Stereolinguistic Education: Improving How We Teach Autistic Individuals

Last year I attended an ecology festival where, as you might imagine, a lot of pot was smoked and a lot of uninhibited fireside conversation occurred. When one of the other campers outed himself as autistic, I did as well, always keen to network and compare experiences with others on the spectrum.

But a funny thing happened. A woman then told me her young son is autistic. She had been terribly worried about his future, but felt heartened to see that I became a functional adult (though many friends of mine will dispute that description). She had an bottomless supply of questions for me.

Just being on the spectrum shouldn't automatically sign me up for ambassador duty, surely? But then, I was in a position to offer useful insights to someone who was only reaching out in good faith, for the sake of a loved one. So I answered every question she had to the best of my ability, and I hope it helped.

But it also got me thinking about how things I have learned about myself and ASD from my own life experience can be used to improve how others like me are educated. Thinking back, the biggest single problem I had was that there was only ever one teacher and possibly a teacher's aid for thirty or more kids. I often needed help interpreting passages from the books we were given to read, but the overworked teacher could not usually spare the time to come and clarify it for me.

The way neurotypical brains appear (to me) to parse text a whole-sentence, at a glance. I base this on the observation that intricately structured, info dense sentences with one or more qualifiers often trip up NTs who skim and absorb "the gist" of the sentence, but if there's a single qualifier nestled in there that totally changes the meaning of the sentence, they will commonly miss it.

A variety of experiments have shown you can mangle sentences pretty badly and still get the meaning across, and that the words can be scrambled so long as the first and last letters remain in place, without significantly reducing reading speed or comprehension. I suspect this owes to the comparative flexibility of NT brains.

My own method of parsing text is a lot more linear, careful and inflexible. It proceeds one word at a time until I have completed the sentence, followed by reflection on the most probable meaning of that sentence in light of how it was worded and the surrounding body of text. This seems necessary to me, if only in order to ensure you haven't misunderstood before moving forward.

If I don't know a word, I drop what I am doing and go look it up, so as not to proceed with a flawed or incomplete understanding. If it's unclear how something looks, I Google a picture of it. If I am unsure whether I know how to perform the task being described, I go and physically attempt it. If the meaning is unclear from the passage I have read, I go and seek out an alternate source about the same topic.

Most of those methods aren't practical for a public education setting. Students aren't typically allowed to interrupt a lesson to go search the meaning of a word, or to physically attempt some procedure the text describes. However, I don't see anything infeasible about including within textbooks an alternate explanation for every difficult concept.

This is the basis for my notion of "stereolinguistics". Stereoscopic imaging involves showing two different images with slightly different perspective, one to each of your eyes, such that you percieve a 3D object or scene. Your eyes already percieve the world around you in a stereoscopic manner.

This is a tremendous advantage for hunting, judging leaps, and other endeavors which can benefit from the added depth information of a second forward-facing eye. Seeing the same thing from two slightly different angles results in a gestalt understanding of that object which cannot be had by looking at a flat image of it, or even both images one at a time.

Whatever is unclear about it when viewed from one angle becomes clear when viewed from two angles simultaneously as the brain synthesizes a third understanding of it from the differences between the two images.

The same is true of written descriptions of anything. Because of inherent limitations in the English language, often times concepts will be worded in such a way that creates unresolvable ambiguity. Two or more interpretations fit the same sentence equally well, with no clues as to which the author intended.

It's this explosion of countless possible meanings of a single stimuli, not just when reading but percieving and interpreting reality in general, which often makes people on the spectrum feel overwhelmed. Sometimes to the point of having meltdowns.

In particular when the contents of a word problem assume strong theory of mind in the reader, the design of the question itself fails the autistic student. But it does not have to be radically changed for the sake of a minority of students if you simply add a second version of the same problem next to it which explains the same scenario in a different way. The differences between the two descriptions, like the differences between two images in a stereo pair, will more often than not resolve any ambiguity about specific parts of it.

I suspect this is because ASD individuals frequently have extremely strong spatial reasoning. This faculty which they are especially strong in can be leveraged, by the sterolinguistic method, towards more reliable reading comprehension in the same way that the blind often overdevelop their other senses in order to compensate.

I did not major in education. I am nothing resembling an expert in this topic. This is just what I feel would've helped me, personally. I feel like I am in a position to be useful to people with autistic loved ones, frustrated by how differently they process information, searching for some way to help them learn more effectively. If this helps even one family, I'll have accomplished my goal.