Reflective Report for Unit 2 Inclusive Practices: Study skills tutoring for neurodiverse students – feeling positive about how you spend your time strengthens your identity and wellbeing
Denise Aitken
20044515
Word count: 1649
‘Time is in the bank but time goes. It can be frittered away, slip through your fingers or allocated frugally with consideration; it can be enjoyed or it can be a misery’.
Denise Aitken
Table of Contents
Practice/positionality
Rationale
Artefact
Intervention
Theory
Realisation
Evaluation
Conclusion
Practice and positionality
I deliver 1-2-1 tutorials to neurodiverse learners in higher education, building on my teaching experience with ESOL-Brixton and Adult Literacy-Peckham.
My positionality as white middle-class university-educated straight female professional brings imbalanced power dynamics (Chan et al., 2018) into the tutorial. Nonetheless, I work alongside students, to build confidence, rapport and positivity, with co-created, Freirean pedagogy, which I encountered in the early ‘80’s when teaching Central American refugees in Canada.
I’ve worked in inclusion for 30 years, to foster equal access to learning/education (Equality Act 2010), and the accompanying privileges and empowerment associated with education (like social transformation (Stromquist, 2009)).
This report references my artefact (timetabling) and intervention (process of discussion with students), highlighting students’ personal voice. The intervention/discussion’s objective seeks to plan and validate the things students do, connecting their pastimes to their well-being, identities, intersectionalities and unique ways they learn. The stigma of poor productivity, ‘not making use of time’, in a capitalistic context, is highlighted.
Rationale
Some people’s immediate ‘time horizon’ is limited, whilst others enjoy or are burdened with a longer horizon (Green, 2023). Implications are around understanding deadlines or preparing for future events. Attention-Deficit-Hyperactive-Disorder (ADHD) students can have a limited time horizon (Ptacek et al., 2019) or a ‘racing internal clock’ (ibid) where activities drag painfully. ‘Time blindness is the inability to sense the passing of time’ (Green, 2023), a sensory issue where a person cannot pick up their internal clock, ‘where time is measured out in pulse rate’ (ibid). Time blindness associated insecurity was difficult for me to imagine, but my experiences with neurodiverse students developed my empathy, as empathy is based upon understanding (Aldrup et al., 2022), and empathic practice underpins inclusion (Lahdesmaki, 2022).
Neurodiverse students can present with low self-esteem from life histories (Hamilton and Petty, 2023), feeling overwhelmed about studying/learning (Tuckman, 2023). Time management is a prevalent theme our 1-2-1s, where students can be anxious (The ADHD Centre, 2019). Romero et al. (2014) believe ‘people’s time perceptions robustly contribute to the prediction of mental well-being’.
Artefact
Plotting deadlines gains a picture of their sequence. Colourful, traffic light system of 1st, 2nd and final draft deadlines accommodates visual learners.
Visualising the weeks in a month with deadlines helps make sense of what’s coming. Inclusive practice is multi-sensory (Burcak, 2017; ADSHE, 2023), so discussing (audio) deadlines alongside calendarizing (visual and kinaesthetic) is helpful. Many neurodiverse students rely on a visual representation (Ptacek et al. 2029), to deeply process how long tasks take.
More intense is a micro-time management activity (example below) of the hours in a day/week.
(World of Printables, 2023)
Intervention– talking to students about how they spend their time
Discussing time perspectives/planning requires sensitivity to students’ intersectionality, whose experiences are shaped by multiple dimensions of identities (Crenshaw, 1991). Drawing out how they ‘spend’ their time, can turn ineffectual if I pass judgement or make assumptions; or if the pedagogy is underpinned with dominances of power, rather than facilitation and grounded in principles of Freirean (1970) education.
Respecting students’ unique lives and responsibilities’ relationship to learning can bring empathy to teaching practice, helping tailor learning. Respect underpins the partnership of facilitator and learner, co-creators of learning (Freire, 1996, cited in Peters, 2018). Accommodating diverse learning styles is paramount to inclusive practices. My peer-to-peer feedback vocalised the importance of accepting different ways of learning. Inclusion focuses on recognising, respecting and valuing difference (UAL, 2019).
Inviting students to articulate their weekly activities provides a snapshot of their lives; this articulation, voicing who they are, is empowering. Linguistic diversity, such as stigmatised dialects, needs to be acknowledged in achieving social equity (McKinney and Hoggan, 2022). Listening in tutorials is important (UAL, 2023). A deeper understanding of how their time will be spent can bring clarity to students’ commitments, and a sense of control and identity (Samuels, 2017).
Theory
Liao and Carstensen (2018) discuss how people’s perception of time affects their relationship with their goals and sense of well-being, stating a person’s, ‘subjective temporal distance and related clarity of future events. […] appear to affect people’s motivational and behavioral responses to those events’. I’m interested in my students’ subjective perception of their study responsibilities and supporting their potential, bringing confidence to their management. Through intervention/discussion, Ibuild a picture of my students’ attitudes to time, sometimes shifting students out of Zimbardo and Boyd’s (1999) ‘present-fatalistic’ time perspective below:
Disability/trauma/productivity/time-management
Richard et al. (2013) theorise that people’s time perspective, ‘involves cognitive processes and perceptions of the past, present, and future temporal frames’. People’s histories impact their time perception. This makes meconsider how disabled people’s experiences include stigma (Hamilton and Petty, 2023), pain and poor inclusion (Barokka, 2017).
People who experienced trauma may have perception of time that fall into past negative and present fatalism (Richard et al., 2013), and disabled people and people of colour can experience trauma in their oppression (Hong et al., 2016, cited in Hamilton and Petty, 2023), sometimes even told the problems of their achievement/successes lies with them (Tate, 2019).
Neurodiverse students often disclose years of stigma to me, and oppression for their difference, which then intersects with mental health outcomes. Impairment limits people’s productivity. Our neoliberalist economy values individual contribution through paid employment, signifying normative abelism (Goodley, 2014), leaving disabled/ill/neurodiverse people vulnerable to low self-esteem. Critical social theory recognises ‘the human need for autonomy and participation’ (Meekosha and Shuttleworth, 2009, p.52).
Some students I support can feel hopeless about managing their study time. Richard et al. (2013) express working with someone to adjust their time biases has been, ‘found very effective in the treatment of anxiety, depression and successful cross-culturally’. Research on time biases helps me understand the complexities of students’ outlooks on their personal challenges of engaging effectively with their work. M artefact/intervention aims to arrive at well-being.
(Burzynska and Stolarksi, 2020)
I encourage students to savour their breaks/non-study activities, with the end goal of feelings of wellbeing (see above), celebrating the things they do and who they are (unique identities).
Realisation
Translated into practice, it is essential to be conscious of my biases around how people spend their leisure and study time, and what value I attribute to them. I once asked students if they would be attending church in the week; now I include mosque and temple. ‘Multiculturalism is clearly beyond toleration and state neutrality, for it involves active support for cultural difference’ (Mahood and Calhoun, 2015). I think enquiring about faith commitments makes room for students’ voices on their faith practices and identity; I feel I promote their identities through offering opportunities to vocalise faith.
In tears, an OCD student disclosed to me her tremendous guilt with losing time through pursuing her compulsions, heightening my understanding of neurodiverse students’ sensitive relationship with time.
I learned not to assume students have family/friends to spend time with, as once this assumption led to a student breaking down over her loneliness. My privilege of a family and friends’ network made someone feel bad. I reflected that my intersection of privilege and oppression, complex with multiple cultural identities (Chan et al., 2018), may lie in being white professional female. Chan et al. (2018) ‘emphasize critical reflexivity to consciously interrogate the coexisting forms of privilege and oppression represented across shifting and diverse contexts, classrooms, and institutions’. Reflecting upon my power differentials will help me ‘think critically about the biases that they perpetuate [and] explicate how their[se] privileges have limited their own viewpoints within the classroom’ (Ibid). Yancy (2018) writes ‘so many white people forget or refuse to see: their being racialized as white and socially and psychologically marked as privileged has problematic implications for my being black’. My social network and privilege have brought, on occasion, assumptions to tutorials about my students’ lives.
I now ask if they have weekend plans and when do they do their laundry, trying to help students estimate where time goes, drawing out their expressions of their lives, shifting to student-led activity, a departure point for evaluation/discussion of how they are spending time, building awareness of activities they value. These values are linked to identity.
Striking an authentic tone in tutorials is challenging. I like Young’s (2007) identification of code meshing, which acknowledges students’ voice, and argues for their validity up against Standard English. Code meshing invites/supports students’ dialect and accent within teacher/student dialogue to achieve authentic communication. McKinney and Hogan (2022) explain, ‘code-switching, literary analysis of diverse texts, and code-meshing share a rejection of the dialect-as-error approach and a movement towards instruction that acknowledges, respects, and embraces the language’s many dialects and speakers’. It is ‘pedagogy that allows students to mesh their own linguistic codes rather than to switch them… [and]… voice is socially situated’ (Sperling et al., 2012).
However, with reflexivity, I must give room for students’ voices to emerge as they are comfortable, without appropriation. As England (1994) expresses, ‘In our rush to be more inclusive and conceptualize difference and diversity, might we be guilty of appropriating the voices of “others”?’, and asks, ‘can we incorporate the voices of “others” without colonizing them in a manner that reinforces patterns of domination?’ (ibid). Within my tutorials, I work towards students being ‘free to speak, knowing their presence will be recognized and valued” (hooks, 1994, p. 186).
Evaluation
Reflecting with the student on last week’s planning often reveals little adherence. But the plan hasn’t failed. This evaluation hallmarks what makes adherence easy or difficult, leading to improved self-awareness.
I tried this quadrant below with a student last week. Today (14/07/23), she reported unprecedented progress with study, understanding tasks’ value and what order to execute them, introducing a small spontaneous change in my practice prompted by attending Inclusive Practice.
In conclusion, the inclusive practice of time-management activity co-executed in tutorials can be an opportunity for students to articulate who they are and what they do, strengthening their identity and well-being, helping them to accept the things they enjoy, and understand their deadlines.
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