Michael W. Duggan - First Class Support for College Students on the Autism Spectrum: Practical Advice for College Counselors and Educators

Michael W. Duggan

First Class Support for
College Students on the
Autism Spectrum

Practical Advice for College
Counselors and Educators

Contents

Preface

Before we begin I should tell you a little about myself. To be honest, I didnt begin my adult life planning to be a counselor with a specialty in disabilities. Originally, I was going to be a musician. My background is in jazz music, and I have played various instruments since I was three years old. I began college on a music scholarship, and my primary instrument was the bass trombone, with an emphasis on jazz improvisationthats the area of music where you go on a stage and listen to a few background chords, and then make up music as you go. I always loved the challenge of creating something out of nothing, and hence I loved improv.

My life changed, as random as this sounds, when I took an anthropology course during my undergraduate studies at Butler University in Indianapolis with Professor Leslie Sharp. We studied a variety of subjects, and among them was the culture of disability. I became fascinated by Deaf culture and communication, the history of Braille and the technological innovations that later translated into the modern world, and the nation-wide advocacy movements spawned by the Americans with Disabilities Act. I could also relate on many other levels to the challenges of being judged when one has an invisible disability that cannot be seen, but once exposed, provokes all kinds of judgments.

As part of an advanced class, I conducted an anthropological study where I staged a fake car accident and lived in a wheelchair for two weeks. I didnt tell anybody, but I wanted to better understand what the disability experience was likeeven if on a very low level. As part of my research, each evening I interviewed someone with a disabilitylearning disabilities, schizophrenia, cerebral palsy, hard of hearing, blindnessand discovered all kinds of information about their lives. I also learned from the way I was treated; people looked down on me, pitied me, and viewed me as less than more than I could have imagined. I also found some of my most favorite haunts were less than accessible to someone in a wheelchair. When I concluded my study, I dropped my scholarship, changed my major, and decided to pursue a career working with people with disabilities.

Long story short, I finished my bachelors degree in psychology and sociology/anthropology, and then my masters degree in rehabilitation (disability) counseling. I was lucky enough to get an assistantship in the colleges disability access office, and fell in love with the profession. Again, creativity was an essential skill. I would need to find how to make an art appreciation class accessible to a student with low vision, empower a student who was dyslexic to complete an elementary education internship, or help a student with a communication impairment successfully complete a speech classall kinds of creative access puzzles. I was absolutely hooked. Upon graduation, I got my first job directing a disability access program at a community college in Oregon. At the time, the colleges president had a less than positive view of disability issues, fearing the costs. A colleague warned me that if you build it, they will come was the driving philosophy. I took this prediction not as a threat, but as a challenge.

Through a variety of grant writing and collaborations (along with some of the most talented grant writers in the universe), our program grew from a 1.5-employee office serving roughly a hundred students to a 20-employee operation serving more than five hundred. We offered scholarships, tutoring, mentoring, and saw more students graduate than ever. The only downside was that as the program grew, my administrative responsibilities grew as well, and my direct contact with students diminished.

After about seven years, I wanted to be closer to my immediate family. I took a job in the Midwest, and have been there ever sincealmost 14 years now. In my current position I am not an administrator, but a counselor. I love this job most of all because every day I work with new students, and they allow me to be a part of the challenges they face. While the students themselves deserve all the credit for their achievements, I am honored to have been part of the process along the way. Every day I start by hoping I can apply what Ive learned in the past to help the students I see, and also hope I can learn a few new things that I can use to help those I will see in the future.

I hope that this book will in some small way serve this purpose of ongoing support for students. I am deeply grateful to the incredible colleagues who have encouraged and inspired me along the way, and maybe this book will have a similar effect on its audience. Thanks for reading.

Chapter 1

My First Failure

Aspergers syndrome is a nebulous topic, and therefore difficult to write about. Normally when I first meet a set of parents with a child who has Aspergers, one of their questions is, How long have you worked with children with autism? I respond that I have been in the field for more than 20 years, and working specifically with students on the autism spectrum for about 15 of them. Although Ive been a therapist for adults with disabilities for a very long time, it really wasnt until I had years of experience under my belt that I could begin putting the pieces together and identify behavioral trends and helpful interventions that were not only practical but also sensitive to the needs of everyone involved. Let me provide an example.

My first year on the job I met with a student named Harry and his father. I was fresh out of graduate school, and although we certainly read about autism, and I passed many an examination on the topic, as almost anyone in a therapeutic the profession will tell you, there is a big difference between studying a diagnosis in a textbook and encountering someone with that diagnosis in real life! At my first meeting with Harry he demonstrated an extremely negative and angry attitude, and, to me at the time, his father seemed equally unenthusiastic and pessimistic. Harry had messed-up hair, an unappealing body odor, and a Transformers shirt on that had seen far better days/belonged in the ragbag. As I asked questions about Harry, what he liked to do, and who he was as a person, I got one-word responses like okay, yeah, and nope. Harry also clearly did not want to be in the office with me that day, and was perfectly okay with his father doing all the talking.

Harrys father looked tired. Better dressed than his son, but tired. He would also get upset with Harry whenever Harry didnt give me a complete answer to a question, or gave me one that was off topic. Harrys father explained these behavioral issues often carried over to the classroom, that Harry frequently interrupted his instructors to ask questions that were unrelated to the classwork, or so highly advanced that they demonstrated he had a better grasp of the subject than the instructor. Of course, this audacity was causing problems at school.

Harrys father had asked the school administrators if he could attend the class with Harry, to intervene when Harry was inappropriate and to correct him. I knew from a Section 504/legal ) perspective that this is not considered a reasonable request, so I immediately went on the defensive: How would this be fair to the other students who could not bring their parents? What if there arent enough desks? How will the instructor react? I can think of many other poorly worded questions that I targeted in the same direction. I fell into a trap that many people in my field fall into. Rather than looking at the problem itself and brainstorming a solution to it, we invest our energy shooting down the parents idea. This response turns the relationship into an adversarial one in which the parent feels unheard, the student feels invisible, and the provider becomes exhausted. Its an approach that will almost always lead to failure.