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Practice, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Letting autistic students leave an overwhelming room would cost schools nothing, panel heard
In short
At the 2024 Sydney education panel, Marion Rabuka named the sensory barriers in classrooms and Sandra Thom-Jones argued the cheapest fix was giving students the autonomy to walk out.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
No classroom will ever suit every child, Sandra Thom-Jones told the education panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, and her answer started from that fact. Her proposal was to give children the autonomy to leave when the sensory environment became too much, with a safe place to go. That, she said, would be “a really huge significant change made at no expense to the education system”.
Kyriakos Gold, who hosted the session, had asked the panel what one step they would take on the physical environment, starting with Marion Rabuka. Rabuka said the physical environment was “all the sensory stuff that becomes a burden and gets in the way of your learning”, and pointed to the room they were sitting in, with its air conditioning. She named sounds, smells and lighting, and also wayfinding, the problem of working out how to get to where you need to be on time. There were many more, she said, but those were probably the most important.
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Sources the story draws on
- Noise-cancelling headphones: do they really help neurodivergent people? (opens in a new tab), Southern Cross University (republished from The Conversation)
- Sensory Rooms and Equipment (policy) (opens in a new tab), Victorian Department of Education, Policy and Advisory Library
- Prevalence of school bullying among youth with autism spectrum disorders: a systematic review and meta-analysis (opens in a new tab), Autism Research, 9(6), 601 to 615 (record in ACU Research Bank)
More from Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
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