Beautiful brains #1 – The importance of neurodiversity.

Remember rote learning? When people used to write out times tables and engrave them into their brains?

Education certainly has been on a Big learning curve itself since then (thank goodness). We have experiential learning, active learning, the Curriculum for Excellence… There are more pedagogies than COVID conspiracy theories.

In recent times, there has been a big increase in the rise of pupils with additional support needs (ASN), which hopefully is a sign of better identification and then, consequently, support offered for the student to best learn in a way that meets their needs.

But what happens when these unique children grow up?

How are they supported in further and higher education?

And, as many folks have jobs for the majority of their adult lives, how are these learner needs mat in the workplace?

Most commonly, they are not.

We grow up, and we get ‘normal’ - apparently.

Or, if this is not the case, we fail to serve our employees with learning that meets their needs.

This devastates me. I hope it devastates you too.

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Such a failure to accommodate difference contributes to issues such as the disability pay and employment gap. Not only are there so many barriers to getting into employment for those with unique needs, but they also face multiple challenges in learning activities and progressing in employment.

We have certainly seen this occur in the COVID remote learning environment. How many of our day-long team-building workshops have been replaced by lengthy e-meets? This is exhausting for the most typical of brains, but we know that this is even more challenging for those with differently wired brains.

When we are all remote, are we still mindful to ask about access needs when engaging in learning activities?

And, at this point, I’m going to introduce a term that has been cropping up a lot recently -  ‘neurodiversity’.

Now, there are not many trends that I claim to be ahead of the curve on, but neurodiversity is something that I’ve been enthused about for a long time.

In my next few blog posts, I’m going to be sharing information on the topic.

Let’s get started on making the most of everyone’s beautiful brains.