Autism Teachers

Thompson (1993) describes facilitated communication as a classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy. The facilitator wants to believe that the person with a severe cognitive and language disability is actually of normal to superior intellectual ability. Parents especially want to believe that a way has been found to finally unlock the door to their real son or daughter.

In short, people want facilitated communication to work.

Advocates of facilitated communication often respond to naysayers, "It can't hurt to try it." Biklen agrees, "It is not harmful to teach people to communicate through pointing." However, he qualifies his claim with the caveat that "it can be harmful if the facilitator over interprets, does not monitor the person's eyes, facilitates when the person is looking away, is not sensitive to the possibility of guiding the person, and asks leading rather than clarifying questions."

Some argue that "false communication" may distort beliefs, understanding, and rehabilitative approaches to persons with autism and other developmental disabilities.

Additionally, facilitated communication in the past few years has been the source of many contested abuse allegations, usually allegedly reported by an individual with very limited unassisted communication skills against a family caregiver or caregivers.

There are at least 50 legal cases in the U.S. involving allegations of sexual abuse produced through facilitated communication (Berger, 1994). Several such cases have already occurred in Australia, and some have arisen in Europe (Green, 1992).

With the exception of three empirical studies (Intellectual Disability Review Panel, 1989; Calculator and Singer, 1992; and Velazquez (in press)) which provide preliminary validation of facilitated communication, most of the support for the validity of facilitated communication is based on anecdotal reports.

Unfortunately, validity questions surround anecdotal reports of facilitated communication. In general, these reports lack the controls necessary to rule out experimenter biases, reliability concerns, and threats to validity (Cummins and Prior, 1992; Jacobsen, Eberlin, Mulick, Schwartz, Szempruch, and Wheeler, 1994).

Although Biklen (1990) admits that facilitator influence is a real possibility, facilitated communications are typically reported as though they are the words of the person with a disability.

Without exception, these empirical studies have questioned the authenticity of the communication as truly coming from the individual versus the facilitator.

Interdisciplinary Party Report (1988) and the Intellectual Disability Review Panel (1989) both of which examined the source of facilitated communications produced by persons in Australia, and found strong evidence that responses obtained through facilitation were influenced by the facilitator.

Gina Green, Director of Research for the New England Center for Autism and Associate Scientist for the E.K. Shriver Center for Mental Retardation, Inc., has reviewed over 150 cases where empirical testing was performed and cites 15 independent conduct evaluations involving 136 individuals with autism and/or mental retardatiion who were alleged to have been taught to communicate via facilitated communication. In none of the cases were investigators able to confirm facilitated communication by the 136 individuals.

Look at the content of any intelligence test—language, arithmetic, patterns, designs. What we measure with the aid of those I.Q. booklets are not the abilities we inherited from out our animal past, but instead their exact counterpart; we measure only those skills the species has been adding throughout all its history since. In some sense, an intelligence test measures the modernness of an individual; an intelligence test measures an individual’s ability to appropriate for himself the same set of skills the species has been appropriating as a whole—skills that do not find their origin in our biological nature, but instead owe their existence to the strange, brewing mixture of non-biological pattern, structure and form that has been rapidly taking shape all around us.

The unusual characteristics of humanity’s transformational individuals are not the result of their genius, they are genius’s prerequisite

But counter to prevailing wisdom, there are many autistic individuals—most likely a majority—who do make substantial progress by means of an alternative perceptual course, a course that allows them not only to navigate meaningfully their surrounding world, but also to assimilate, if somewhat awkwardly and belatedly, to the human species itself (and thereby explaining how autism, estimated to be present in nearly one percent of the human population, could go entirely unrecognized until as recently as sixty-five years ago).

all autistic individuals must crystallize their existence by means of this alternative perceptual course—it becomes, in essence, autism’s most salient feature.

The unusual behaviors and interests of autistic children—lining up toys, staring at ceiling fans, twirling, flapping hands repeatedly, fascination with knobs, buttons, switches, letters, shapes and digits, watching the same video again and again, singing the same song over and over—these activities betray a form of perception completely unlike that of most other children, a perception noticeably absent in social and biological focus, but also noticeably drawn to symmetry, repetition and pattern.

The unusual routines of autistic children are the natural, indeed the expected, mode of expression for a form of perception engaged primarily by the structural aspects of the non-social, non-biological world.

Autistic individuals would have been the first to notice the inherent structure contained in the natural world—the geometry of plants, the isomorphisms of natural objects, the logic of the celestial seasons—only they would have had motivation to embrace such form, only they would have had the need to perceive nature’s symmetry, repetition and pattern in order to form their cognitive grounding.

We know only bits and pieces about the four Greeks on Professor Flynn’s list, but filling in with the traits from the list’s more modern members, we can reasonably summarize all the unifying characteristics: late- or strange-talking, socially awkward, irascible, obsessed with structure, compelled by form, unusually—not necessarily greatly—intelligent.

The continuing medicalization of autism, the insistent demonization of autism’s spontaneous effect—these carry the danger of an unforeseen consequence. For the cure of autism will not be the end of a tragic brain disorder; autism’s eradication will not see the passing of a troubling mental disease. The removal of autism from the entire human species will produce only an ironic solution to the mystery of our expanding human intelligence, it will produce the ignoble end to the Flynn effect.

When confronted by data that runs counter to our accustomed way of seeing things, we as humans have but two choices: we can try to explain the results away, or we can adjust our perception of the experienced world. The former choice paves the all-too-common road of modern academic science; the latter, as described above, walks the more promising path of genius.

Autism is not a mental illness, not a brain disorder, it is instead the source of humanity’s changing perception of its experienced world; it is, with care and understanding, genius’s fertile soil.

4) The teacher and child take turns.

5) Reinforcers presented are related to the task.

Facilitated Communication therapy began in Australia with Rosemary Crossley. The center for FC in the United States is Syracuse University, which houses the Facilitated Communication Institute (FCI) in their School of Education.

A very damaging, detailed criticism was presented on PBS's "Frontline", October 19, 1993. The program was repeated December 17, 1996, and added that since the first showing, Syracuse University has claimed to have done three studies which verify the reality and effectiveness of FC, while thirty other studies done elsewhere have concluded just the opposite.

Furthermore, FC clients routinely use a flat board or keyboard, over which the facilitator holds their pointing finger. Even the most expert typist could not routinely hit correct letters without some reference as a starting point.

Facilitators routinely look at the keyboard; clients do not. The messages' basic coherence indicates that they most probably are produced by someone who is looking at the keyboard.

Anyone familiar with Helen Keller, Stephen Hawking or Christy Brown knows that blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or physical or neurological disorders, do not necessarily affect the intellect. There is no necessary connection between a physical handicap and a mental handicap. We also know that such people often require an assistant to facilitate their communication. But what facilitators do to help the likes of a Hawking or a Brown is a far cry from what those in the facilitated communication business are doing.

But the vast majority of FC clients apparently are mentally retarded or autistic. Their facilitators appear to be reporting their own thoughts, not their patient's thoughts. Interestingly, the facilitators are genuinely shocked when they discover that they are not really communicating their patient's thoughts. Their reaction is similar to that of dowsers and others with "special powers" who, when tested under controlled conditions, find they don't have any special powers at all.

It is interesting that the parents and other loved ones who have been bonding with the patient for years are unable to be facilitators with their own children.

And when the kind strangers and their patients are put to the test, they generally fail. We are told that is because the conditions made them nervous. These ad hoc excuses sound familiar; they sound like the complaints of parapsychologists.

Skeptics think the evidence is in and FC is a delusion for the most part. It is also a dangerous delusion. Critics have noted a similarity between FC therapy and repressed memory therapy: patients are accusing their parents and others of having sexually abused them. Facilitators are taught that something like 13% of their clients have been sexually abused. This information may unconsciously influence their work.

Pervasive Developmental Disorders, including Autistic Disorder, Asperger Disorder, Pervasive Developmental Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, and Childhood Disintegrative Disorder.

For autistic disorder, Fombonne says: The correlation between prevalence and year of publication was statistically significant and studies with prevalenceover 7/10,000 were all published since 1987. These findings point towards an increase in prevalence estimates in the last 15-20 years.

recent autism surveys have consistently identified smaller numbers of children with AS than those with autism within the same survey.

We therefore used for subsequent calculations an estimate of 6/10,000 for AS, recognizing the strong limitations of available data on AS.

How much lower is difficult to establish from existing data, but a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1 would appear an acceptable,

Eight studies provided data on childhood disintegrative disorder (CDD). Prevalence estimates ranged from 0 to 9.2/100,000.

Current evidence does not strongly support the hypothesis of a secular increase in the incidence of autism but power todetect time trends is seriously limited in existing datasets.

The upper-bound limit of the associated confidence interval (4.0/100,000) indicates that CDD is a very rare condition, with about 1 case to occur for every 103 cases of autistic disorder.

Whilst it is clear that prevalence estimates have gone up over time, this increase most likely represents changes in the concepts, definitions, service availability and awareness of autistic-spectrum disorders in both the lay and professional public.

The possibility that a true change in the underlying incidence has contributed to higher prevalence figures remains, however, to be adequately tested.

Another weakness of the study is that it was short term, only four weeks. It therefore did not test if the effect of hyperbaric treatment survives much beyond the treatment itself. Even if the effect in this study is real, it may represent only a temporary symptomatic benefit - not altering the course of autism itself. Therefore longer followup studies are needed as well.

It is not impossible that hyperbaric oxygen may have some benefit in some children with autism.

The biggest risk of the treatment now is that it is expensive - costing 150-900 dollars per treatment or 14-17 thousand dollars for a chamber.

But one thing is clear - any future studies should be very tightly controlled, or they will be counterproductive.

15 children with down’s syndrome

25 typically developing children

The authors found that all three diagnostic groups showed anomalies in the development of face recognition when compared to typically developing kids.

The children with low (but not high) functioning autism show a disadvantage for identifying eyes but an advantage for identifying mouths. In addition, they were better at identifying eyes and noses when the these were upside down than when they were upside up. This is the opposite of what is expected in typically developing children.

The authors discussed how this may be due to an aversion to looking directly at eyes, especially in upright faces. Therefore, the observed deficiencies in face recognition among the low functioning autism group may not be due to problems in the development of whole face recognition processes per se, but instead this weakness may be due to a natural aversion to stare at the eyes area of the face.

Antivaccine activists are campaigning among them, which worries public health officials, especially because some families go back and forth to Somalia, where measles is still a significant cause of childhood death, according to Unicef.

Last year, she said, 25 percent of the children in preschool classes offering the most intensive treatment had Somali parents, while only about 6 percent of public school enrollment is Somali. Dr. Daniel S. McLellan, a pediatrician, said that when he began practicing at Children’s Hospital six years ago, he was struck by how many autistic Somali children he saw.

results provide indirect support for the common clinical practice of considering signs of sensory sensitivities as one factor when determining whether a child has an ASD, a developmental delay, or a language delay.

early sensory sensitivity should be one of the factors examined by pediatricians during healthy baby checkups.

results do not tell us whether the levels of sensory anomalies observed in the non-ASD group are higher than what is expected among typically developing children.