard of Clapham Common and discoverer of hydrogen. The privilegesTo not have conversations because they make you uncomfortable is the definition of privilege. Your comfort is not at the center of this discussion.Brené Brown Power can be understood as… More 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 safePsychological safety is a condition in which you feel (1) included, (2) safe to learn, (3) safe to contribute, and (4) safe to challenge the status quo—all without fear of… More homes of opportunity without the requirement of nobility or privilege. Replace the trappings of the compliance classroom with student-created context, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), and BYOC (Bring/Build Your Own Comfort). Let’s hit thrift stores, buy lumber, apply some hacker ethos, and turn the complianceNoncompliance is a social skill.Noncompliance is one of the most important social skills. Noncompliance skills make it possible to say no, even when others want your right to say no to… More classroom into something psychologically safe and comfortable to a team of young minds engaged in passion-based learning. Inform spaces with neurodiversity and the social modelIn the broadest sense, the social model of disability is about nothing more complicated than a clear focus on the economic, environmental and cultural barriers encountered by people who are… More of disability so that they welcome and include all minds and bodies. Provide quiet spaces for high memory state zone work where students can escape sensory overwhelm, slip into flow states, and enjoy a maker’s schedule. Provide social spaces for collaboration and camaraderie. Create cave, campfire, and watering hole zones. Develop neurological curb cuts. Fill our classrooms with choice and comfort, instructional tolerance, continuous connectivity, and assistive technology. In other words, make space for Cavendish. Make spaces for both collaboration and deep work.

 Classroom UX: Designing for Pluralism

We provide caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can find respite. Online and offline, we provide individual spaces as well as communityWhat I have always been hoping to accomplish is the creation of community.Community is magic. Community is power. Community is resistance.Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-First-Person-Stories-Twenty-First-ebook/dp/B082ZQBL98/ https://www.amazon.com/Disability-Visibility-Adapted-Young-Adults-ebook/dp/B08VFT4R9T/… More spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity. Caves, campfires, and watering holes are necessary to designing for neurological pluralism and providing psychological safety. They’re necessary to positive niche construction.

The watering hole is an informal space where peers can share information and discoveries, acting as both learner and teacher simultaneously. This shared space can serve as an incubator for ideas and can promote a sense of shared culture. It is an informal area, where students can share in collaborative learning experiences.

“Some autistic people’s needs will conflict with each other. For example, some autistic people may need the TV playingThere is nothing more human than play. Humans were designed to learn in play. In fact, nearly all mammals evolved this way.Play’s Power At our learning space, we provide learners fresh… More to calm down, as it can help to focus on specific sounds. But for others this may cause more stress depending on their mental state. Additionally, some autistic people may need to stim to feel relaxed and comfortable, or it may be involuntary when they are stressed, but noises they make (e.g. verbal stimsSelf-stimulatory behavior, also known as stimming and self-stimulation, is the repetition of physical movements, sounds, or words, or the repetitive movement of objects Stimming – Wikipedia Autistic adults highlighted the importance of stimming as… More), could really stress another autistic person out. I think the key here is space.”

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

Our cave, campfire, and watering hole moods map to the red, yellow, and green of interaction badges (aka color communication badges). The three-level and three-speed communication flow used at distributed companies reflects the progressive sociality of cave, campfire, and watering hole contexts and red, yellow, green interaction moods. All of these facilitate intermittent collaboration.

Perhaps the most important form of control over one’s space is authority over who comes in and out—a point missed by those who believe that our workspaces should resemble a bustling coffeehouse. The informal exchanges facilitated by proximity are indeed generative. But the value of such interactions can be extracted only if it is also possible, when necessary, to avoid interacting at all.

The Extended Mind – Annie Murphy Paul

We use Cavendish Space to pursue special interestsI don’t know who invented the phrase “special interest.” Probably some researcher. Autistic people don’t really love the term because the term “special” has become tied so closely with terms… More and assist attention tunnelsEntering flow states – or attention tunnels – is a necessary coping strategy for many of us.Fergus Murray People need to feel appreciated and safe, to give themselves to an… More so that learners can slip into flow states.

People need to feel appreciated and safe, to give themselves to an activity; and they need to feel like they are making progress to keep giving themselves to it. To get into The Zone, you need to know you’re getting somewhere, that you’re in the process of mastering a skill – you need ongoing feedback, whether from another person or another source. There is also something uniquely satisfying about working with other people effectively, towards a shared goal; in my experience there is no substitute when it comes to building a community.

Flow states are the pinnacle of intrinsic motivationIntrinsic motivation: where somebody wants to do something for themselves, for the sake of doing it and doing it well.Craft, Flow and Cognitive Styles Self-determination Theory distinguishes between two different… More, where somebody wants to do something for themselves, for the sake of doing it and doing it well.

Flow allows us to recharge, to feel a sense of achievement and satisfaction, and a kind of respite from the often-baffling demands of the school social environment.

Craft, Flow and Cognitive Styles

When focused like this an Autistic person can enter a ‘flow state‘ which can bring great joy and satisfaction to the person experiencing it.

Monotropism

Entering flow states – or attention tunnels – is a necessary coping strategy for many of us.

Fergus Murray

🌷 Dandelions, Tulips, and Orchids

🏗 Niche Construction

Seven components of positive niche construction in the classroom:

• Assessment of students’ strengths
• The use of assistive technology and Universal Design for Learning“Sure,” they say, “with enough humiliation we can allow you to do things differently, as long as you understand that we’ll never consider you an equal part of the school.”… More
• Enhanced human resources
• The implementation of strengths-based learning strategies
• Envisioning positive role models
• Activation of affirmative career aspirations
• The engineering of appropriate environmental modifications to support the development of neurodiverse students

Source: Reimagining Inclusion with Positive Niche Construction

• Organisms are not passive.
• The environment is a product of organisms.
• Interactions are reciprocal.
• Ecology, development, & evolution are interdependent.

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

🌈 Cognitive Diversity Exists for a Reason

It doesn’t take long to figure out when observing the natural world that biodiversity creates pathways for organisms to not just survive, but also to thrive within ecosystems.

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

If neurodivergenceNeurodivergent, sometimes abbreviated as ND, means having a mind that functions in ways which diverge significantly from the dominant societal standards of “normal.”NEURODIVERSITY: SOME BASIC TERMS & DEFINITIONS Neurodivergent is quite… More is essentially disablement, why do we keep replicating the gene pool? The less extensive, yet persistent, body of work indicating specialist strengths within neurodiversity, supports the hypothesis that the evolutionary purposeSelf-determination Theory (SDT) is… — a model, a macro theory, of human motivation. It’s one of several models of human motivation, but it’s one that has been confirmed over and… More of divergence is ‘specialist thinking skills’ to balance ‘generalist’ thinking skills (as per the ‘spiky profile’). The evolutionary perspective is congruent with the Neurodiversity movement and essential to understanding the occupational talent management perspective that is currently in vogue.

The spiky profileThere is consensus regarding some neurodevelopmental conditions being classed as neurominorities, with a ‘spiky profile’ of executive functions difficulties juxtaposed against neurocognitive strengths as a defining characteristic. Neurominorities, Spiky Profiles,… More may well emerge as the definitive expression of neurominority, within which there are symptom clusters that we currently call autism, ADHD, dyslexiaDyslexia is a genetic, brain-based characteristic that results in difficulty connecting the sounds of spoken language to written words. It can result in errors in reading or spelling as well… More and DCD.

Neurodiversity at work: a biopsychosocial model and the impact on working adults | British Medical Bulletin | Oxford Academic

🤲 Social Buffering and Collaborative Morality

“It was diversity between people which led to human success and it is particularly important as it gives you different specialised roles.

“We are arguing that it is the rise of collaborative morality that led to the possibility for widening the diversity of the human personality.”

Autism and human evolutionary success

Here we argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities through the emergence of collaborative morality will have opened new niches for adaptive cognitive strategies and widened personality variation. Such strategies include those that that do not depend on astute social perception or abilities to think recursively about others’ thoughts and feelings. We particularly consider how a perceptual style based on logic and detail, bringing certain enhanced technical and social abilities which compensate for deficits in complex social understanding could be advantageous at low levels in certain ecological and cultural contexts. ‘Traits of autism’ may have promoted innovation in archaeological material culture during the late Palaeolithic in the context of the mutual interdependenceInterdependence acknowledges that our survival is bound up together, that we are interconnected and what you do impacts others. If this pandemic has done nothing else, it has illuminated how… More of different social strategies, which in turn contributed to the rise of innovation and large scale social networks.

Extensive evidence for support for individuals with disabilities in the distant archaeological record (Hublin 2009; Spikins, Rutherford, and Needham 2010; Spikins 2015a; Tilley 2015) argues that selection pressures within human societies were not simply orientated around immediate responses or short-term social value, and that social buffering of vulnerabilities was common.

Whilst we generalise evolutionary pressures as proceeding towards greater cogitation of other’s thoughts and feelings and increasingly complex intuitive models of other minds, the reality is likely to have been more complex. We argue that social buffering of vulnerabilities in increasingly complex human societies may have encouraged a range of different strategies to pro-socialityThe eight prosocial design principles provide guidance for dealing with people who regularly ignore relevant advice (or consistently refuse to seek or give advice) and therefore regularly cause downstream problems… More that go beyond increasingly recursive theory of mindAnd this is where the neurotypical belief in theory of mind becomes a liability. Not just a liability – a disability. Because not only are neurotypicals just as mind-blind to autistics… More, and lead to a wider range of pro-social human personalities.

Rather than social astuteness, signals of pro-social motivations and behaviours that positively affect the group thus become a major factor in reputation and selective success (Tomasello et al. 2012; Silk and House 2016). Third, the food sharing, collaborative parenting and maintenance of egalitarian dynamics which form the basis of human evolutionary success (Whiten and Erdal 2012) buffer individual shortfalls not only in resources (the basis for economic success) but also in abilities.

We argue that as a transition to collaborative morality(Tomasello and Vaish 2013b) occurred within human groups, new opportunities arose for alternative strategies to sociality, including those which do not depend on complex social understanding and theory of mind.

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

Collaborative morality opens up opportunities to be respected and appreciated through the emergence of distinct abilities, virtues or spheres of elevated influence and respect even when these are associated with deficits.

Are there alternative adaptive strategies to human pro-sociality? The role of collaborative morality in the emergence of personality variation and autistic traits

🤝 Interdependence and Collaboration

The notion of disability in our society is underscored by a bizarre conception of “independence”.

It is time to celebrate our interdependence!

THE MYTH OF INDEPENDENCE: HOW THE SOCIAL MODEL OF DISABILITY EXPOSES SOCIETY’S DOUBLE STANDARDS » NEUROCLASTIC

Magic happens when you combine collaboration and neurodiversity.

Celebration of interdependence | Autistic Collaboration

It is time to celebrate our interdependence! Collaboration allows us to create genuinely safe spaces for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people. We should expect society to support us in establishing new forms of creative collaboration, and we should not be forced individually to be “included” in toxic exploitative environments.

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