Are you saying that people with Autism are less valueable than people without Autism or other able losses?

I am actually saying the exact opposite. If a person's social value is based solely on the level of our able achievements, without any regard for the inner and outer resources that have been internally afforded to us and made easily available to us externally, then that is not a reality-based standard, let alone an equitable one. The cause and effect relationship between our ableness and our access to equitable able-to-function needs cannot be divided. This is particularly apparent when people with Autism and other biologically-based losses do not have equitable access to the resources we need to reach our fullest potential. Then the mutual functional and behavioral interactions between people with and without Autism will deteriorate automatically and in direct relationship to each other's access to training based in best Autism practices.

Therefore, if being able to work hard to achieve our full potential on an even resource playing field were the standard, then people with Autism across the spectrum would have equal social status and equitable access to best practice methods. This would helps us all become more aware of the true value of person who survives, functions, and achieves in the face of significant innate loss and substantial barriers to community resource access. At Threshold we have worked with people with Autism 24/7/365 for well over a decade using best practices. We have always witnessed each remarkable person who survive, function, and achieve well when provided access to the resources we all need and the best practice adaptations that are well-matched to our individual and group needs. This is a universal meta-need for us all--to have our needs met.

This is why ableness is only one factor that controls whether we are allowed to be able-to-function up to our fullest potential. The cultural forces of ableism versus the functional supports of access to best practices and able alliances are other critical factors. It is just the subjective force of one large majority abel group gaining and holding power over another for no good reason. With our vulnerable able group of significantly communication, sensorimotor, and social relatedness losses, this is very easy and very tempting to do. Yet, it is just as wrong. It is not more wrong, it is exactly as wrong. It is interfering with other human beings natural capacity to survive, function and belong in ways that let us reach our fullest human potentials. That is why I say it is not reality-based to view people of able loss as less socially valued. We are very value-able human beings.

This IS hard to let in all the way to our core, because we each have constructed our own cultural and functional sets of knowledge, awareness, skills, and abilities within our diverse, yet still typically more-able-centered communities. Our society does not supply fully conscious, complete well- organized, or socially integrated fact-based information on human beings and groups biological and social diversity across our life spans. We may resist this new able world view cognitively. It may sound very wrong and false at first. Therefore, because we find our inner beliefs now at odds with our outer world, it may make us uncomfortable socially and we may hotly resist the work at an affective level too. Even providers who work with children and families with able losses are educated in ways that usually have incomplete cultural frameworks and unreal functional assumptions. That is no individuals fault. It is just where we are currently at about able diversity education.
One place to start is to work to be aware, accepting and engaging in relation to the idea that ableness is assumed across almost all educational process and content. People with significant able losses are automatically and acceptably not very visible or vocal within our able culture and so those of us with significant able losses have the most silenced group voices of all, for many biological and social reasons.

But most of *us* generally operate without conscious models of human ableness, even as educators studying human development, the dominant cultural models rule in the field of able diversity. Here is a basic model that may help us start by self- identifying our own demographic ableness status and your able-to-function needs:

What do you mean my ableness status and my able-to-function needs?

Our ableness status is our developmental reality and how society would notice, name and judge

our relevant levels of ableness as a human being and how that would affect our place in society is
the social part of our able/social status. Like other social demographic characteristics, our able status is also how society has or has not culturally adapted to meet our able-to-function needs. For example, a wheelchair supports the independence of a person with biological able loss of

lower body motor ambulation to move around. Stairs help a person with biological more able lower body motor skills to climb up through buildings independently. A chair lift on stairs or an elevator can meet both persons needs to move up through buildings independently, but the person with an able loss requires the support to do this function. This makes that architectural feature necessary for a person in a wheel chair to BE able to function and DO more as an able person may do. All buildings and tools are automatically designed to meet the able-to function needs of dominant culture able groups. Other social and particularly able loss groups must constantly advocate to get their able-to-function needs met. Often without success. This is how ableism can impact peoples ableness more than the able loss condition itself.


How would I begin to think about my own and other people's able conditions and biosocial realities?

A systems science developmental model proposes that people have four dimensional domains in which we naturally have capacities (innate resources) that are related to different kinds of important functions of living (useful activities).

BIOLOGICAL DOMAIN: This first developmental domain includes the biological/physical growth, change, stability and diversity of the internal structures and functions of the human body and brain.

COGNITIVE DOMAIN: This second developmental domain includes the growth, change, stability and diversity of individual mental processes and ones ability to utilize internal concepts and external information in order to learn, remember, think, reason, communicate and function.

BIOSOCIAL DOMAIN: This developmental domain includes the external social/environmental spheres of home, school, community and culture that influence a person's biological development, deveopmental well-being and cultural and functional status and our diverse group relations across our life span

PSYCHOSOCIAL DOMAIN: This developmental domain includes the growth, change, stability and diversity of human spirit, emotions, personality characteristics, self identity, social awareness, and the ability to create and maintain positive personal relationships with other individuals.

(See The Developing Person Through the Life Span-Fourth Edition. Kathleen Stassen Berger.
Worth Publishers. 1998, for more on this model of typical and atypical able development.)

Most medically related able losses have their biological basis, or cause of loss, in physical conditions such as illness, injury or genetic/congenital diversity from birth. But most of these losses, and particularly biological disorders of the brain, may also directly effect the other two domains of cognitive and psychosocial ableness. And for adults living alone able losses in the later two mental domains above can create risks that then impact biological health, creating downward spirals of able losses. This creates our ableness in significant degrees that effects ourselves and our lives in long term ways. So conditions in one domain can interact in positive or negative ways to affect ones capacity to function typically and effectively or even to survive.

In addition the biosocial sphere’s nurture problems, such as social oppression, poverty, hunger, crime, war, abuse, neglect, abandonment, inadequate education, and a lack of prenatal or life span medical and mental health care are some of the important environmental factors that can permanently impact ableness in all three domains. These three broad areas of ableness and all the diverse able issues they imply are centrally related to human development for all able groups and all living individuals. Therefore I would propose they are foundational to everything people do


in teaching and learning as children and adults. If we think about ourselves and our lives we can begin see the typicalness and the levels of our ableness and able status across these three
domains. This will help us begin to think about how our homes, schools, communities and society meets our individual and our able diverse groups able-to-function needs. THIS IS THE KEY to developing able alliances that replace power centered providership with allyship and augment our provider skills in leadership with complimentary followership knowledge, skills and abilities. This opens the Autism world to the potential of empowerment through family-centered planning.

What does meeting my able-to-function needs mean?

Everyone's typical/more ableness is universally more desired and most often unconsciously assumed across the home, school and community social spheres. So our culture and environments and society are largely designed to automatically meet the needs of typically able adults. We are learning to make accommodations to some groups with able diversity in some aspects of culture and our environment. But those in power that control those adaptations are able individuals and groups.

For example schools have separate IEPs to adapt to students atypical able losses and needs, but there has been little movement to fully and collectively adapt school environments or policies to create fully inclusion for all students including students of able loss, whether they are present or not. This means each time a student or family enters a school they must individually work advocate for the adaptations to be able to function all over again, often every time staff change. Therefore it is critical how actual levels of ableness and able status may interact in this able group dominant setting. What would happen if schools were fully able diversity prepared--who benefits?

Furthermore it is important to emphasize that able loss and other social identities are often interactive. So able status is influenced by individual and collective bicultural status. This creates more social loss for those of us will able losses who are people of color, women, homosexuals or poor. That is why illnesses that emerge mainly within non-dominant groups are marginalized in how society responds. Breast cancer, AIDS, and sickle-cell and malnutrition in our county represent examples of this able level of the bicultural phenomenon.

What can we do about this?

In the case of those of us already enrolled in our ADAPT classes--that is easy to answer. Keep coming to class and do the readings, listen and talk, participate in demonstrations and do your practice work activities in and out of class. You will be stunned at your own new able ally skills.


What does low or high functioning "Autism Spectrum Disorder" mean?

This is one of the most misused terms in the world of Autism. Even professionals have begun to misuse this term in ways that have created a lot of confusion. We most likely cannot change this now, but if we understand the problem with the use of language, then we do not have to be negatively impacted by it. The level of functioning of a person is part of the two part identification of mental retardation involving objective levels of both intelligence as it compares to age mates, and daily functioning as its compares to social peers and cultural group members. which is now more commonly referred to as the level of any significant learning disorder or cognitive-loss condition which fall under single developmental disability. One the other hand Autism is a complex and highly varied PERVASIVE developmental disorder. Some people with Autism have mental retardation and some do not.

•What are the different degrees or kinds of Autism?
While the level of this pervasive developmental condition ranges from mild to moderate to severe, Autism ALWAYS represents a very serious challenges for the individual with Autism, their family, and the whole community across the settings we may life, work and cope each day. This is because Autism always alters a person's learning and reasoning processes at a physical level in ways that create a very different perception of our outer environment, experience of our inner realities, and perspective of our human interactions as social beings and groups. Children and adults with Autism and related disorders most often show combinations of different levels of more or less severe, moderate, or mild degrees of their sensory, communication and social features. Any one person with AUtism may have any or all of these three levels across these three features. By its very nature Autism represents both a diverse spectrum of individuals and a splintering of development within each individual. This is why understanding any one individual's true profile of Autism requires sharing of family and professionals observations over time and across settings.

A few people with Autism may show high or savant level skills in one or more of these sensory abilities. This is why in the early twentieth century people with severe Autism, but intact high splinter skills such as rote memory skills, music, math and art were labeled as Idiot Savants. While savant skills are impressive in children with Autism, maximizing or even maintaining such extreme splinter skills may come at the long term cost of some critical neurological forms of imbalances in developing other important knowledge, skills or abilities people with Autism can learn to live more typically and independently. While it is an individual judgment call (AND an emerging issue of social empowerment for self advocacy by the group of adults with Autism for their member group of children with AUTISM) savant skills probably should NOT be over-focused on in the hope of fostering exceptional giftedness, or other areas of development and independent functioning may seriously suffer.