Clare Lawrence - Autism and Flexischooling: A Shared Classroom and Homeschooling Approach

This book uses the term ASD. This is increasingly becoming an accepted term, but what does it mean? Does it include both autism and Asperger syndrome? Is Asperger syndrome the same as autism or is it something different? The initials ASD are usually taken to stand for autism spectrum disorder, a phrase that has been coined to incorporate both autism and Asperger syndrome, their perceived similarities and their perceived differences. However, nothing is simple and this term autism spectrum disorder carries a number of difficulties.

For a start, what is this spectrum? The term was first used by Lorna Wing and Judith Gould back in 1979 when it began to be understood that autism does not present as a single concrete condition but rather as something that can manifest itself over a whole spectrum of presentation. Their perception in the late seventies certainly did a great deal to widen our understanding of autism, but their term spectrum has been somewhat hijacked since then. Many use it to imply that there is a range of autism, and that some autism is somehow worse than others. People talk about the spectrum running from mild to severe, which misunderstands the nature of autism. Autism is a difference in the way a persons brain processes information. How can this be seen in terms of good or bad, mild or severe? Surely it is simply different?

Similarly, the term disorder to stand for the the D in ASD is a real problem. So much about autism has been defined in terms of disorder, disability or impairment. Perhaps this is understandable if autism is to be seen as a medical condition. Doctors do so love to find things wrong with us! Increasingly, though, autism is being understood as a difference in the way the brain works rather than as an impairment. Indeed, huge strides are being made in the Can Do field of diagnosis. If someones brain works in a different way to someone elses, surely that can be observed just as much through what that person can do better as through what he struggles with? Perhaps the difference in the way his brain processes information can be observed through superior memory or through an enhanced ability to recognise pattern or to identify musical pitch.

The debate as to whether Asperger syndrome and autism are the same condition or two different ones is further confused by the way some people have come to use the terms. Many use Asperger syndrome to describe people with autism who have average or superior intelligence. This is fine in itself, but what is far from fine is if this definition of Asperger syndrome then implies that a definition of autism must involve below average or deficient intelligence. It most certainly does not. Autism is autism, and intelligence is intelligence. Cross referencing the two is like saying that a car must be fast because it is blue. Some cars are blue and some cars are fast, but I doubt whether a driver in a Formula One race would use the colour as the deciding factor when choosing which car to race.

All of this leaves the ordinary person somewhat flummoxed. The people this book is written for parents and teachers and children with an ASD are unlikely to be too concerned with the ebb and flow of the autism vs Asperger vs spectrum debate. They merely want to get on with it. So, throughout this book I have used the term ASD as shorthand. It stands, for me, for an autism spectrum difference: autism because that is the proper name for this different way of neuro-processing; spectrum because that is the current most accepted way to include Asperger syndrome and difference because that is what it is. Autism is a difference and as Gunilla Gerland, a woman with autism wrote, being different is just as good as being like everyone else (Gerland in Hesmondhalgh and Breakey, 2001, p.45).