Challenging Ableism in Schools

Transcript

Deiera 

Hi everyone, I'm Deiera, the host of the All Kinds of Minds podcast. I represent Social Cipher, an edtech company that makes social and emotional learning games for neurodivergent students.

The All Kinds of Mind podcast is all about sharing tips, strategies, and insights for the professionals who support neurodivergent youth.Today we have a very special guest, Christina Cipriano, she'll be joining, she's joining us today. She's the director of the Education Collaboratory at Yale, as well as an associate professor at the Yale Child Study Center.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be here today.

Christina Cipriano

Thank you so much for the invitation. Glad to be here.

Deiera

No problem. So can you tell us a little bit about what you do at Yale and your connection to neurodivergence in education?

Christina Cipriano

Absolutely. So, um, I'm an Applied Developmental and Educational Psychologist by training. And I have the honor of directing a lab called the Education Collaboratory, where we work to advance the science of learning and social and emotional development. And we do that through three pillars. The first pillar is, um, the centering of marginalized students and educators and their experiences of social and emotional learning. And when I say marginalized, I'm talking about identity at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability. And actually the whole first decade of my career was anchored in all of the students who had been othered within the school system, starting through and driving through the lens of disability.

The other two areas of our work are regarding, um, evidence synthesis. So, whose, um, funds of knowledge are held up as evidence? How do we understand the what, why, how, for whom, under what, what conditions within the broader SEL landscape? And how do we support folks to, um, make really, um, meaningful decisions as they're thinking about ways in which they're investing in evidence based science in social-emotional learning?

And then the last pillar is, uh, we do assessment builds. So we co-construct novel data points to help students,  schools, and communities tell their implementation journeys, and we do so by providing, uh, meaning and meaningful and malleable data points so that they're discreet and, um, democratize the data so kids engage with the assessments around emotion regulation and then they get the data right back so they can be agents of change in helping to support their teachers and their broader school community with understanding, you know, the diversity and the ways in which they're experiencing and navigating their world.

So, all that to be said, you know, I come to the work, um, as a prevention scientist by training, but I also am a first generation high school graduate and the mother of four beautiful children, um, three of whom are designated exceptional, two of whom are designated neurodivergent by the current assessments of the times.And so, um, there's a, you know, what I do for work, I really do view very much as a passion project that has found me because it's also my lived experience in every day from classrooms to our kitchen table and the ways in which we kind of engage and understand and support inclusive environments for all children to thrive in.

Deiera

That's so awesome.Thank you. And it sounds very tedious. It sounds like...

Christina Cipriano

There's a lot!

Deiera

A lot of work, but it's really impactful work. And I love that it goes full circle that, you know, even when you're at home, you're still able to use things that you use in your profession and vice versa. So that's really cool.

Christina Cipriano

Yeah, absolutely.

Deiera

So we actually found you because you wrote an article for EdSurge about how public schools are failing neurodivergent learners. And so our audience is typically educators, school administrators, district administrators. So can you tell us more about what you talked about in that article?

Christina Cipriano

Absolutely. And I will say that that article foregrounded a book that I have coming out. I've actually just written a book called Be Unapologetically Impatient, The Mindset Required To Change The Way We Do Things. And in the book, I step on the science that I present in that article around understanding the role that we can each play in engaging in meaningful conversation to live our love forward to move our  society forward in ways that are equitable and inclusive and that we each can play a role in that as parents, as educators, as, um, you know, employers, um, as doctors, when we're helping to support, um, all, all youth to have the opportunity to thrive.

So all that being said, um, you know the motivation behind the article that, um, that, uh, that EdSurge on my behalf, um, was actually, um, my, my daughter, my, I say four children, and so it was my daughter, Eleanor, um, who's named in the book and who gives permission for me to speak about her experiences and thoughts. Um, I tell a piece of the story of our experiences and journey to a diagnosis in her neurodivergence and how the environment with which she was, um, situated within was not, was not meeting her needs. And in many ways, it was mirroring what we're seeing nationwide around the ways in which special education and neurodivergence within special education is positioned right? And so, um, what I mean by that is there is a culture and climate within special ed of deficit framing, right? Even just the idea of like, you know, you may hear terms like learning difference, that there is something different or atypical or all of these kind of clinical terminologies that come up that kind of suggest an othering in and of itself.

And then on top of that, there is a culture within the school systems nationally around, you know, kind of a waiting to fail model. This idea that, um, in order to receive supports and inputs that may benefit students, um, to, uh, you know, mo most optimally, uh, you know, maximize how they're able to learn in school, right? And what they're able to kind of engage with, with their peers, with the content, et cetera, that we kind of have to show that they aren't accessing it before we kind of intervene, right? Within special education services. So it's like a much broader kind of landscape within that.  

Anyway, so in the, in the article, I kind of share some pieces of our experience, um, and, and, you know, what, um, what our daughter was kind of going through in a context that wasn't quite, um, you know, designed with her in mind, nor setting her up to succeed, and rather, um, waiting, waiting for her to fail in that regard.

And so, um, you know, my hope in writing that article as well as, um, in the book that's coming out is to support folks with having, um, critical conversations and recognition of the positionality that we each hold to affect change so that we can evolve the status quo in meaningful ways for all kids to thrive in.And so, um, to make things kind of like a bit more, concrete, I think it's very important that we acknowledge when we think about neurodivergence and the ways in which kids are showing up that, you know, there is diversity in how each and every one of us, um, see and navigate our world, right? The ways in which we engage is, are wildly diverse at the intersections of disability, as well as other salient factors of our, of our identities, right? In the context with which we're in. And recognition of that can be challenging depending upon what school system you're in, what classroom you're in, how the teacher was trained. You know, in the article I mentioned  briefly about how, you know, odds are most educators take one class, in, you know, special education at large, broadly, fill in the blank.

And so there's, um, really kind of a, a lack of, a lack of knowledge or awareness and or kind of a, a distance between what the scientists know or what, like, you know, what the, what's coming out in the latest research and then what's being taught in pre-service and in-service education to best support, um, uh, us attending to the widest, um,  heterogeneity of learner, meaning that, like, we're all variable in how we would benefit in a learning experience in school. And so improving, um, pedagogies, so how we teach, being conscious of what we're teaching, the content, and the ways in which, um, in classrooms across the country, we have, you know, we see this in our research. There are, there's some shoulding or some suggesting of what, um, you know, good learning looks like,  students should feel. We, we, we have to be really careful. And in my book, I talk a lot about how we can all learn to recognize and hear, that kind of framing and pause and say, hey, wait a second, we've got an opportunity here to us begin to kind of unlearn  and relearn a new way of recognizing, um, the assets that every student brings to the classroom.

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