 So welcome everyone, and thank you for joining the session. My name is Magdalena Gross-Hodge, and together with Lorna Hamilton here, we're going to talk about ways in which you can neurodiversify your curriculum. Both Lorna and I are members of the neurodiversity group within FORT. So what is FORT? We work for open and reproducible research training as a community-driven organization, which was designed by and for educators who wish to engage open science principles into their teaching. In fact, Flavio, the director of FORT, has just been shortlisted for the Dorothy Bishop Price Award, and we're keeping our fingers crossed he will get it. Our community supports teaching of open science principles by providing resources. They can all be found on our educational nexus or our learning platform, which is divided into a number of sections. In the bottom right corner, you can see some of the components, and I am not going to go through all of them today. You can familiarize yourself with them on our website. What I'm going to highlight is what you can see here in green, the curated resources created by the neurodiversity group within FORT. Our community is growing quickly at the moment. The number of scholars that belong to the organization exceeds 700, and our members represent a variety of fields. So our aim, we would like to support educators in promotion and adoption of open scholarship practices in higher education, generate a conversation about ethics and social impact of higher education pedagogy, as well as promote a reflection about perceived importance of different academic activities and advocate for greater recognition of educational resources. Now, without doubt, within the last five years, we have witnessed remarkable progress within open science. However, the teaching has received relatively little attention. Focus on pedagogy is crucial as embedding open scholarship values in classroom activities will facilitate a quicker adoption of open science practices. Therefore, we provide resources which are available to all educators interested in promoting open scholarship. Our materials invite educators and students to engage in epistemological discussions and to reflect on the core values of open science. You're probably familiar with the core values under the umbrella of open science movement. Today, we would like to discuss how these can be embedded in our teaching and why incorporating them benefits all of us in academia. So, let's move on to neurodiversity. Our team has been established to promote neurodiversity within science. So what is neurodiversity? It is the non-pathological variation in cognitive functions. Now, it includes neurotypicals as well as those who identify as neurodivergent. The term neurodivergent refers to neurotypes that differ from that of the majority. For example, autistic or dyslexic individuals. Now, even though neurodiversity and open science movement share many core values, neurodiversity has not received as much attention within the open science scholarship movement as we would like to. Therefore, the aim of our group is to raise awareness of diversity in academia, build community and increase the visibility of the work produced by neurodivergent scholars and educators. So, as I mentioned, neurodiversity and open scholarship share a number of values. They both hold social justice at heart. They promote equity and opportunity of opportunity and call for collaborative team approaches would draw on individual strength. Now, I am going to hand it over to Lorna, but you will see me pop up and tell you about the lesson part that we have prepared and are going to share with you. We're going to tell you how the lessons we have prepared embed these values and how you can use them in class. Hi everyone, my name is Lorna. So we're going to talk about what we mean by neurodiversifying the open scholarship curriculum over the next few slides and give some worked examples through the lesson pack that accompanies this workshop, which you can find the link at the bottom of this slide. In recent years you'll be very aware of movement to increase representation of minoritized groups in academic curricula, and to improve the relevance of those curricula for diverse student populations. So I'll call to neurodiversify the curriculum very much sits within that decolonization tradition and follows and learns from those movements have gone before. So given the prevalence of neurodivergent conditions, every classroom will be neurodiverse. And there are well evidence benefits of cognitive diversity in groups in terms of tackling complex problems in resisting confirmation bias and group think. So as educators, and we argue that we should all reflect on how we can neurodiverse neurodiversify the curricula that we teach to give our neurodivergent students the best support to flourish in education and beyond. So we're going to talk about three pillars of neurodiversification and so raising awareness of neurodiversity in through our curricula including an open scholarship curricula. Talking about difference, including neurodiversity in this case, openly transparently in non pathologizing ways and with empathy and designing and delivering what we teach for a diverse student audience. I'll move on to the next slide Magda. Thank you. So by now I think everyone is probably aware that representation in education really matters it's really important for our students that they see themselves represented in the curricula and which they study. We know that many neurodivergent scientists and academics don't disclose their diagnosis, because, at least partly because neurodivergent conditions including autism, ADHD and dyslexia are often highly stigmatized and perhaps especially within academic context. But our neurodivergent students need role models to aspire to. And that's why the activism science of autistic and other neurodivergent scholars in recent years has been so important and so inspiring. So we wanted to, in order to think about how we might increase representation of neurodivergent scholars within the open, open science curricula we wanted to highlight one very recent initiative that the four team neurodiversity has been working on. And in fact the lead of this, this initiative is in the room, Emily. Hi Emily. So we have a new database of neurodivergent researchers, which is linked in the slides. And purpose of this resource is to counteract some existing bias towards neurotypicality in the research literature to challenge deficit oriented paradigms of neurodiversity, which apologize minority neurotypes and instead promote a neurodiversity paradigm. So neurodivergent inclusion requires a shift from that pathologizing medical model approach, which, which focuses almost exclusively on deficits to a more balanced understanding of differences and disabilities that individuals experience. And this database to be a resource for neurodivergent authors themselves to reduce the stigma around neurodivergence in research by providing representation and role models, and to help them find other neurodivergent scholars to collaborate with. It's also intended for educators who are seeking to neurodiverse by curricula and create inclusive syllabi. So with this resource we're hoping to inspire academics to reflect on our attitude to embrace all neurotypes and to initiate constructive discussions that challenge these hidden biases that we have that are pervasive throughout academic curricula. You can click on the link through these slides and explore this and we invite any neurodivergent scholars out there who would like to register themselves and add their work to this database, please to do so. So one of the key outcomes that we hope for this is to create a safe environment for disclosure to encourage disclosure amongst academics and students of neurodivergent status in order to reduce stigma. Okay, so as well as increasing representation in the authors that we include in our syllabi. As educators we have the opportunity to challenge the deficit focus when we're, when we're talking about neurodiversity and as a developmental psychologist I teach this stuff all the time, but people in other fields, and also this is I'm sure relevant to. In recent years, more strength based models of neurodiversity have have entered the literature so the medical model that's been dominant for the last few decades has been almost exclusively focused on. Examining causality through focuses focus on specific deficits at different different levels. So for neurodivergent people cognitive profiles have for a long time been characterized really only in terms of impairment and deficit and what's wrong. So neurodiversity paradigm challenges this. So there was a recent great review in the Journal of Child Psychology and psychiatry by Elizabeth Pellecano and Jack and then hooting, who talk about this paradigm shift in autism science in this case and give some really interesting examples of how what even how characteristics of autistic cognition. Even when they could well be described as strengths have historically in the scientific literature being almost exclusively characterised in terms of deficit so one example from this Pellecano's own work that she gives in the past where she conducted some experimental work, looking at perceptual after effects and after looking at bases in autistic children. And she found there was a reduced perceptual after effect in autistic compared to non autistic children and interpreted that as a sign of a functional deficit, having engaged with the neurodiversity paradigm and as a key proponent of the neurodiversity paradigm, she reinterprets that the same data as a strength so autistic children space recognition following the adaptation was actually more accurate and non non autistic children so this is just one example of how a difference in cognition. Often gets presented in the light of deficit against the neurotypical standard. So we can, we can change, we can change that so on the slide here are just some examples of cognitive styles that are typically presented as deficits in the scientific literature. So deficit in perseveration, for example, could be could equally be presented as a strength and persistence and focused attention. Big picture thinking. So weak central coherence counts of autism, for example, can be presented as a strength and attention to detail. So in addition, the characteristic ADHD can also be flipped unseen as a strength and past problem solving and decision making so the neurodiversity paradigm challenges us to notice and harness these strengths in our teaching in the way that we talk about neurodiversity and in the way that we interact with our neurodivergent students. Okay, so I'm going to pass back to Walter. So we wanted to incorporate this into our lesson plans that we are going to share with you and I hope you have them open in a tab, if not, it might be a good idea to go back to the first slide and click on this. I am also going to show you this and I'm hoping that I won't get lost with sharing. Okay, so we have prepared for you. We have a bank of resources, which you can access through the link given on the slides. And there we go, our bank looks like this. So it's a series of 10 lessons, which all focus on promotion, open scholarship and neurodiversity in the academia. I'm going to show you how we promote what Lorna has just discussed through showing you the first lesson. And here we invite our students to read an article which was written over a hundred years ago by Lombrosso or his discussing left handedness. And where his bias towards right handedness is very much visible. He uses very pathologizing language to describe left handedness, but also this very short piece of writing shows his bias towards women, negative bias towards women, people of races other than white, as well as individuals suffering from mental health problems and those who have criminal records. Now, this piece of writing reads rather badly today so it shows how those biases become visible with the course of time and how something that may not be visible 100 years ago, something that is accepted by the society might stand out later on. Another example that we use to communicate this to our students is through an activity like this so this time we look at language used in recent publications on neurodiversity. This time we asked students to have a look at the language and, oh sorry, let me just share again. And analyze how the language used pathologizes neurodiversity. Can I just ask you quickly whether this is okay. Right so you are going to have an opportunity to look at the exercises a little bit later if you would like to engage with them and see how they work. But I am just going to very quickly talk you through them. So we look at examples of abnormal time processing in ASD. And we ask students to think of what abnormal suggests and what sort of feelings the word abnormal invokes. We also ask them to think about who decides about what is normal, and what is abnormal, and whether the same traits could be considered normal in different cultures. A similar example with detecting the risks of autism spectrum disorder again, what does risk here suggest, and what does disorder imply. So it's an activity where we invite students to notice these things and discuss them together. Okay, and so as well as increasing representation and the second pillar of neurodiverse buying our curriculum is thinking about the language that we use when we talk about cognitive neurological diversity. So, in order to create an environment of trust with our neurodivergent students. It's really important that educators are mindful in the in the language that we use when talking about these subjects, and make a conscious effort to avoid discriminatory and apologizing terminology. Whilst being aware that the language of neurodiversity is evolving all the time there are multiple sometimes conflicting views this is not an easy, easy area at the moment, people including neurodivergent people have very strong and different views on this. We can acknowledge that diversity view, and we can be respectful and we can talk to our students about their own language preferences. And we can be aware, aware of double empathy barriers in the classroom and I'll talk about that a little more in a moment. Double empathy really refers to the difficulties in communication and mutual understanding between people with different experiences of the world and especially across neuro types. And we can model respect for minorities in the way that we behave and in the way that we talk about diversity. So Christina but I'm a vital and colleagues recently published a paper on this which challenges us to think about the connotations of very common terminology in the scientific literature and educational literature on cognitive diversity. And so, for example, and they challenge us to think about how these terms might be received by people who might fall within these these groups. So some of them are potentially challenging, even to those of us who are writing and thinking about this all of the time. So special needs, for example, is a very commonly accepted term in the UK to describe children in school who have additional educational needs. So including neurodivergent students. But these authors challenge us to think about how infantilizing this term might be for someone who falls into that group. And challenge and proposal more neutral alternatives which might be taking care to actually describe the specific needs of an individual rather than placing them in this group would go through every every single one but for example, the use of person first language or person with autism, which has historically been recommended by psychological bodies. The person is not defined by their diagnosis so it's well intentioned but there's good evidence certainly in the Anglophone world that many neurodivergent people prefer an identity first terminology so an autistic person rather than a person with autism, because the autism is not separable from from the person it's a core part of who they are. And others so medicalized terminology like comorbid and symptoms can easily be replaced with more neutral less value laden and alternatives like co occurring or traits or characteristics. The references for these papers are included at the end of the slides. And so using potentially stigmatizing terminology in the classroom when we're talking about these things is one good way to set up a double empathy barrier in the classroom. And so the double empathy problem was first described by Damian Milton, an autistic sociologist at the University of Kent in 2012 where he wrote a paper on the ontology of autism so how we understand what autism is in the world. And discusses the harm done to autistic people by the scientific communities characterisation of autism as defined by a deficit in empathy. The challenges are understanding what about empathy is and whether whether it's a within individual characteristic or whether it's something that is created between individuals in interaction. This little infographic here is from Catherine Crompton's paper in front is for young minds that came out a couple of years ago, and it gives a really nice just summary of this idea of double empathy. So while an autistic person might struggle to read between the lines of communication and process non literal language. They may also struggle to overcome other people's misconceptions about autism, while also managing sensory distractions. On the other hand, the non autistic person interaction may struggle to form positive first impressions about the autistic people and that's well evidenced and some really nice experimental work. And neurotypical people for form very quick negative judgments about autistic people based on very little information. They may struggle to understand what autism is and how it affects the individual and they may struggle to imagine what autistic sensory difficulties might feel like. And so both parties might struggle to understand each other's thoughts feelings and behavior. This is not a deficit that is with it within the autistic person. It's a deficit. It's a problem that occurs in interaction and is exacerbated when two people have very different experiences of the world. And there's more and more writing coming out at the moment about how these double empathy barriers might manifest in the classroom. So if I think it's really important as educators we interrogate the expectations that we have of our students. And often our expectations of the way students might participate or engage in our classes is perhaps neuro normative so we might interpret a student who is closing their eyes or wearing headphones is not engaged in what we're saying because in fact some many neuro divergent students say that this is in order to fill out filter out sensory distractions and be able to really focus on what's being covered. We might infer a student who is unwilling to take part in group work as disengage whereas in fact there might be other reasons behind that. And often neuro divergent behaviors from students in the classroom I think are wrongly interpreted as having bad intentions. And another barrier might be that we have stereotype expectations of what an autistic learner is capable of or what they're not capable of what a dyslexic learner might struggle with or what an developmental language disorder can and can't do whereas in fact all of the research from the last decade or two on these conditions. One thing that it does agree on is how wide the heterogeneity is within all of these diagnoses and the well worn phrase if you've met one autistic person you've met one autistic person and so having these approaches about what an individual is capable of and not capable of can be harmful within a classroom setting to matter. Okay, so let's see how gracefully I can actually exit this presentation and move on to the materials. Again, I am going to show you how we have incorporated some of these things into the lesson plans that we have prepared for you. You can now see the lesson plans and I am going to flip to a lesson title respect for neurodiversity. So here students are invited to reflect on what neurodiversity sorry diversity in general is, and they discuss dimensions of diversity. So they focus on concepts such as cultural humility, think about culture, race, gender, age, social class, and so on. We also present them with the academic will of privilege which has been developed by the neurodiversity group. And through this tool the students can self reflect on their own privilege. They can think of how the dimensions describe them and how their experience based on their belonging to different groups might be different compared to people who would describe their belonging differently. And if that's okay I would like to actually invite you to reflect on this and to use the tool we have created again. Okay, I think you can see it now. This is the academic will of privilege. And what you can see in front of you, if you look at the very outer part of the wheel. These are dimensions of diversity. So for example gender sexuality neurodiversity mental health. I would like you to look at the dimensions of privilege on the outside. And then think of which of the options inside the circle suits you best. So for every answer in the smallest circle, the closest to the middle of the wheel, give yourself one point, then two points for each of them in the middle. This is for any option to the outside of the circle. I'll give you a moment to just reflect on this. And, and again, this is just an activity to make students aware that their experience might be very different to other people's experience. And they sometimes might see the world through their privilege it also allows them to understand and reflect on intersectionality. I'm thinking that we might get back to this when we have a little bit of time in the workshop and we'll just continue with the presentation. So stay tuned. Thanks, Magda. And so the third and final part of our neurodiversification agenda is designing and delivering our teaching for diversity. There's lots of pedagogical literature out there already that can be harnessed for a neurodiversity affirmative approach. And so strength based approaches to learning in the classroom. Notice what our students particular strengths are and build on those to engage them in what we're trying to teach so whether it's in how, for example, a student who has an attention to detail but might struggle with group work a bit more. So bringing them into group work by, for example, giving them a data management role or a kind of checking role at the end. And social justice pedagogy aims to develop consciousness of injustice while empowering students to work for justice. Compassionate pedagogies Invite us to notice distress in the classroom where it exists and students are distressed often even with our best intentions and to act to alleviate that distress. And Universal Design for Learning or UDL, which invites us to design curricula to be accessible to the widest possible range of learners in the classroom, not only neurodivergent students for all students. In fact, all of these approaches have clear benefits for everybody in the classroom, not just neurodivergent students. Thanks, Magda. So just a little bit of more detail on UDL, which I currently trialling in my own teaching and finding really, really great for the neurodivergent students I'm working with. So there's loads of literature on this that you can look at but effectively Universal Design for Learning is about giving students choice, flexibility and autonomy in how they engage with the material that we're trying to teach them. So this can be through multiple means of engagement so acknowledging that our students have differ in what motivates them in their attention and what brings them in and designing our teaching to accommodate that diversity. So some students are motivated by spontaneity and invention and for some that's much more uncomfortable for example, so we might design classroom activities that have a variety of activities, choice in the group activities, some technological options and parts where students can choose the content that they're engaging with and so on in order to harness individual differences in motivation. We can present our content through multiple means of representation and so obviously scientific and academic papers are a core part of what we do but they're using blogs and video and visual materials, not to, it says here learning styles not in terms of the debunked visual kind of static learning styles but just acknowledging the differences in the way that the ways that people best engage with information and even intra individual variation so at certain points a student might be able to engage very well with an academic research papers paper and other times they might need something a bit different a blog or a podcast or a different way into the topic. And then finally, multiple means of action and expression so giving to students choice in the way that they demonstrate what they've learned. And so I am currently working with my class on translating some scientific information for a non specialist audience and I'm using this this UDL technique for the first time. So I thought I might get just a lot of written information sheets or blog sheets but in fact I've got an animation coming and somebody who's doing a TikTok video I'm really excited to see what the students produce because I'm neurodivergent students in particular have talked about how this choice in harnessing the things that they're already good at and they all need love is increasing their motivation with the material. Next matter. So here's an example of how our materials foster autonomy through providing choice to students and by that incorporate universal design for learning. So this task is taken from lesson to delivering for diversity. This lesson focuses on diversity, not only academia but generally on diversity. So students here are presented with a task, but instead of just giving them one choice, there are two options and I think this is something that I have incorporated into my teaching fairly recently. I understood that not all students actually like working in groups and not all students benefit from social interaction and for some students this can be highly stressful and difficult to participate in. So in our materials, we try to provide a choice of activities, and that's usually quite difficult in the classroom, but we believe that it is possible and here is an example. So students here are asked to go through an interactive text. And they have a choice of either doing a jigsaw reading where they divide parts of the text between the members of the group, then they skim the text and summarize it to each other, which can then be followed by a discussion. However, the option B that they're given is to work on their own. And again, look at the text skim it quickly and create a mind map and a mind map or a poster. And again, they are invited then to exchange those with other students so they can still benefit from the exchange of knowledge, but they can decide on their own how much they want to participate in social interaction and how much they prefer to reflect on the material and deal with it on their own. Okay, so just before we invite you to join some groups and reflect on this in your own work, just thought we've finished by summarizing what a neurodiversity affirming education might achieve and what it might be. So we would define neurodiversity affirming education as teaching that expects diversity expects the classroom to be diverse in the way that they think in the way they interact with information and with each other. And designs curricula for that diversity. A neurodiversity affirming education empower students to be self advocates where they need to be by reducing stigma and by increasing students comfort to disclose and to talk about difference, where they feel comfortable doing so. It fights stigma by use of non pathologizing and discriminatory language and by increasing representation of neurodiversity. And it profiles students at the individual level not not at the label level so understanding the difference is not defined by the diagnosis that they might have received and strengths and weaknesses are going to be individual and harnessing those in the classroom. Okay, so we would like to now invite you to engage with our materials a little bit to get to know them to some extent and maybe go through the activities that I have given you as examples. And also to engage in a discussion with each other so we have drafted here three questions that we would like you to reflect on. So first of all, we would like you to think about some easy solutions or strategies that you could implement in order to have all students to manage their time better. Do you think of how to scaffold these abilities or do you just expect that the students will know that in my teaching I think at the beginning I expected students to know that. Now I focus a little bit more on actually making teaching that a bit more explicit and talking about this in the classroom a bit more. We would also like you to maybe think of a time when you had a conflict or misunderstanding, which could be caused by the double empathy barrier. How could you approach a similar situation taking the neurodiversity paradigm into consideration next time. And finally, we would like you to think of a lesson or course you have developed and think of three ways in which it could be neurodiversified looking at the points we have just covered. I am going to divide you into breakout rooms if that's okay. And in those breakout rooms we would invite you to reflect on these questions, and also to go through the resources that we have created and maybe discuss them together will give you 15 minutes. We have 20 minutes or 15 minutes should be okay. And we will assign you automatically so I can see that we have 10 participants. So I will create three breakout rooms, and we will assign you automatically so in a moment, you should be directed to a breakout room. And the link to all the resources can be found on OSF. I can also paste it in the moment in the chat. Get together and discuss the questions.