AutCollab Education invites you to learn directly from the neurodiversity and disability rights movement via paradigm shifting professional education courses.
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The objectives of the neurodiversity and disability rights movements overlap significantly with the struggles of indigenous peoples. All people are fully human.
Neurodiversity is not only about neurodivergent students, it is also about the many neurodivergent teachers, parents, artists, and professionals and entrepreneurs in all sectors of our economy – who are unable to act as role models for neurodivergent students when having to remain undercover, to avoid bullying, ruthless exploitation, and systematic discrimination in their workplaces. It will not come as a surprise that most neurodivergent students and educators have negative school experiences.
Our education team is working with neurodivergent teachers globally to facilitate sector wide education in the neurodiversity paradigm, the neurodiversity movement, and related cultural change.
We are your partners, lovers, friends, carers, nurses, clinicians, teachers, parents, children, and colleagues. Yet, we live in a world that is not safe for us.
Our ability to fulfil our potential is being threatened by the stigma associated with having been labelled with a “disorder” or a “special” educational need, and by the misconceptions many people still have about Autistic people and people with learning differences. In a hypernormative society that pathologises human diversity we are more vulnerable and at risk of being mistreated.
Neurodiversity is part of the biodiversity of all animals with nervous systems. It is not limited to humans, and it is part of the biological diversity that enables species to survive, adapt, evolve, and thrive, even in changing environmental conditions.
AutCollab Education is assisting schools and universities with unique interactive education courses to create a more inclusive educational landscape that prepares students and teachers for life in a time of ecological overshoot, frequent extreme weather events, and unavoidable rapid social change in the coming decades.
Our comprehensive professional education offering is based on ongoing participatory research, and is delivered by intersectionally diverse educators with decades of lived experience.
We recommend the following short explanatory videos for introducing students to the neurodiversity movement and the neurodiversity paradigm:
- Biodiversity and neurodiversity
- The challenges faced by indigenous, Autistic, and other marginalised people
- The birth of Autistic community
AutCollab Education is very different from education about neurodiversity in the language of the pathology paradigm, which frames neurodivergent people in terms of deficits relative to the current neuronormative culture, perhaps with a few special splinter skills thrown in for Feel Good Effect.
The course Introduction to the Neurodiversity Paradigm and Intersectionality is an interactive “deep dive” into neurodiversity and autistic culture. It is creative, collaborative, and goes beyond the usual medical and workplace neurodiversity ideas. Very refreshing to take part in CPD catering to different learning and communication styles. It was the most fun I’ve had in CPD this year! The course book is beautiful.
Dr Sarah Bernard FRACP, Australia
Surviving on the edges of modern society is an art. The arts and regular immersion in genuinely safe Open Spaces help us imagine and co-create ecologies of care in which care and mutual aid are the primary values. Within the context of the polycrisis that shapes the modern human predicament, the urgency of cultural evolution can not be addressed from within the paradigm of an education system from the early industrial era. Healthy Artistic and Autistic life paths by necessity differ from “normality”.
Autists in particular learn and play differently, because our senses work differently, and because we make sense of the world in different ways. Our sensory profiles don’t allow us to push cognitive dissonance out of conscious awareness. We feel and know that a way of life that traumatises large segments of the population and the non-human world does not make any sense. We need to slow down, to the relational speed of life.
In order to bring about this change, we need your help:
You can deepen your understanding and educational toolkit by learning directly from the neurodiversity and disability rights movement via our paradigm shifting professional education courses.
Inquiry sent.
Onwards!
The AutCollab Education Team
- Jorn Bettin, Aotearoa New Zealand
- Dr Juanita Fernando, Australia
- Christyanne Gaspar, United States
- Jolene Stockman, Aotearoa New Zealand
- Brittney Geary, United States
Support our work!
As an AutCollab Education Sponsor you receive one AutCollab Education voucher worth NZ$ 248 every 3 months, which we will send to education professionals or healthcare professionals of your choice.
In case you don’t want to nominate recipients, your vouchers will be used to provide AutCollab Education grants to professionals who otherwise can’t afford our courses. Additionally you’ll have early access to all new AutCollab articles, can explore the anonymous quantitative results of our Dr. B. Educated participatory research, and you’ll receive a copy of the book The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale.
Introductory learning resources
- Communal definition of Autistic ways of being
- Introduction to Autistic ways of being
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Autistic Collaboration TV
Books
- On human collective behaviour
- On the ND paradigm, the ND movement, and Autistic culture
- On Autistic wellbeing
Our partners and allies
Regular Open Space with members of the neurodiversity and disability rights movement is a tool for jointly embarking on a unique journey of omni-directional learning and intersectional community co-creation that leaves no one behind.
