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CONCEPT-BASED AUTISM INFORMATION: Able Diversity Education
A New Path Towards A Peace-able Dialog About Ableness, Able Loss & Ableism

"WHY is learning about people with Autism like learning about a whole new culture?"
In this web site, we describe the ways to travel within, by learning about, this new world of Autism. We explain the need for specific communication vehicles for riding on verbal roads or nonverbal rivers, which can connect the typical lands of learning to the areas of Autism where our young children have atypical language losses. We share about our experience having to work hard to build and traverse new bridges over the mutual social canyons that separate people with Autism from people without Autism. We seek to influence adult providers in ways so that we can become able to explore the far side of our vast able diverse universe to better understand Autism through the use of best Autism intervention practices in person-focused assessment, family-centered planning, and Autism community based program options. All of this may sound as if we are saying that we actually come from different planets not just, different continents, countries, or cultures. It may look as if we are showing how we adults are strangers in this new world, or that our children must be strangers in ours. We hope not. The geographic metaphors we use are only meant to capture the diverse functional terrain and the mutual cultural gaps we must ALL face together—as human beings within a shared world. However, these distance metaphors are also meant to expose some of the cultural falsehoods that we may all encounter along the way home. We want to promote a dialog about the truth of our differences and similarities, because upon entry into the universe of Autism we must work hard to learn about the social nature of a whole new able reality we may have never known existed. However, we also want to discuss any falsehoods that Autism alone creates all the cultural distances between us. We typical people create many of those miles, and meteor belts our families collide with, if we find outselves consigned to outer able space.

One sociological definition of culture is: the knowledge; skills; rules; belief-systems; ideals; values; symbols; customs; preferences; arts; material objects; and, subjective experiences, that is, the total lifestyle, in the context of the whole history, of a people or social group that may be automatically transferred or communicated to, and changed by succeeding generations. This is a typical most biosocially-able world definition of culture.

With this definition, people with Autism both could and would not represent another functional/cultural group in certain ways. People with Autism often do share similar yet still often unique preference; arts; material objects; and, asubjuctive experiences, in ways that impact our and our families' lifestyles over all our life spans. However, Autism can also negatively impact how we typical adults may or may not be able to pass on our diverse social cultures' knowledge, skills, rules of conduct, abstract belief-systems; ideals; values; meanings of symbols; social customs. However, neither the cultural context, nor the whole history, of people with Autism has ever been recorded, and people with Autism are not afforded any collective passages of a shared cultural experience down to a next generation of people with Autism. Therefore, we must work hard to both pass on positive and matchable, and often to let go of passing on both any negative and unmatchable parts of our family's typical functional and diverse social cultures to people with Autism.

However, the questions becomes are people with Autism a real cultural group? I would say yes, but with a caveat. Individuals with Autism ARE social beings, we are just more ASOCIAL and asubjective cultural beings who view the world more objectively. Therefore issues of functional material objects and contextual environmental adaptations may form the best way to build spaces in which people with and without Autism can more ethically connect and effectively make contacts/encounters. This means that typical people will have to open this peace-able potentials. Typical persons' socialness is defined by having social perspectives that are more objective and less subjective. Therefore people with and without Autism represent a vast social spectrum in relation to each other. In this same way, people with Autism may then need to seen as a true community, but an acultural functional group as well. Therefore, we represent a bio-asocial cultural group. Yes, trust me, I do know this takes some thinking to unknot. Sometimes when you encounter a whole new cultural world or even just sharing in diverse worldviews it can cause confusion and upset. Yet, the reality of Autism may demand that we work through to mental resolution and emotional reconciliation around our diverse functional and cultural groups. One way to start is to look at the cultural definition above you will see that the biological heritage of Autism combines with its asocial features in a way that supports my abductive hyposthesis here. Most of the trainees we have worked with over the last decade who have reflected on and critically thought about these ideas find that they unknot the mutual binds of Autism.

My reasons for trying to bridge the distances between people with and with Autism with a social and cultural diversity aware model is because our history shows all the features of two cultures in conflict, with one having a power-over status. Autism may create two cultural worlds due to our significantly different functional realities, but it is our lack of knowledge, awareness, skills and ableness to relate to people with Autism that actually creates the great distances between our two worlds. This is why we need to learn to understand Autism and the biological conditions it creates and the social situations it places our children and families within, in a whole new way. We need a guide--an able diversity guide. Such a text can guide us to the cultural and functional realities people with and without Autism face in relation to each other. This guide book is written within the texts of this web page. You may have noticed that in this web page we use language differently and in a way that can allow us to begin to feel truly respectful towards, and that affords us a way to be authentic inclusive of both people with and without Autism. Give yourself some time to adjust-able and learn new words to talk about Autism in ways that are response-able, you will find your way to peace-able relations, as you get familiar with its meanings.

This web page is part of what is Threshold's broader an Able Diversity and Anti-Ableism mission. As an able worlds researcher, Threshold's Exectuve Director Sharone Lee is seeking to find ways to have the Autism community have a clearer and stronger voice by studying the meaning of language in relation to our able diverse groups. More of this work can soon be found at another web site on her able diversity work at www.sharone.net. Here is an able orientation from that site for you to consider:

"WHY do you use different words to talk about people with disablities?"
We can frame the concept of disability one of two ways. It is either about a condition of loss of function that belongs soley to the person with that condition, which often makes us the person-with-the-problem and even, the person-as-problem as well as framing those of us who are fservice providers as the person-with-the-solution. This approach makes "us" the person-with-power-over our children and families with atypical able-losses as "The Others."

However, there is a second way to view disability, in a way that deconstructs this first view as The Problem itself. This alternate view affords us a view of everyone's functional conditions, patterns, situations, and experience as relevant. This perspective means that able gains and losses in us all always matter as we live, work and cope with reality together as one human world with many functionally and culturally diverse communities situtated with that world. This means that both our biologically determined and socially nurtured capacities will be seen as existing in a shared space between us--which can authentically include everyone's specific problems and everyone's unique potentials in a more equitiable way. This is the philosophy Threshold has come to experience as our foundation. Therefore this web page is part of what is our broader Able Diversity Education and Anti-Ableism Work mission. As an able life worlds researcher, Threshold's Exectuve Director Sharone Lee is seeking to find ways to have the Autism community have a clearer and stronger voice by studying the meaning of language in relation to all our able diverse groups realities. The theory and practice of this model can soon be found at another separate web site www.sharone.net This site will make avail-able and afford-able adult provider curricula for higher education institutions and able-allied organizations. Here is an able orientation from that site for you to consider now:

A Radical Voice for A New ReasonABLE Dialog Approach to Able Diversity Education & Anti-Ableism Work
In this, my human development research works, I hope to build a radical grounded theory for a Cultural and Funtional Model of Biosocial Identity, Status, and Power, and to create new and useful materials for adult developmental education and organizational advocacy in relation to able and social groups justice work. My shared mission with other able advocates is to facilitate positive progress in able groups’ human development and humane relations in ways that have the potential to create needed systems change. In this work, I have found two keys to progressive transformation: for peoples who are oppressed to find our Voices and to develop needed leadership skills, and for peoples with power to hear our “Messages” and develop needed followership skills. Language is a key to change.

As a person of typical cognitive most-ableness, I have struggled in my work to be in service to those of us with significantly atypical developmental patterns and permanent able losses. My colleagues outside and inside the Autism community reported struggling to follow and use such terms. I understand. For, in this learning and teaching, I have mightily wrestled with what I have come to see as the ableist language which is embedded in and interwined in what may be our better to worse providership practices. However, for me to lead on this path, I must break our status quo, and own the word able in new ways. Here is where I started:

In my developmental journey of investigating the nature of able reality, I found that we need to recenter able status, terminology, communications, history, providership principles, and work spaces in relation to a more functionally inclusive model of all our able groups. Therefore, I will not use the word “disabled.” No. Instead, I will talk about our able conditions, for we all have these. I will not use the term “special” needs. Rather, I will identify our often universal or group specific able-to-function needs. I will not talk about any “special” education programs or “handicapped” services. Instead, as a model of what can become safer service providership, I will talk more about able adaptive education for all students, and able diversity education for all adult providers. I will work to avoid using the inclusive/exclusive pronouns “us/them” or “we/they,” and, instead, will use the inclusive forms those of us, we, or our in ways that challenge us to rethink our able groups relations in authentically inclusive ways. I will not imply “superior-vs-inferior” or “normal-vs-abnormal” as constructs to be put onto any human beings or groups, with anyone framed as “the other.” Rather, I will focus on the nature of human biosocial diversity and the significantly typical and atypical developmental patterns of able gains and losses all human beings may experience in our selves, families, and work and recreational spaces across all our life spans and diverse cultural groups. Furthermore, I will oppose any competitively framed interests between peoples’ biologically-at-risk and socially-oppressed group memberships. Because, I wish to integrate the cultural and functional realities of all of those of us surviving our experiences, and working with our exercises, of the systemic forces of biosocial oppression and power. I never entertain either side of angry “political correctness” debates. These false pretenses pave the long-running road of liberals’ and conservatives’ avoidance of complex issues of collective power and empowerment, which cannot be resolved with finalized lists of labels or rote rules of conduct. I am only interested in listening to subordinate/atypical group leaderships and negotiating dominant/typical followerships and offering mutual empathy to learn in a model of socially ethical communications and authentically inclusive engagement. Such radical pedagogical able reality content and andragogical able groups’ work processes may make our individual “personal and professional relationships” uncomfortable at first, as we must all gain and sustain a more conscious knowing of our true able-groups’ relations. Therefore, I must warmly, yet firmly, insist to any who do not expect, or want, to deal with new able words: “We all need such new able ideals, if we are ever to promote change, and to make specific able technologies available and adaptable to meet all our needs, as we experience them, as we all experience them around our manage-able limitations.” Therefore, this new able terminology is not a matter of just “able jargon.” It is a matter of long-missing vocabulary needed for building communication bridges to a place of longer overdue social and able justice for our world’s most vulnerable citizens.

PLEASE NOTICE: Now, that said, no reader of this information has my consent to use this information to try to control how other's speak. People have every right to use established typical world language to talk about ableness. Those of you seeking to become able allies only have my permission to become more response-able in how you yourself may feel and think and speak and act in a more able allied manner by using this language model. Let the next person find their own way here, without getting bogged down in distracting "you said/I say" debates about how we dialog. Therefore, this language is not just an easy script to be learned and then taught, it is a reality to be discovered, known, and understood as a way to create more negotiABLE terms of engagement. So PLEASE do not start another able war-of-ableist-words using my work. I seek only peace-able and I will not support such actions. In this way this work becomes the guide to the empathic betrayors and ethical saboteurs who can now better notice, name, engage and negotiate what will most likely, always be an ableist world.


The text above includes excerpt from ABLETIQUETTE A Guide to the Able Diverse Universe For the Well-Intended Provider, by Sharone Lee. This is a college level text for diversity engagement work (2001). Understanding Autism Webbook. Copyright © 2000-03 by Sharone Lee. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. All names, concepts, methods, materials, products and publications are protected by trademark and copyright, and no part of this text or this web page may be reproduced or distributed in any manner, for any purpose, including educational purposes, without express written consent from: THRESHOLD • SALEM, OREGON • 503-375-9462 • sharone@understandingautism.org.