Background to the ‘Teaching for Neurodiversity’ project
In 2016, a consortium led by the British Dyslexia Association in partnership with Dyslexia Action, Dyspraxia Foundation, The Helen Arkell Centre, and The Professional association of teachers of students with specific learning difficulties (Patoss), was awarded a Department for Education-funded contract to provide support for Dyslexia and other Specific Learning Differences. A research team from Manchester Metropolitan University was tasked with evaluating the project.
A major element of the contract was to develop training to help equip the school and post-16 workforces to deliver quality teaching and effective, evidence-based SEN support for pupils with dyslexia and other specific learning difficulties (SpLD). This training was to focus on enhancing teachers’ knowledge, understanding and skills in identifying and supporting pupils with SpLD to ensure their ability to identify and respond to the needs of children from an early age. A ‘train the trainer’ approach was recommended in order to maximise the sustainability and reach of the programme.
The consortium addressed the requirement to meet the needs of learners with a range of SpLD by developing a training programme focussing on neurodiversity, called ‘Teaching for Neurodiversity’. Differing concepts of neurodiversity currently exist: some use the term in order to reframe the label ‘Autistic Spectrum Disorder’ (Singer 1999), others to refer to a range of specific learning difficulties (DANDA 2006; Baker 2011). However, the model underpinning the training would conceive that everyone is included within the spectrum of neurodiversity, and this conception is further developed later in this article.
It is important to make clear that the concept of teaching for neurodiversity is not the same as that of ‘educational neuroscience’ (a branch of science that explores the links between biological neural mechanisms and education). The idea that laboratory-based experimental approaches to the brain and learning can be transferred unproblematically to a school classroom has been fundamentally questioned by scholars working in the fields of critical neuroscience and critical educational psychology. While such experimental approaches might give some limited information about neurobiological functioning, they have been criticised for being very reductionist in approach, failing to account for, firstly, the affective dimensions of learning (Le Doux 1999), secondly, the concept of human personality as being more than the sum of its neurophysiological parts (Kirmayer & Gold 2012), and thirdly, the highly complex set of variables at play in the social dynamics of learning in the classroom (Johnston 2015).
The other danger with the educational neuroscience approach is that it is based within a positivist medical tradition which has traditionally considered human diversity through a lens of psychopathology and a focus upon deficit. In this tradition, the aim has been to identify and treat ‘syndromes’ within the individual, which, as Professor Tom Billington of the University of Sheffield points out, “restrict the available ways of conceptualising and responding to human difference in our schools and more specifically within special educational needs.” (Billington 2017).