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Towards applied integrationism – integrating autism in teaching and coaching sessions
Language Sciences 33 (2011) 593–602
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Towards applied integrationism – integrating autism in teaching and coaching sessions Charlotte Marie Bisgaard Nielsen ⇑ Hasseris Gymnasium & IB World School, Hasserisvej 300, Postbox 70, 9100 Aalborg, Denmark
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Article history: Available online 6 May 2011 Keywords: Autism research Applied integrationism Methodology Self-reflection Contextualization
a b s t r a c t At present, Denmark counts numerous cases of youngsters with Aspergers syndrome and the implementation of separate project classrooms for Asperger-students has proved beneficial (EVA-report January 2010). Today, Asperger-students at project schools have the opportunity to receive an education whereas before they often ended up as psychiatric cases. The few participating schools offer one class of approximately 10 persons each per year. Unfortunately, this covers only a small percentage of a growing need. Indeed, some students are struck with more severe Autism than Aspergers. In 1994, autistic psychopathy was put on the list of psychiatric diagnoses as ‘‘Aspergers syndrome’’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Asperger and Kanner, 1996). For traditional teachers, Aspergerstudents often seem difficult to teach because they perform differently in social settings. They are often perceived as problematic and marginalized by teachers and peers when integrated in conventional classes. As a high school teacher, language psychologist and mentor, I have been closely involved with Asperger-students at schools in my hometown outside of the classroom. The Danish government has recently granted four additional project classes nationwide and is considering an expansion of the project: http:// www.uvm.dk/Aktuelt/~/media/C9D15AE89C54449C9E3A325B76F2E987.ashx (last visited June 6th 2010). Suggestions will be needed for the long term and guidance will be necessary for teachers to deal professionally with Asperger-students. My main purpose here is to discuss the potential application of integrationism towards the design of an integrational case-study. This contribution suggests a way to analyze why teachers and Asperger-individuals experience communicational problems. Several related questions are important to consider: How does society improve the general integration of Asperger-students in educational institutions? What can teachers and coaches do to enhance the integration of Asperger-students in their daily practice according to an integrational approach? This study suggests that teachers and institutions must understand that Asperger-diagnosed students are agents in the world just as are ordinary students. They perform as anyone else in verbal and non-verbal ways. Contextualization is therefore a keyword to this investigation and its suggestions. Focusing on how to enhance integration working explicitly with self-observation in communication may be a tool for teachers to contribute to change the way people experience and face Asperger-students. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
⇑ Tel.: +45 22174288. E-mail address: [email protected] 0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2011.04.023
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1. Integrating psychological processes in the study of communication Anti-psychiatrist Dr. Ronald D. Laing investigated disorders in interpersonal existential contexts and determined disease as a healthy reaction to a sick society. According to Laing the state of psychosis cannot be cured with medicine but only through speech therapy: ‘‘Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things’’ (Laing, 1967, p. 24). Ken Loach’s film Family Life (1971) demonstrates the meaning of Laing’s double-bind hypothesis showing how contradictions in dialogue-situations function as self-defense. For example, the film shows a central theme of a mother’s care for her pregnant daughter that leads to an abortion which triggers a state of schizophrenia with the daughter. Laing explains that in our world alienation is a normal condition which leads to violence on one’s own and the other’s experience (Laing, 1967, p. 29). Laing argues that society values ‘‘normality’’ so highly that we as individuals fail to observe what the other’s needs are. Linguistically and extra-linguistically we strive for a state of ‘‘normality’’ that we educate each other with following our own desires and fears of not being ‘‘normal’’. This can seem invalidating to the content of the other’s contextualization, violating the other instead of loving the other (Laing, 1967, p. 31). Demonstrating Laing’s theory of persons and experience (1967), the mother in Family life (1971) thinks she acts for the sake of the good while violating her daughter’s authority by forcing her to get an abortion. Laing points to the case that we do not at our present state of knowledge as modern societies have a general practice for appropriate humane response to one another Fig. 1. This study challenges the way Autism and Aspergers syndrome is considered conventionally in academia and draws on four selected works of professor emeritus Roy Harris (1996, 1998, 2009a,b) that I consider most relevant to my study. Referring to the above one can say that signs in anti-psychiatry as well as in integrational linguistics are treated as contextualized. Signs do not exist as autonomous entities segregated from the situations in which they occur, but must be understood in relation to the local circumstances. Laing thus also considers meaning to be created continuously at all levels of the interaction – both verbal and non-verbal. As an integrational approach to the study of communication rejects the existence of language as a study object of importance in itself, anti-psychiatry rejects the study of a segregated psychology. Communication can, in both approaches, be regarded as the ongoing processes of contextualization that both contextualizes and recontextualizes meaning in the continuous birth and rebirth of the context. Signs are in both discourses stated as the products of communication as it is happening and not as structures underlying society. Signs are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions. The functions are bound to the integration of past, present and supposed future experience of what we are trying to do. This approach is relevant to the study of Aspergerstudents as a prerequisite for the premises of a new study. Leaving behind a structuralist approach to language and communication, communication is set free from language and can involve various sign forms linguistic or non-linguistic. An important point is the consideration of communication’s creativity so that talk of ‘‘right or ‘‘wrong’’ interpretation evaporates. Meaning belongs only to the situation. This will help one to orient an effective approach towards an integrational study and to avoid structuralist mythologies and other systems of beliefs. An explicit discussion of the hegemonies of beliefs in study designs, research topics and perspective setting in analysis is inevitable within the field of integrationism. I will try not to start in the middle of the battlefield, but should warn that any discussion of research discourse and methodology automatically leads to the drawing of a sword following an integrational tradition (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b). Three fundamental questions guide this study: – How can we design an integrational psychology to explore how youngsters diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome integrate their understandings of learning and sociability? – What do we need to know more about in order to deal with an Asperger-diagnosed subject in order to examine him through texts and conversations in educational contexts so that we can state a researchable integrational approach? – How can an integrational approach – focusing on lack of interaction and understanding oneself contribute to analyzing the challenge Asperger youngsters face every day? Framework for harmonizing integrational description with an integrational case-study. I generally question how we may apply an integrational approach and how we may address the integration of understandings in a study in order to reach for intervention sometime in the future. Knowing that the project is ambitious but necessary I work with an ongoing two-faced discussion: My methods, in order to discuss integrational assumptions on how to treat communication studies according to Roy Harris. How to harmonize integrationism with the thought of an applied field: What is science and knowledge to the integrationist? My main questions on examining communicational premises in practice among Aspergers are: How do Asperger-individuals experience communication? How do Asperger-individuals’ understandings manifest themselves in written sources and in interaction studies?
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The study covers difficulties in communication and focuses upon: To what extent are the difficulties in communication due to understandings of context? How can an integrational approach examine Asperger-individuals’ understandings of communicational premises? How may we as integrationists approach and analyze the understandings manifested or referred to by Aspergerindividuals? 2. From clinical psychology to an integrational psychology Aspergers syndrome is one diagnosis within the autistic spectrum diagnoses. Clinical studies and its literature, often call it mild Autism. Still, those suffering with Aspergers share many of the same symptoms as general Autism. Aspergers is a lifelong disorder, a dysfunctional disturbance characterized by repetitive action patterns and a lack of interest either in creative play or general social surroundings (Asperger and Kanner, 1996). Typical symptoms are eye-gaze, facial expression and characteristic body posture. The behavior of those with Aspergers, according to clinical literature, seem strange to normal persons. They avoid eye-contact in social gatherings and they often avoid responding when addressed (Ochs et al., 2005, pp. 574–575). They are overall described as intelligent people driven by habits. The academic literature on the subject has typically been interested in Aspergers syndrome clinically and only so far as it relates to Autism developing the Theory of mind and the term Mindblindness (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, 2003). However, we cannot know or explain all aspects of Aspergers or Autism from clinical data alone. Swedish Petra Bjöne’s Ph.D. thesis A possible World: Autism from Practice to Theory (2007) describes and discusses the life world of the autistic child qualitatively. Björne places Autism within the field of cognitive psychology. Björne’s alternative placement of Aspergers outside the strict clinical field is especially interesting for me, since I consider the syndrome to be primarily a communication problem concerning contextualization of self-understanding. In order to achieve better lives for those who understand life differently (and also to reduce psychiatric cases), an integrational framework for analysis is needed that lifts Autism out of psychiatry and into the field of language psychology. 3. Human psychology and communicational behavior Some basic behavioral strategies are expected in any face to face interaction. Strategies for behavior are presumed by agents as a basic implicit understanding of a general human psychology through the manifestation of habitual behavior. The strategy for question–answer treatment and responsivity can be produced in many creative ways by different participants in any given situation. This behavior and its participants’ creativity has been widely documented by Conversation Analysis practitioners (Drew and Heritage, 1992; Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997). The study of a general human psychology of strategies of behavior was already described by William James in his Principles of Psychology in 1890. On the theme of Habit we regard it as natural for humans to act in certain strategic ways because it is within our common nature. When a baby cries we know it needs something, though we may not know exactly what it is (James, 1980, vol. 2, chapter XIX). The case of Autism challenges our very basic assumptions on human behavior since autistic individuals do not share this conventional stimulus of need and response statements (Ochs et al., 2005). Their behavior therefore poses a problem in the linguistic context for the presumed normal people in concrete situations as much as for the autistic person himself. He has trouble integrating himself and we have trouble integrating him in a habitual communicational psychological set-up. 4. Aspergers’ retold responses in communication situations in the class room This study draws upon observations made in environments where Asperger-students are taught in project classes or coached by teachers individually. How do Asperger-individuals experience communication? During a recent visit to a school that educates young boys with Aspergers syndrome in computer programming, I realized that the students in the classroom on several occasions made comments to one another about how they understood the context of their communication. For example, one student explicitly told another when something was meant to be regarded as funny to offer him the opportunity to laugh with him. Comments were made and witnessed from a perspective exterior to their own. This points to the case that these students appear to be trained in self-observation. Training in self-observation is definitively absent at conventional schools save for the project schools where Asperger-students are integrated in the classroom with ordinary students. I visited a school where they educate youngsters with Aspergers syndrome on revalidation to work as computer programmers with special talents – an initiative funded with both public and private money. On the school programme syllabus is the subject ‘communication’. In this class, the students learn about ‘‘other people’s’’ basic expectations with communication through open group reflection with the entire class. Eight persons participated in the class I observed as a silent spectator. I observed the class as if it were a focused interview, where I did not conduct an investigation but answered my own questions of interest through their comments, which I noted down. The group had to agree on which material on Autism
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and Aspergers syndrome they wanted to work with and discuss this Spring. They those the book I’m special: Introducing Children and Young People to their Autistic Spectrum Disorder by Peter Vermeulen (2000). In class, the teacher explained that 80% of their communication is non-verbal, which is why the Asperger-students must learn to show their understandings explicitly, for example, by looking at their conversation partners when wanting to show that they understand the task they are discussing or being instructed to perform. ‘‘We look at each other when we understand’’, the teacher pointed out. Overall, I experienced a great interest from the Aspergers side to know more about how their performance seemed to others. They also, perhaps surprisingly, joked about what people thought of them and how they then could possibly respond to each other and their surroundings. I found this interesting and it dovetailed nicely with the observations and questions from Roy Harris’ paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (2008) which I shall deal with shortly. The teacher treated the jokes with a friendly ironic comment ‘‘You don’t actually know how to do that’’. A comment to which one of the youngsters – the most talkative – responded: ‘‘Well, then I don’t know how to be a proper Asperger either’’. He gave his response an ironic tone but it led to a serious discussion of individual experiences of not being understood in an educational context. All their lives they say they have been treated as if they were ‘‘wrong’’ but left with uncertainty as to what. This socialization has lead to great insecurity and different reaction patterns such as violence and inwardness varying from person to person. When the discussion fell upon how we talk to each other the teacher asked ‘‘How do we talk to each other?’’ and a student replied that he uses what he learns in class ‘‘to better get what I want’’. In my conversations with coaches for Asperger youngsters I have noted that the coaches who have success in guiding Asperger kids tell that they agree to contextualize their interaction with the Asperger-students on common grounds – meaning that they are actively attempting to decipher the rationales of the Asperger youth into responding to any given situation. 5. Literary cases of Asperger stories – Daniel Tammet and Temple Grandin Roy Harris points out something crucial about Aspergers general lack of self-observation in his Notes and Papers 2006– 2008 in his paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (Harris, 2009a), when he discusses the case of Daniel Tammet and his biography Born on a Blue day. Harris discusses how Daniel explains not knowing that he was supposed to say an answer out loud in class, when he knew the correct answer and the teacher asked him. He kept quiet, because he already knew the answer and knew that it was correct Since Daniel already knew the answer in his mind, he saw no reason to say it aloud. He failed to understand that he was expected to inform his teacher of information irrelevant to himself, but relevant to the linguistic context of the teaching situation. The teacher considered Daniel non-responsive and therefore unwilling to answer, a misinterpretation we can attribute to Daniel’s lack of understanding of the teaching context. Daniel did in fact answer (and answered correctly), but only in his mind and not aloud in the classroom (Tammet, 2006). Harris notes that Daniel tells that he understood what was said to him. In other words he did not fail to understand the words of the linguistic context with which he was presented in school by the teachers. Later, he reflects that he failed to understand what was expected of him, just as the autistic diagnose foresaw. Meaning, he did not understand and respond to the functions of basic turn-taking rules. This is a problem to the integrationist since he hereby integrates himself in a way which produces an inappropriate situation for himself as well as for his teacher. However, his diagnosis does not include reflection upon the past, since it isolates situations and segregates the behavior of the Asperger from his contextualization over time. The lack of responsivity described by the clinical psychologists must be reconsidered as Aspergers’ responses are investigated in an integrational perspective. My observations suggest that Asperger-students respond when addressed in appropriate relevant ways introducing contextualization as a tool in analysis. Responselessness, then can be treated in relation to context understandings and earlier supposed non-responsive behavior can be reconsidered and treated as a chosen – though silent – strategy for engaging in initiative-response sequences – not as an inability – when guiding Aspergers. This Roy Harris made me realize when reading his paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (2008). How do Asperger-individuals’ understandings manifest themselves in written sources and in interaction studies? Asperger-individuals behave like ordinary individuals linguistically, since there are no delays or repetitions in their language ability (Ochs et al., 2005; Frith, 2003), but because they behave differently they are viewed as responseless in their communication practice just as the above clinical description and Harris’ example with Tammet demonstrates for us. Asperger-individuals do not respond as we expect them to. The different response which could be avoiding to engage in the rules of speech acts (Searle, 1969) can be covered and documented by methods of the CA discourse studies (Pomertantz and Fehr 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1992; and others) and treated by pragmatic studies as a failure, an impairment, an anti-accountability. Not responding to a question with an answer or not responding to a teaching session as a student is considered incorrect. This common belief and view of communication, I claim, often results in misunderstandings and poses problems for Aspergers like the case of Daniel Tammet. The problem might be accounted for in our traditional view on language. Let us presume this be the case. To what extent are the communicative difficulties due to understandings of context? Harris points out that the response problem cannot be treated by a traditional linguist who would consider the linguistic syntax said aloud in a classroom or in Daniel Tammet’s mind in his story and conclude that there is no linguistic problem. But
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for an integrationist, there is still a problem to consider since Daniel did not achieve a communicational goal to address the needs of the situation of stimulus and response within a teaching session. Moreover, after such an episode the teacher might consider him to be strange and therefore not pursue the issue further because of this lack of expected behavior (Harris, 2009a). The problem is whose problem it is. Harris’ remark on the problematic assumption of the traditional linguistic perception of language and communication not being able to identify a linguistic problem here is interesting but can be somewhat covered with contemporary methods from CA and Speech Act Theory looking at the interaction and locating that something is not treated correctly (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1992; Searle, 1969). To me, the interesting and crucial fact that Harris points to was that Daniel himself reflected upon his practice seen in a past-tense perspective. Why else tell the story of the inside of an autistic mind? So I kept looking for further signs of self-reflection as a case. Asperger biographer Temple Grandin has published various books, one commented on by Oliver Sacks (1996). Grandin’s storytelling shows the same reflection on her own communicative practice. She describes her childhood as difficult in the same way Danieldoes. She also describes how she received a great deal of help from a sympathetic teacher who acted as her mentor and helped her to improve self-reflection – a skill she credits with helping her become proficient at integrating her ability and knowledge of thinking in pictures and not marginalizing herself in society (Grandin, 2006, 2008). Segregational psychiatrists who measure by isolated observations and medical presumptions alone have dominated the discussion of autistic people; looking at communication engagements as ongoing contextualizing process (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a) would entail significantly different treatment and enhance integration of autistic people’s own understandings in research designs. Asperger-individuals behave differently yes, but they also reflect upon their experiences with communication and social play later on which gives us good reason to coach them in their studies and to help more of them complete their education and thereby develop their skills. I found it inevitable not to explore Daniel Tammet’s case of self reflection further. As Roy Harris remarks the problem cannot be localized within the traditional beliefs of linguistics and communication studies merely because the focus does not seek to explain the engagement; it is simply different than integration of understandings and thus contextualization. Due to completely different response-patterns or an actual lack of response to basic needs of communication engagement which need fulfillment, the autistic person remains a mystery to many people who fail to understand his lifeworld (Frith, 2003) – but not to the integrationist. Nevertheless, we still need to determine the extent to which context-understanding can be analyzed.
6. An Asperger-student’s self-reflection: his own rationale My own claim is that many Asperger-youngsters who are considered to respond incorrectly are themselves aware of why they do not respond correctly simply because they do not conform to the common nature of communication in the class room. One Asperger-student I coached said that he did not participate in discussions in class when he felt the other students did not seem to invest intellectually in the discussions. He felt the level was below his interest of discussion and thus participation. So he saw no reason to participate – it was not because he could not. He could not bring himself to do it, due to his own unfulfilled personal standards of attention. He provided me with other examples in which his strategies proved less successful. For example he told me that he had trouble with his physics teacher who assumed he did not pay attention in class when looking down at the table. The boy did not care much for numbers and physics but after we attempted a new social– survival response strategy (i.e. not to actually get him more interested but simply to get the teacher to think that he was paying attention, whether or not he cared about math). He was to look up strategically in class, without making eye-contact with the teacher (eye-contact made him uncomfortable) and to indicate that he was paying attention instead by wiggling his ears when the teacher addressed him. He tried the new strategy and gladly came back and told me that it had worked. He benefitted from indicating his attention strategically. Nonconformity with basic interaction-rules is not considered normal – but is it a disease as stated by clinical psychology and psychiatric discourse? I believe the Asperger’s contextualization holds a new answer to this when treated as a topic in communication studies. How can an integrational approach examine the Asperger-individuals’ understandings of communicational premises? I learned here and from observing the class that although we can state an integrational approach and engage in a theoretical discussion on which questions to pose, it is also necessary in a case-study to incorporate common beliefs and myths in our guidance – not to understand the phenomena we describe, but to treat the challenges people with communicational disorders face in their daily lives. We all live in a world of structuralist hegemony after all. The beauty of it is that though Asperger-students appear to be super-structuralists to whom you can teach the rules of speech acts, they also prove structuralism a false assumption on how communication actually operates in the real world, since no signs can function as ‘‘contextneutral’’ (Harris, 2009b, p. 97). What Aspergers fail to understand when not trained in self reflection is the non-rule guided free flow of human communication, what we refer to with the poetic terms of intuition or sense of situation. The rules they learn do not always work because situations cannot be calculated. Their case and communication strategies are highly relevant to integrationists. Guidance is needed since they suffer misunderstandings from traditional linguistic surroundings, which frequently fail to understand why they have difficulty with ‘‘common interaction’’. My observations confirm the case Harris points out that Aspergers do reflect on their own communicative engagement habits and social practice as in the examples of Daniel Tammet and Temple Grandin. When encouraged by the teacher to
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reflect upon their understandings and their interaction responses with others, the youngsters I observed in class did enthusiastically express a high level of self-reflection through conversational meta-comments. How may we as integrationists approach and analyze the understandings manifested or referred to by Aspergerindividuals? It is interesting to note that the Asperger youngsters I have dealt with myself as a mentor have told me that they most certainly had a rationale of their own in their response actions. At first, I thought it was extraordinary but Harris’ pointing at the Daniel Tammet-case refuted my experience, so I kept investigating the case of self-reflection. In conclusion, we need to state a clear integrational approach to the study of Asperger-individual’s communication and analyze their understandings manifested in various sources using interactionist tools to register data applying an integrational approach to the study of communication and examining contextualization as a main purpose. It makes no sense seen from an integrational point of view to try to measure Aspergers’ responselessness as a simple impairment, if we regard communication as a continuous process that includes sign statements, both verbal and non-verbal. This would contradict the assessment presupposed by clinical diagnosis. The only thing they impair is common nature because they do not agree to it. That appears to be their main rationale and thus contextualization. Seen from an integrational point of view, common nature as studied and considered in interaction studies, could well be confused with the reproduction of cultural mythologies produced by structuralist hegemony of common beliefs on language. Signs, as a study object, are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions for somebody and thus the study object has switched from language itself to the contextualization of someone. Language itself is of no special importance, since it only seems to exist segregated, isolated from real communication processes, by the linguists ruling the academic world. That is not the case. I shall return to this discussion briefly. Common nature here is for the integrationist nothing more than the speech community’s rules, finely overviewed by Grice and Searle and most explicitly described in Logic of Conversation (Grice, 1975) and Speech Acts (Searle, 1969). But those ‘‘rules’’ of common communicational nature rely on the acceptance of the existence of a structualist linguistic reality, a nature of structure invented by Saussure (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b) and not on true contextualization that takes place in a reality with real problems as explained in an integrational perspective (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b). A good idea for any researcher, teacher or coach for that matter would be to start by talking with the Asperger-individual and asking him what he has experienced and how he organizes his rationales for acting the way he does. In this way, one can discuss with him exactly what he can gain from different strategies. These conversations may perhaps be recorded for further study using CA-tools. But when conclusions are made they must be drawn from an integrational perspective to avoid the trap of structualist thought in order to help teachers and coaches prepare to face Asperger-students in a humane way. 7. A new science or a new scientific discourse? In order to examine how an integrational study within this field may be designed, I ask the questions – What is science to the integrationist? What is knowledge to the integrationist? These two questions are fundamental to almost all aspects of any integrational consideration; understanding science, verbalization, framing, communication and thus communicational problems. The integrational frame as a frame of science is presented to create an evidence based foundation for an integrational case-study. 8. Aspergers syndrome reconsidered Signs in an integrational framework presuppose that somebody is engaged in doing something involving sign-production. Thus, identification and interpretation have a facilitating function in order for someone to achieve some proficiency or response by doing so: ‘‘Basic axioms of integrational semiology are: 1. What constitutes a sign is not given independently of the situation in which it occurs or of its material manifestation in that situation. 2. The value of a sign (i.e. signification) is a function of the integrational proficiency which its identification and interpretation presuppose.’’ (Harris, 1996, p. 154). Harris thus argues that meaning is created in the process of integrating signs. From here we may conclude that seen from an integrational perspective cases involving individuals with Aspergers syndrome necessarily must include those persons and their own understandings, unless we want to limit ourselves to interpreting our own understandings of discourse and our own experiences. Consequently, we may conclude that this goes well with the above axioms considering that a sign’s value is a function of an actual integrational process that inevitably belongs to a situation and individual’s integrational activity and not to the language and discourse itself – this would be non-sense to the integrationist. Signs are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions. The functions are bound to the integration of past, present and supposed future experience of what we are trying to do (Harris, 1996, p. 154). Meaning, as a result, belongs wholly to the situation. In this context, an integrational study challenges the way Autism and Aspergers syndrome is considered conventionally in academia. As mentioned, Swedish Björne deals with the experiences of the autistic child pointing to the case that clinical discourse does not include a possible self for the autistic person but rather reduces the autistic person to a person with limited abilities,
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Fig. 1.
a person with impaired skills and thus a person who is less proficient for example at communicating. Björne’s placement of Aspergers outside the arguably strict clinical field is writing itself into an alternative scientific discourse and therefore is an interesting perspective, since it like I in my project considers the syndrome to be primarily a communication problem concerning contextualization of self-understanding. The autistic person has trouble integrating himself and we have trouble integrating him in a habitual communicational psychological set-up – how then should Autism be described and treated? Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen aims to investigate and understand the biomedical aspects of Autism according to the mission statement of the Autism research centre at Cambridge University http://www.Autismresearchcentre.com/arc/default.asp (last visited June 6th 2010): An examination of the ARC-homepage illustrates that the clinical discourse on Autism is communicated within the discourse of neuroscience – a third Autism Neuroscience Conference is announced to be coming up in September. Autism is formulated as a ‘‘condition’’ rather than a challenge and the ARC states that the condition can be dealt with through ‘‘new and validated methods for assessment and intervention’’ worked out by the ARC that will ‘‘foster collaboration between scientists in Cambridge University and outside, to accelerate this mission’’ – which again is – to understand and investigate the biomedical causes of Autism spectrum conditions. The whole linguistic discourse is focused on something more closely associated with brain surgery embedded smoothly in conventional scientific oriented syntax based on words such as ‘‘condition’’, ‘‘validated’’, ‘‘methods’’, ‘‘assessment’’, ‘‘intervention’’, ‘‘foster’’, ‘‘collaboration’’, ‘‘scientists’’ then to be action packed with Frankensteinian vocabulary where they will ‘‘foster’’ (collaboration) and we end up on the race track where they will ‘‘accelerate this mission’’. This is something far away from the daily problems facing high school boys diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome that I have worked with, and their teachers. The above linguistic discourse is relevant as a scientific approach in which Autism is placed as a neurological issue. This placement is a dominant one in Autism research but it must be said that this approach can be considered to be a function of a certain discourse, the clinical discourse, and not the ‘whole truth’ of Aspergers syndrome. Daniel Tammet’s biography Born on a Blue day (2006) which Harris deals with and comments in his Notes and Papers (2008) has a foreword written by Cambridge expert and director Simon Baron-Cohen, confirming that Daniel’s case is rare as he validates that Daniel’s synaesthesia gives him rich textured, multi-sensory forms of memory, and his Autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns (Tammet 2007: foreword by Simon Baron-Cohen). I consider the foreword interesting as an example of linguistic enhancement of the clinical scientific discourse dominating what is considered to be the scientific field of Autism in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. What Simon Baron-Cohen seems to be doing is the act of validating the content of the book with a clinical discursive frame. It is interesting to question the meaning of ‘‘rich textured, multi-sensory forms of memory’’ and a ‘‘narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns’’ – Are we to understand that Baron-Cohen and his ‘science’ can look into Daniels brain through his words and see a more richly textured memory than he can do normally by ‘beaming himself’ into other people’s memories? And how can a memory be textured? From where does Baron-Cohen know this neuro-exotic information about Daniels brain – from reading his biography?
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9. An integrational study of Autism and Aspergers syndrome – a new scientific discourse? How does the integrational approach to science apply to create an evidence basis for an integrational case-study involving Asperger-individuals and their teachers? What is science? – this fundamental question I must consider and discuss in the construction of my applied research design since integrational linguistics is mainly a theoretical approach to the study of communication and thus of science. I find support in Adrian Pablé’s consideration that the question of reality and the real can be treated as a macrosocial abstraction (Pablé, 2011). In wanting to design an applied integrational frame I have little to lean on. How then would the integrationist consider and discuss the research in a case-study? In The Semantics of Science (2005) Roy Harris deals with science as a supercategory.: ‘‘(. . .) supercategories such as science, art, religion, and history are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language dependent. But they do not all come to be construed in the same way. That is why it is worth paying attention to the linguistic process involved in each individual development. (. . .) The basic function of a supercateory is to integrate what would otherwise be separate activities and inquiries; and the result of that integration is to re-draw the map of the intellectual world that society as a whole adopts’’ (Harris, 2005, p. xi). Harris distinguishes various categories from one another to clarify how science as any supercategory can be considered and thus treated as a verbal construct of the organization of society. This constructivist perspective suggests that it may change over time. The above approach to science stated by Harris is highly relevant to my study of cases involving individuals with Autism and Aspergers syndrome because I aim to change the way we consider Autism and Aspergers syndrome within society. Autism research is mainly dominated by clinical psychology and a clinical diagnostic discourse. This discourse is thus regarded as the science within the field and thus treatment and integration of autistic individuals in school systems is drawn from the findings in clinical psychology and a clinical diagnostic discourse. From my own experience in dealing with Aspergers students and listening to their thoughts and rationales of their communicational integrational problems I have come to believe that Autism research should be reconsidered and that autistic cases should be discussed and treated differently. This could lead to enhancing integration in – for example school contexts – but also throughout dealing with autistic conditioned persons in general as human beings that one can communicate with in various forms. This kind of enhancement cannot be met by relying on clinical standards. I have experienced teachers’ misinterpretation of students due to the dominance of the clinical way of verbalizing and framing the case of Autism and Aspergers. People too simply assume that they are to understand something specific when dealing with autistic individuals and often fail to integrate the individuals due to instructed presumptions of what they think they ought to understand, rather than understanding what is ‘understandable’ in the actual situation. In order to operate Harris’ science approach as he views science as a verbal construct belonging to a super-category in society, I deal with science as a discursive matter. As mentioned above Autism research is dominated by a certain approach to science. Since I wish to explore an alternative approach I need to consider the different ways in which a super-category such as science can be expressed. I name the sub-categorical level a discursive level. I deal with discourses as verbalizations that frame certain windows through which we can consider the world, the agents in it and their activities with each other. According to my interpretation of Harris, a certain scientific discourse as well as its overall categorization – the supercategory of science as a whole – requires the linguistic support of a specific terminology. What is verbalized are the rules that exist that are supported by a community’s terminology. When such terminology is deployed, on a cross-disciplinary basis, by many practitioners, with a certain regularity and assurance as the dominant form of discourse and is not challenged by an integrational (or any other) way of speaking of Autism and Aspergers syndrome then that discourse will be adopted by large communities in society, including the individuals being diagnosed. That clinical discourse then determines how people treat autistic individuals and may also lead to problems with their self-perception because we tend to experience and treat them in a certain way that makes them different. Such one-sidedness may lead to discrepancies in self-understanding and forced integration of activities that individuals do not agree to, though this discussion will not be further elaborated on within the scope of this paper. Most interesting to my project is the goal of the integrational approach that is to see science as discourses that may be facilitated by adopting new ways of speaking about certain topics, hence they operate by integration. Regarding the cases of Autism and Aspergers syndrome it is interesting to see that Asperger biographers are adopting the clinical discourse (Tammet, 2009, Grandin, 2006) in order to integrate themselves as somebody in a scientific discourse – as the clinical discourse is placed in a higher ranking than their own stories. My claim is that integrating the clinical discourse may not help Aspergerindividuals solve their communicational problems, since the diagnostic method is consistently seen from an outwardly fixative perspective. However, I do understand why they try to integrate themselves in the clinical discourse. Also it is interesting to consider, that they thereby show an ability to recognize categories and preferred discourses, stating a social proficiency in doing so, that is in fact challenging the content of the diagnosis they have been given in that same discourse. For the integrationist, science has nothing to do with attempts to fixate meaning in the integrationist case nor in the approach to sense-making (Harris, 1996, 1998, Toolan, 1996). How does the integrational approach to knowledge apply to an analysis of Asperger-individuals’ problems in communication? Harris presents his understanding of knowledge in After Epistemology (2009b) drawing upon his Notes on The integrational Conception of the Sign (2008). Knowledge and communication do not, according to Harris, refer to a specific form but may
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apply to any communicable knowledge – cognitive or practical. This broad framing of knowledge as human communicative activity through sign-use and tool-use for sign-making is the theoretical basis of my project to explore and understand why teachers and Asperger-students experience communicational problems. Asperger-diagnosed students, first of all, must be recognized as social agents similar to ordinary students otherwise we start out presupposing a clinical discourse which may describe but not necessarily deal with the people the project involves. As Roy Harris points out in After Epistemology (2009b) it is evident that we understand and treat knowledge about the world, both – our own and others, whether they are lay persons or academics – as inseparable from the experience of ‘‘life’’ – Furthermore, that applies to the things we all encounter in real life situations, including the experience of engaging in communication and integrating activities with other persons that we deal with as human beings. By integration I suggest involving the Asperger-persons and their own integration of activities in a case-study. Through analyzing how they experience communication and integration I will describe the discourse they themselves formulate to deal with the problems they experience. This path to discovery is necessary in order to create an evidence based frame for an integrational case-study. One might say that it explores a new way of explaining integrationist science and scientific discourse. 10. Integrating the data I intend to include every aspect from past experience to observations, literary cases, theoretical and methodological discussions, the framework for analysis and project planning.
Mentorship. Field notes from observations. Asperger biographies. Approaches in theory and methodology. Data analysis. Data collection and status.
As one example, Roy Harris points out something crucial about Aspergers’ general lack of self-observation in the paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ in Notes and Papers 2006–2008 (Harris, 2009a), when he discusses the case of the before mentioned biographer Daniel Tammet and his biography Born on a Blue day. Harris discusses how Daniel explains not knowing that he was supposed to say an answer out loud in class, when he knew the correct answer and the teacher asked him. Aspergers not included? Later as noted above, Daniel reflects that he failed to understand what was expected of him, just as the autistic clinical diagnosis foresaw. His diagnosis does not include reflection upon the past, since it isolates situations and segregates the behavior of the Asperger from his contextualization over time. The lack of responsivity described by the clinical psychologists must be reconsidered as Aspergers’ responses are investigated in an integrational perspective. My observations integrated with this example of discrepancy suggest that Asperger-students response introduce the integrational account for contextualization as a tool for analysis that can address problems that traditional linguistic cannot even identify. Turning the topic into contextualization, responselessness can then be treated in relation to contextual understandings and previously assumed, non-responsive behavior can be reconsidered and treated as a chosen – though silent – strategy for engaging in initiative-response sequences, not as an inability, when guiding Aspergers. It was Roy Harris who introduced me to this realization, after reading his paper Integrating Autism (2009a). The problem is – Whose problem is it? Harris’s remarks on the problematic assumption of the traditional linguistic perception of language and communication not being able to identify a linguistic problem here is interesting but can be somewhat covered with contemporary methods from CA and Speech Act Theory, which look at the interaction and locating of something not treated correctly (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1993; Searle, 1969). To me, the interesting and crucial fact that Harris points to was that Daniel himself reflected upon his practice seen in a past-tense perspective. Asperger-individuals reflect upon their experiences with communication and social play which indicates a good reason to coach them to help more of them complete their education and develop their skills. The rules they learn do not always work because situations cannot be calculated. Thus their case and communication strategies are highly relevant to integrationists. Guidance is needed since they suffer misunderstandings from traditional linguistic surroundings, which frequently fail to understand why they have difficulty with ‘‘common interaction’’. It is interesting to note that they form their own rationale for contextualization. Common nature could then well be confused with the mere reproduction of cultural mythologies produced by a structuralist hegemony of common beliefs on language. 11. Concluding remarks I started out by drawing upon anti-psychiatry to state a different research design, an alternative to the psychiatric discourse that directs most studies on Autism and Aspergers. Björne’s thesis on Autism within cognitive psychology inspired
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me along with Harris’ notes on integrating Autism to design a study that can contribute to change the discourse of casestudies on Autism and Aspergers syndrome. It makes no sense seen from an integrational point of view to try to measure Aspergers’ responselessness as a simple impairment, like clinical psychology does. If we instead apply an understanding of communication as a continuous process that includes sign statements, both verbal and non-verbal – this would contradict the assessment presupposed by clinical diagnosis and thus create a whole new science of Autism where there is no status for signs. Signs, as a study object, are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions for somebody and thus the study object has switched from language itself to the contextualization of someone. My claim is that integrating clinical discourse may not help Asperger-individuals solve their communicational problems since this diagnostic method is always considered from an outward fixative perspective. Instead, a discourse should be described as formulated by the Aspergers themselves in order to help them solve their problems in communication. As set out in the whole of the integrationist case and its approach to the making of sense introduced in this paper referring to the basic axioms of sign value (Harris, 1996, 1998, Toolan, 1996) and the integrationist approach to science and knowledge (Harris, 2005, 2009b) – for the integrationist, science should not attempt fixation of meaning but deal with integrational activity processes rather than outward descriptions. This essay only states the preliminaries of a study that draws the outline for my pioneering work on integrational psychology. I thank Professor Roy Harris for his great inspiration that continues to grow through my continuous reading of his many thought-provoking books on integrationism. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his help and valuable insight. References Asperger, Hans, Kanner, Leo, 1996. Hans Asperger & Leo Kanner. Videnscenter for Autisme, Fritz Grafisk, København (Copenhajen). Baron-Cohen, S., 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and the Theory of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge. Björne, Petra, 2007. A Possible World: Autism from Practice to Theory, Cognitive Science. Lund University, Lund. Drew, Paul, Heritage, John (Eds.), 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Frith, Uta, 2003. Autism: Explaining the Enigma, second ed. Blackwell, Oxford. Grandin, Temple, 2006. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, second ed. Vintage Books, New York. Grandin, Temple, 2008. The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Aspergers. Future Horizons, Arlington. Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58. Harris, Roy, 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. Routledge, London. Harris, Roy, 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford. Harris, Roy, 2005. The Semantics of Science. Continuum, London. Harris, Roy, 2009a. Integrationist Notes and Papers 2006–2008. Bright Pen, Gamlingay. Harris, Roy, 2009b. After Epistemology. Bright Pen, Gamlingay. James, William, 1980. The Principles of Psychology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Laing, Ronald D., 1967. Persons and experience. In: The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin Books, Middlesex. Ochs, Elinor, Solomon, Olga, Sterponi, Laura, 2005. Limitations and transformations of habitus in child-directed Communication. Discourse Studies 7 (4–5), 547–583. Pablé, Adrian, 2011. Integrating the ‘real’. Language Sciences 33 (1), 20–29. Pomerantz, A., Fehr, B.J., 1997. Conversational analysis: an approach to the study of social action as sense making practices. In: van Dijk, T.A. (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Sage Publications, London, pp. 64–91. Sacks, Oliver, 1996. An Anthropologist from Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. Vintage. Searle, J.R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tammet, Daniel, 2006. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Tammet, Daniel, 2007. Born on a Blue day. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Tammet, Daniel, 2009. Embracing the Wide Sky. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Toolan, Michael, 1996. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Film Family Life directed by Ken Loach, EMI films (1971).
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Towards applied integrationism – integrating autism in teaching and coaching sessions Charlotte Marie Bisgaard Nielsen ⇑ Hasseris Gymnasium & IB World School, Hasserisvej 300, Postbox 70, 9100 Aalborg, Denmark
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Article history: Available online 6 May 2011 Keywords: Autism research Applied integrationism Methodology Self-reflection Contextualization
a b s t r a c t At present, Denmark counts numerous cases of youngsters with Aspergers syndrome and the implementation of separate project classrooms for Asperger-students has proved beneficial (EVA-report January 2010). Today, Asperger-students at project schools have the opportunity to receive an education whereas before they often ended up as psychiatric cases. The few participating schools offer one class of approximately 10 persons each per year. Unfortunately, this covers only a small percentage of a growing need. Indeed, some students are struck with more severe Autism than Aspergers. In 1994, autistic psychopathy was put on the list of psychiatric diagnoses as ‘‘Aspergers syndrome’’ by the World Health Organization (WHO) (Asperger and Kanner, 1996). For traditional teachers, Aspergerstudents often seem difficult to teach because they perform differently in social settings. They are often perceived as problematic and marginalized by teachers and peers when integrated in conventional classes. As a high school teacher, language psychologist and mentor, I have been closely involved with Asperger-students at schools in my hometown outside of the classroom. The Danish government has recently granted four additional project classes nationwide and is considering an expansion of the project: http:// www.uvm.dk/Aktuelt/~/media/C9D15AE89C54449C9E3A325B76F2E987.ashx (last visited June 6th 2010). Suggestions will be needed for the long term and guidance will be necessary for teachers to deal professionally with Asperger-students. My main purpose here is to discuss the potential application of integrationism towards the design of an integrational case-study. This contribution suggests a way to analyze why teachers and Asperger-individuals experience communicational problems. Several related questions are important to consider: How does society improve the general integration of Asperger-students in educational institutions? What can teachers and coaches do to enhance the integration of Asperger-students in their daily practice according to an integrational approach? This study suggests that teachers and institutions must understand that Asperger-diagnosed students are agents in the world just as are ordinary students. They perform as anyone else in verbal and non-verbal ways. Contextualization is therefore a keyword to this investigation and its suggestions. Focusing on how to enhance integration working explicitly with self-observation in communication may be a tool for teachers to contribute to change the way people experience and face Asperger-students. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
⇑ Tel.: +45 22174288. E-mail address: [email protected] 0388-0001/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.langsci.2011.04.023
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1. Integrating psychological processes in the study of communication Anti-psychiatrist Dr. Ronald D. Laing investigated disorders in interpersonal existential contexts and determined disease as a healthy reaction to a sick society. According to Laing the state of psychosis cannot be cured with medicine but only through speech therapy: ‘‘Our behavior is a function of our experience. We act according to the way we see things’’ (Laing, 1967, p. 24). Ken Loach’s film Family Life (1971) demonstrates the meaning of Laing’s double-bind hypothesis showing how contradictions in dialogue-situations function as self-defense. For example, the film shows a central theme of a mother’s care for her pregnant daughter that leads to an abortion which triggers a state of schizophrenia with the daughter. Laing explains that in our world alienation is a normal condition which leads to violence on one’s own and the other’s experience (Laing, 1967, p. 29). Laing argues that society values ‘‘normality’’ so highly that we as individuals fail to observe what the other’s needs are. Linguistically and extra-linguistically we strive for a state of ‘‘normality’’ that we educate each other with following our own desires and fears of not being ‘‘normal’’. This can seem invalidating to the content of the other’s contextualization, violating the other instead of loving the other (Laing, 1967, p. 31). Demonstrating Laing’s theory of persons and experience (1967), the mother in Family life (1971) thinks she acts for the sake of the good while violating her daughter’s authority by forcing her to get an abortion. Laing points to the case that we do not at our present state of knowledge as modern societies have a general practice for appropriate humane response to one another Fig. 1. This study challenges the way Autism and Aspergers syndrome is considered conventionally in academia and draws on four selected works of professor emeritus Roy Harris (1996, 1998, 2009a,b) that I consider most relevant to my study. Referring to the above one can say that signs in anti-psychiatry as well as in integrational linguistics are treated as contextualized. Signs do not exist as autonomous entities segregated from the situations in which they occur, but must be understood in relation to the local circumstances. Laing thus also considers meaning to be created continuously at all levels of the interaction – both verbal and non-verbal. As an integrational approach to the study of communication rejects the existence of language as a study object of importance in itself, anti-psychiatry rejects the study of a segregated psychology. Communication can, in both approaches, be regarded as the ongoing processes of contextualization that both contextualizes and recontextualizes meaning in the continuous birth and rebirth of the context. Signs are in both discourses stated as the products of communication as it is happening and not as structures underlying society. Signs are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions. The functions are bound to the integration of past, present and supposed future experience of what we are trying to do. This approach is relevant to the study of Aspergerstudents as a prerequisite for the premises of a new study. Leaving behind a structuralist approach to language and communication, communication is set free from language and can involve various sign forms linguistic or non-linguistic. An important point is the consideration of communication’s creativity so that talk of ‘‘right or ‘‘wrong’’ interpretation evaporates. Meaning belongs only to the situation. This will help one to orient an effective approach towards an integrational study and to avoid structuralist mythologies and other systems of beliefs. An explicit discussion of the hegemonies of beliefs in study designs, research topics and perspective setting in analysis is inevitable within the field of integrationism. I will try not to start in the middle of the battlefield, but should warn that any discussion of research discourse and methodology automatically leads to the drawing of a sword following an integrational tradition (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b). Three fundamental questions guide this study: – How can we design an integrational psychology to explore how youngsters diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome integrate their understandings of learning and sociability? – What do we need to know more about in order to deal with an Asperger-diagnosed subject in order to examine him through texts and conversations in educational contexts so that we can state a researchable integrational approach? – How can an integrational approach – focusing on lack of interaction and understanding oneself contribute to analyzing the challenge Asperger youngsters face every day? Framework for harmonizing integrational description with an integrational case-study. I generally question how we may apply an integrational approach and how we may address the integration of understandings in a study in order to reach for intervention sometime in the future. Knowing that the project is ambitious but necessary I work with an ongoing two-faced discussion: My methods, in order to discuss integrational assumptions on how to treat communication studies according to Roy Harris. How to harmonize integrationism with the thought of an applied field: What is science and knowledge to the integrationist? My main questions on examining communicational premises in practice among Aspergers are: How do Asperger-individuals experience communication? How do Asperger-individuals’ understandings manifest themselves in written sources and in interaction studies?
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The study covers difficulties in communication and focuses upon: To what extent are the difficulties in communication due to understandings of context? How can an integrational approach examine Asperger-individuals’ understandings of communicational premises? How may we as integrationists approach and analyze the understandings manifested or referred to by Aspergerindividuals? 2. From clinical psychology to an integrational psychology Aspergers syndrome is one diagnosis within the autistic spectrum diagnoses. Clinical studies and its literature, often call it mild Autism. Still, those suffering with Aspergers share many of the same symptoms as general Autism. Aspergers is a lifelong disorder, a dysfunctional disturbance characterized by repetitive action patterns and a lack of interest either in creative play or general social surroundings (Asperger and Kanner, 1996). Typical symptoms are eye-gaze, facial expression and characteristic body posture. The behavior of those with Aspergers, according to clinical literature, seem strange to normal persons. They avoid eye-contact in social gatherings and they often avoid responding when addressed (Ochs et al., 2005, pp. 574–575). They are overall described as intelligent people driven by habits. The academic literature on the subject has typically been interested in Aspergers syndrome clinically and only so far as it relates to Autism developing the Theory of mind and the term Mindblindness (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Frith, 2003). However, we cannot know or explain all aspects of Aspergers or Autism from clinical data alone. Swedish Petra Bjöne’s Ph.D. thesis A possible World: Autism from Practice to Theory (2007) describes and discusses the life world of the autistic child qualitatively. Björne places Autism within the field of cognitive psychology. Björne’s alternative placement of Aspergers outside the strict clinical field is especially interesting for me, since I consider the syndrome to be primarily a communication problem concerning contextualization of self-understanding. In order to achieve better lives for those who understand life differently (and also to reduce psychiatric cases), an integrational framework for analysis is needed that lifts Autism out of psychiatry and into the field of language psychology. 3. Human psychology and communicational behavior Some basic behavioral strategies are expected in any face to face interaction. Strategies for behavior are presumed by agents as a basic implicit understanding of a general human psychology through the manifestation of habitual behavior. The strategy for question–answer treatment and responsivity can be produced in many creative ways by different participants in any given situation. This behavior and its participants’ creativity has been widely documented by Conversation Analysis practitioners (Drew and Heritage, 1992; Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997). The study of a general human psychology of strategies of behavior was already described by William James in his Principles of Psychology in 1890. On the theme of Habit we regard it as natural for humans to act in certain strategic ways because it is within our common nature. When a baby cries we know it needs something, though we may not know exactly what it is (James, 1980, vol. 2, chapter XIX). The case of Autism challenges our very basic assumptions on human behavior since autistic individuals do not share this conventional stimulus of need and response statements (Ochs et al., 2005). Their behavior therefore poses a problem in the linguistic context for the presumed normal people in concrete situations as much as for the autistic person himself. He has trouble integrating himself and we have trouble integrating him in a habitual communicational psychological set-up. 4. Aspergers’ retold responses in communication situations in the class room This study draws upon observations made in environments where Asperger-students are taught in project classes or coached by teachers individually. How do Asperger-individuals experience communication? During a recent visit to a school that educates young boys with Aspergers syndrome in computer programming, I realized that the students in the classroom on several occasions made comments to one another about how they understood the context of their communication. For example, one student explicitly told another when something was meant to be regarded as funny to offer him the opportunity to laugh with him. Comments were made and witnessed from a perspective exterior to their own. This points to the case that these students appear to be trained in self-observation. Training in self-observation is definitively absent at conventional schools save for the project schools where Asperger-students are integrated in the classroom with ordinary students. I visited a school where they educate youngsters with Aspergers syndrome on revalidation to work as computer programmers with special talents – an initiative funded with both public and private money. On the school programme syllabus is the subject ‘communication’. In this class, the students learn about ‘‘other people’s’’ basic expectations with communication through open group reflection with the entire class. Eight persons participated in the class I observed as a silent spectator. I observed the class as if it were a focused interview, where I did not conduct an investigation but answered my own questions of interest through their comments, which I noted down. The group had to agree on which material on Autism
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and Aspergers syndrome they wanted to work with and discuss this Spring. They those the book I’m special: Introducing Children and Young People to their Autistic Spectrum Disorder by Peter Vermeulen (2000). In class, the teacher explained that 80% of their communication is non-verbal, which is why the Asperger-students must learn to show their understandings explicitly, for example, by looking at their conversation partners when wanting to show that they understand the task they are discussing or being instructed to perform. ‘‘We look at each other when we understand’’, the teacher pointed out. Overall, I experienced a great interest from the Aspergers side to know more about how their performance seemed to others. They also, perhaps surprisingly, joked about what people thought of them and how they then could possibly respond to each other and their surroundings. I found this interesting and it dovetailed nicely with the observations and questions from Roy Harris’ paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (2008) which I shall deal with shortly. The teacher treated the jokes with a friendly ironic comment ‘‘You don’t actually know how to do that’’. A comment to which one of the youngsters – the most talkative – responded: ‘‘Well, then I don’t know how to be a proper Asperger either’’. He gave his response an ironic tone but it led to a serious discussion of individual experiences of not being understood in an educational context. All their lives they say they have been treated as if they were ‘‘wrong’’ but left with uncertainty as to what. This socialization has lead to great insecurity and different reaction patterns such as violence and inwardness varying from person to person. When the discussion fell upon how we talk to each other the teacher asked ‘‘How do we talk to each other?’’ and a student replied that he uses what he learns in class ‘‘to better get what I want’’. In my conversations with coaches for Asperger youngsters I have noted that the coaches who have success in guiding Asperger kids tell that they agree to contextualize their interaction with the Asperger-students on common grounds – meaning that they are actively attempting to decipher the rationales of the Asperger youth into responding to any given situation. 5. Literary cases of Asperger stories – Daniel Tammet and Temple Grandin Roy Harris points out something crucial about Aspergers general lack of self-observation in his Notes and Papers 2006– 2008 in his paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (Harris, 2009a), when he discusses the case of Daniel Tammet and his biography Born on a Blue day. Harris discusses how Daniel explains not knowing that he was supposed to say an answer out loud in class, when he knew the correct answer and the teacher asked him. He kept quiet, because he already knew the answer and knew that it was correct Since Daniel already knew the answer in his mind, he saw no reason to say it aloud. He failed to understand that he was expected to inform his teacher of information irrelevant to himself, but relevant to the linguistic context of the teaching situation. The teacher considered Daniel non-responsive and therefore unwilling to answer, a misinterpretation we can attribute to Daniel’s lack of understanding of the teaching context. Daniel did in fact answer (and answered correctly), but only in his mind and not aloud in the classroom (Tammet, 2006). Harris notes that Daniel tells that he understood what was said to him. In other words he did not fail to understand the words of the linguistic context with which he was presented in school by the teachers. Later, he reflects that he failed to understand what was expected of him, just as the autistic diagnose foresaw. Meaning, he did not understand and respond to the functions of basic turn-taking rules. This is a problem to the integrationist since he hereby integrates himself in a way which produces an inappropriate situation for himself as well as for his teacher. However, his diagnosis does not include reflection upon the past, since it isolates situations and segregates the behavior of the Asperger from his contextualization over time. The lack of responsivity described by the clinical psychologists must be reconsidered as Aspergers’ responses are investigated in an integrational perspective. My observations suggest that Asperger-students respond when addressed in appropriate relevant ways introducing contextualization as a tool in analysis. Responselessness, then can be treated in relation to context understandings and earlier supposed non-responsive behavior can be reconsidered and treated as a chosen – though silent – strategy for engaging in initiative-response sequences – not as an inability – when guiding Aspergers. This Roy Harris made me realize when reading his paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ (2008). How do Asperger-individuals’ understandings manifest themselves in written sources and in interaction studies? Asperger-individuals behave like ordinary individuals linguistically, since there are no delays or repetitions in their language ability (Ochs et al., 2005; Frith, 2003), but because they behave differently they are viewed as responseless in their communication practice just as the above clinical description and Harris’ example with Tammet demonstrates for us. Asperger-individuals do not respond as we expect them to. The different response which could be avoiding to engage in the rules of speech acts (Searle, 1969) can be covered and documented by methods of the CA discourse studies (Pomertantz and Fehr 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1992; and others) and treated by pragmatic studies as a failure, an impairment, an anti-accountability. Not responding to a question with an answer or not responding to a teaching session as a student is considered incorrect. This common belief and view of communication, I claim, often results in misunderstandings and poses problems for Aspergers like the case of Daniel Tammet. The problem might be accounted for in our traditional view on language. Let us presume this be the case. To what extent are the communicative difficulties due to understandings of context? Harris points out that the response problem cannot be treated by a traditional linguist who would consider the linguistic syntax said aloud in a classroom or in Daniel Tammet’s mind in his story and conclude that there is no linguistic problem. But
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for an integrationist, there is still a problem to consider since Daniel did not achieve a communicational goal to address the needs of the situation of stimulus and response within a teaching session. Moreover, after such an episode the teacher might consider him to be strange and therefore not pursue the issue further because of this lack of expected behavior (Harris, 2009a). The problem is whose problem it is. Harris’ remark on the problematic assumption of the traditional linguistic perception of language and communication not being able to identify a linguistic problem here is interesting but can be somewhat covered with contemporary methods from CA and Speech Act Theory looking at the interaction and locating that something is not treated correctly (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1992; Searle, 1969). To me, the interesting and crucial fact that Harris points to was that Daniel himself reflected upon his practice seen in a past-tense perspective. Why else tell the story of the inside of an autistic mind? So I kept looking for further signs of self-reflection as a case. Asperger biographer Temple Grandin has published various books, one commented on by Oliver Sacks (1996). Grandin’s storytelling shows the same reflection on her own communicative practice. She describes her childhood as difficult in the same way Danieldoes. She also describes how she received a great deal of help from a sympathetic teacher who acted as her mentor and helped her to improve self-reflection – a skill she credits with helping her become proficient at integrating her ability and knowledge of thinking in pictures and not marginalizing herself in society (Grandin, 2006, 2008). Segregational psychiatrists who measure by isolated observations and medical presumptions alone have dominated the discussion of autistic people; looking at communication engagements as ongoing contextualizing process (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a) would entail significantly different treatment and enhance integration of autistic people’s own understandings in research designs. Asperger-individuals behave differently yes, but they also reflect upon their experiences with communication and social play later on which gives us good reason to coach them in their studies and to help more of them complete their education and thereby develop their skills. I found it inevitable not to explore Daniel Tammet’s case of self reflection further. As Roy Harris remarks the problem cannot be localized within the traditional beliefs of linguistics and communication studies merely because the focus does not seek to explain the engagement; it is simply different than integration of understandings and thus contextualization. Due to completely different response-patterns or an actual lack of response to basic needs of communication engagement which need fulfillment, the autistic person remains a mystery to many people who fail to understand his lifeworld (Frith, 2003) – but not to the integrationist. Nevertheless, we still need to determine the extent to which context-understanding can be analyzed.
6. An Asperger-student’s self-reflection: his own rationale My own claim is that many Asperger-youngsters who are considered to respond incorrectly are themselves aware of why they do not respond correctly simply because they do not conform to the common nature of communication in the class room. One Asperger-student I coached said that he did not participate in discussions in class when he felt the other students did not seem to invest intellectually in the discussions. He felt the level was below his interest of discussion and thus participation. So he saw no reason to participate – it was not because he could not. He could not bring himself to do it, due to his own unfulfilled personal standards of attention. He provided me with other examples in which his strategies proved less successful. For example he told me that he had trouble with his physics teacher who assumed he did not pay attention in class when looking down at the table. The boy did not care much for numbers and physics but after we attempted a new social– survival response strategy (i.e. not to actually get him more interested but simply to get the teacher to think that he was paying attention, whether or not he cared about math). He was to look up strategically in class, without making eye-contact with the teacher (eye-contact made him uncomfortable) and to indicate that he was paying attention instead by wiggling his ears when the teacher addressed him. He tried the new strategy and gladly came back and told me that it had worked. He benefitted from indicating his attention strategically. Nonconformity with basic interaction-rules is not considered normal – but is it a disease as stated by clinical psychology and psychiatric discourse? I believe the Asperger’s contextualization holds a new answer to this when treated as a topic in communication studies. How can an integrational approach examine the Asperger-individuals’ understandings of communicational premises? I learned here and from observing the class that although we can state an integrational approach and engage in a theoretical discussion on which questions to pose, it is also necessary in a case-study to incorporate common beliefs and myths in our guidance – not to understand the phenomena we describe, but to treat the challenges people with communicational disorders face in their daily lives. We all live in a world of structuralist hegemony after all. The beauty of it is that though Asperger-students appear to be super-structuralists to whom you can teach the rules of speech acts, they also prove structuralism a false assumption on how communication actually operates in the real world, since no signs can function as ‘‘contextneutral’’ (Harris, 2009b, p. 97). What Aspergers fail to understand when not trained in self reflection is the non-rule guided free flow of human communication, what we refer to with the poetic terms of intuition or sense of situation. The rules they learn do not always work because situations cannot be calculated. Their case and communication strategies are highly relevant to integrationists. Guidance is needed since they suffer misunderstandings from traditional linguistic surroundings, which frequently fail to understand why they have difficulty with ‘‘common interaction’’. My observations confirm the case Harris points out that Aspergers do reflect on their own communicative engagement habits and social practice as in the examples of Daniel Tammet and Temple Grandin. When encouraged by the teacher to
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reflect upon their understandings and their interaction responses with others, the youngsters I observed in class did enthusiastically express a high level of self-reflection through conversational meta-comments. How may we as integrationists approach and analyze the understandings manifested or referred to by Aspergerindividuals? It is interesting to note that the Asperger youngsters I have dealt with myself as a mentor have told me that they most certainly had a rationale of their own in their response actions. At first, I thought it was extraordinary but Harris’ pointing at the Daniel Tammet-case refuted my experience, so I kept investigating the case of self-reflection. In conclusion, we need to state a clear integrational approach to the study of Asperger-individual’s communication and analyze their understandings manifested in various sources using interactionist tools to register data applying an integrational approach to the study of communication and examining contextualization as a main purpose. It makes no sense seen from an integrational point of view to try to measure Aspergers’ responselessness as a simple impairment, if we regard communication as a continuous process that includes sign statements, both verbal and non-verbal. This would contradict the assessment presupposed by clinical diagnosis. The only thing they impair is common nature because they do not agree to it. That appears to be their main rationale and thus contextualization. Seen from an integrational point of view, common nature as studied and considered in interaction studies, could well be confused with the reproduction of cultural mythologies produced by structuralist hegemony of common beliefs on language. Signs, as a study object, are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions for somebody and thus the study object has switched from language itself to the contextualization of someone. Language itself is of no special importance, since it only seems to exist segregated, isolated from real communication processes, by the linguists ruling the academic world. That is not the case. I shall return to this discussion briefly. Common nature here is for the integrationist nothing more than the speech community’s rules, finely overviewed by Grice and Searle and most explicitly described in Logic of Conversation (Grice, 1975) and Speech Acts (Searle, 1969). But those ‘‘rules’’ of common communicational nature rely on the acceptance of the existence of a structualist linguistic reality, a nature of structure invented by Saussure (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b) and not on true contextualization that takes place in a reality with real problems as explained in an integrational perspective (Harris, 1996, 1998, 2009a,b). A good idea for any researcher, teacher or coach for that matter would be to start by talking with the Asperger-individual and asking him what he has experienced and how he organizes his rationales for acting the way he does. In this way, one can discuss with him exactly what he can gain from different strategies. These conversations may perhaps be recorded for further study using CA-tools. But when conclusions are made they must be drawn from an integrational perspective to avoid the trap of structualist thought in order to help teachers and coaches prepare to face Asperger-students in a humane way. 7. A new science or a new scientific discourse? In order to examine how an integrational study within this field may be designed, I ask the questions – What is science to the integrationist? What is knowledge to the integrationist? These two questions are fundamental to almost all aspects of any integrational consideration; understanding science, verbalization, framing, communication and thus communicational problems. The integrational frame as a frame of science is presented to create an evidence based foundation for an integrational case-study. 8. Aspergers syndrome reconsidered Signs in an integrational framework presuppose that somebody is engaged in doing something involving sign-production. Thus, identification and interpretation have a facilitating function in order for someone to achieve some proficiency or response by doing so: ‘‘Basic axioms of integrational semiology are: 1. What constitutes a sign is not given independently of the situation in which it occurs or of its material manifestation in that situation. 2. The value of a sign (i.e. signification) is a function of the integrational proficiency which its identification and interpretation presuppose.’’ (Harris, 1996, p. 154). Harris thus argues that meaning is created in the process of integrating signs. From here we may conclude that seen from an integrational perspective cases involving individuals with Aspergers syndrome necessarily must include those persons and their own understandings, unless we want to limit ourselves to interpreting our own understandings of discourse and our own experiences. Consequently, we may conclude that this goes well with the above axioms considering that a sign’s value is a function of an actual integrational process that inevitably belongs to a situation and individual’s integrational activity and not to the language and discourse itself – this would be non-sense to the integrationist. Signs are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions. The functions are bound to the integration of past, present and supposed future experience of what we are trying to do (Harris, 1996, p. 154). Meaning, as a result, belongs wholly to the situation. In this context, an integrational study challenges the way Autism and Aspergers syndrome is considered conventionally in academia. As mentioned, Swedish Björne deals with the experiences of the autistic child pointing to the case that clinical discourse does not include a possible self for the autistic person but rather reduces the autistic person to a person with limited abilities,
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Fig. 1.
a person with impaired skills and thus a person who is less proficient for example at communicating. Björne’s placement of Aspergers outside the arguably strict clinical field is writing itself into an alternative scientific discourse and therefore is an interesting perspective, since it like I in my project considers the syndrome to be primarily a communication problem concerning contextualization of self-understanding. The autistic person has trouble integrating himself and we have trouble integrating him in a habitual communicational psychological set-up – how then should Autism be described and treated? Cambridge professor Simon Baron-Cohen aims to investigate and understand the biomedical aspects of Autism according to the mission statement of the Autism research centre at Cambridge University http://www.Autismresearchcentre.com/arc/default.asp (last visited June 6th 2010): An examination of the ARC-homepage illustrates that the clinical discourse on Autism is communicated within the discourse of neuroscience – a third Autism Neuroscience Conference is announced to be coming up in September. Autism is formulated as a ‘‘condition’’ rather than a challenge and the ARC states that the condition can be dealt with through ‘‘new and validated methods for assessment and intervention’’ worked out by the ARC that will ‘‘foster collaboration between scientists in Cambridge University and outside, to accelerate this mission’’ – which again is – to understand and investigate the biomedical causes of Autism spectrum conditions. The whole linguistic discourse is focused on something more closely associated with brain surgery embedded smoothly in conventional scientific oriented syntax based on words such as ‘‘condition’’, ‘‘validated’’, ‘‘methods’’, ‘‘assessment’’, ‘‘intervention’’, ‘‘foster’’, ‘‘collaboration’’, ‘‘scientists’’ then to be action packed with Frankensteinian vocabulary where they will ‘‘foster’’ (collaboration) and we end up on the race track where they will ‘‘accelerate this mission’’. This is something far away from the daily problems facing high school boys diagnosed with Aspergers syndrome that I have worked with, and their teachers. The above linguistic discourse is relevant as a scientific approach in which Autism is placed as a neurological issue. This placement is a dominant one in Autism research but it must be said that this approach can be considered to be a function of a certain discourse, the clinical discourse, and not the ‘whole truth’ of Aspergers syndrome. Daniel Tammet’s biography Born on a Blue day (2006) which Harris deals with and comments in his Notes and Papers (2008) has a foreword written by Cambridge expert and director Simon Baron-Cohen, confirming that Daniel’s case is rare as he validates that Daniel’s synaesthesia gives him rich textured, multi-sensory forms of memory, and his Autism gives him the narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns (Tammet 2007: foreword by Simon Baron-Cohen). I consider the foreword interesting as an example of linguistic enhancement of the clinical scientific discourse dominating what is considered to be the scientific field of Autism in psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience. What Simon Baron-Cohen seems to be doing is the act of validating the content of the book with a clinical discursive frame. It is interesting to question the meaning of ‘‘rich textured, multi-sensory forms of memory’’ and a ‘‘narrow focus on number and syntactic patterns’’ – Are we to understand that Baron-Cohen and his ‘science’ can look into Daniels brain through his words and see a more richly textured memory than he can do normally by ‘beaming himself’ into other people’s memories? And how can a memory be textured? From where does Baron-Cohen know this neuro-exotic information about Daniels brain – from reading his biography?
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9. An integrational study of Autism and Aspergers syndrome – a new scientific discourse? How does the integrational approach to science apply to create an evidence basis for an integrational case-study involving Asperger-individuals and their teachers? What is science? – this fundamental question I must consider and discuss in the construction of my applied research design since integrational linguistics is mainly a theoretical approach to the study of communication and thus of science. I find support in Adrian Pablé’s consideration that the question of reality and the real can be treated as a macrosocial abstraction (Pablé, 2011). In wanting to design an applied integrational frame I have little to lean on. How then would the integrationist consider and discuss the research in a case-study? In The Semantics of Science (2005) Roy Harris deals with science as a supercategory.: ‘‘(. . .) supercategories such as science, art, religion, and history are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language dependent. But they do not all come to be construed in the same way. That is why it is worth paying attention to the linguistic process involved in each individual development. (. . .) The basic function of a supercateory is to integrate what would otherwise be separate activities and inquiries; and the result of that integration is to re-draw the map of the intellectual world that society as a whole adopts’’ (Harris, 2005, p. xi). Harris distinguishes various categories from one another to clarify how science as any supercategory can be considered and thus treated as a verbal construct of the organization of society. This constructivist perspective suggests that it may change over time. The above approach to science stated by Harris is highly relevant to my study of cases involving individuals with Autism and Aspergers syndrome because I aim to change the way we consider Autism and Aspergers syndrome within society. Autism research is mainly dominated by clinical psychology and a clinical diagnostic discourse. This discourse is thus regarded as the science within the field and thus treatment and integration of autistic individuals in school systems is drawn from the findings in clinical psychology and a clinical diagnostic discourse. From my own experience in dealing with Aspergers students and listening to their thoughts and rationales of their communicational integrational problems I have come to believe that Autism research should be reconsidered and that autistic cases should be discussed and treated differently. This could lead to enhancing integration in – for example school contexts – but also throughout dealing with autistic conditioned persons in general as human beings that one can communicate with in various forms. This kind of enhancement cannot be met by relying on clinical standards. I have experienced teachers’ misinterpretation of students due to the dominance of the clinical way of verbalizing and framing the case of Autism and Aspergers. People too simply assume that they are to understand something specific when dealing with autistic individuals and often fail to integrate the individuals due to instructed presumptions of what they think they ought to understand, rather than understanding what is ‘understandable’ in the actual situation. In order to operate Harris’ science approach as he views science as a verbal construct belonging to a super-category in society, I deal with science as a discursive matter. As mentioned above Autism research is dominated by a certain approach to science. Since I wish to explore an alternative approach I need to consider the different ways in which a super-category such as science can be expressed. I name the sub-categorical level a discursive level. I deal with discourses as verbalizations that frame certain windows through which we can consider the world, the agents in it and their activities with each other. According to my interpretation of Harris, a certain scientific discourse as well as its overall categorization – the supercategory of science as a whole – requires the linguistic support of a specific terminology. What is verbalized are the rules that exist that are supported by a community’s terminology. When such terminology is deployed, on a cross-disciplinary basis, by many practitioners, with a certain regularity and assurance as the dominant form of discourse and is not challenged by an integrational (or any other) way of speaking of Autism and Aspergers syndrome then that discourse will be adopted by large communities in society, including the individuals being diagnosed. That clinical discourse then determines how people treat autistic individuals and may also lead to problems with their self-perception because we tend to experience and treat them in a certain way that makes them different. Such one-sidedness may lead to discrepancies in self-understanding and forced integration of activities that individuals do not agree to, though this discussion will not be further elaborated on within the scope of this paper. Most interesting to my project is the goal of the integrational approach that is to see science as discourses that may be facilitated by adopting new ways of speaking about certain topics, hence they operate by integration. Regarding the cases of Autism and Aspergers syndrome it is interesting to see that Asperger biographers are adopting the clinical discourse (Tammet, 2009, Grandin, 2006) in order to integrate themselves as somebody in a scientific discourse – as the clinical discourse is placed in a higher ranking than their own stories. My claim is that integrating the clinical discourse may not help Aspergerindividuals solve their communicational problems, since the diagnostic method is consistently seen from an outwardly fixative perspective. However, I do understand why they try to integrate themselves in the clinical discourse. Also it is interesting to consider, that they thereby show an ability to recognize categories and preferred discourses, stating a social proficiency in doing so, that is in fact challenging the content of the diagnosis they have been given in that same discourse. For the integrationist, science has nothing to do with attempts to fixate meaning in the integrationist case nor in the approach to sense-making (Harris, 1996, 1998, Toolan, 1996). How does the integrational approach to knowledge apply to an analysis of Asperger-individuals’ problems in communication? Harris presents his understanding of knowledge in After Epistemology (2009b) drawing upon his Notes on The integrational Conception of the Sign (2008). Knowledge and communication do not, according to Harris, refer to a specific form but may
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apply to any communicable knowledge – cognitive or practical. This broad framing of knowledge as human communicative activity through sign-use and tool-use for sign-making is the theoretical basis of my project to explore and understand why teachers and Asperger-students experience communicational problems. Asperger-diagnosed students, first of all, must be recognized as social agents similar to ordinary students otherwise we start out presupposing a clinical discourse which may describe but not necessarily deal with the people the project involves. As Roy Harris points out in After Epistemology (2009b) it is evident that we understand and treat knowledge about the world, both – our own and others, whether they are lay persons or academics – as inseparable from the experience of ‘‘life’’ – Furthermore, that applies to the things we all encounter in real life situations, including the experience of engaging in communication and integrating activities with other persons that we deal with as human beings. By integration I suggest involving the Asperger-persons and their own integration of activities in a case-study. Through analyzing how they experience communication and integration I will describe the discourse they themselves formulate to deal with the problems they experience. This path to discovery is necessary in order to create an evidence based frame for an integrational case-study. One might say that it explores a new way of explaining integrationist science and scientific discourse. 10. Integrating the data I intend to include every aspect from past experience to observations, literary cases, theoretical and methodological discussions, the framework for analysis and project planning.
Mentorship. Field notes from observations. Asperger biographies. Approaches in theory and methodology. Data analysis. Data collection and status.
As one example, Roy Harris points out something crucial about Aspergers’ general lack of self-observation in the paper ‘‘Integrating Autism’’ in Notes and Papers 2006–2008 (Harris, 2009a), when he discusses the case of the before mentioned biographer Daniel Tammet and his biography Born on a Blue day. Harris discusses how Daniel explains not knowing that he was supposed to say an answer out loud in class, when he knew the correct answer and the teacher asked him. Aspergers not included? Later as noted above, Daniel reflects that he failed to understand what was expected of him, just as the autistic clinical diagnosis foresaw. His diagnosis does not include reflection upon the past, since it isolates situations and segregates the behavior of the Asperger from his contextualization over time. The lack of responsivity described by the clinical psychologists must be reconsidered as Aspergers’ responses are investigated in an integrational perspective. My observations integrated with this example of discrepancy suggest that Asperger-students response introduce the integrational account for contextualization as a tool for analysis that can address problems that traditional linguistic cannot even identify. Turning the topic into contextualization, responselessness can then be treated in relation to contextual understandings and previously assumed, non-responsive behavior can be reconsidered and treated as a chosen – though silent – strategy for engaging in initiative-response sequences, not as an inability, when guiding Aspergers. It was Roy Harris who introduced me to this realization, after reading his paper Integrating Autism (2009a). The problem is – Whose problem is it? Harris’s remarks on the problematic assumption of the traditional linguistic perception of language and communication not being able to identify a linguistic problem here is interesting but can be somewhat covered with contemporary methods from CA and Speech Act Theory, which look at the interaction and locating of something not treated correctly (Pomerantz and Fehr, 1997; Drew and Heritage, 1993; Searle, 1969). To me, the interesting and crucial fact that Harris points to was that Daniel himself reflected upon his practice seen in a past-tense perspective. Asperger-individuals reflect upon their experiences with communication and social play which indicates a good reason to coach them to help more of them complete their education and develop their skills. The rules they learn do not always work because situations cannot be calculated. Thus their case and communication strategies are highly relevant to integrationists. Guidance is needed since they suffer misunderstandings from traditional linguistic surroundings, which frequently fail to understand why they have difficulty with ‘‘common interaction’’. It is interesting to note that they form their own rationale for contextualization. Common nature could then well be confused with the mere reproduction of cultural mythologies produced by a structuralist hegemony of common beliefs on language. 11. Concluding remarks I started out by drawing upon anti-psychiatry to state a different research design, an alternative to the psychiatric discourse that directs most studies on Autism and Aspergers. Björne’s thesis on Autism within cognitive psychology inspired
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me along with Harris’ notes on integrating Autism to design a study that can contribute to change the discourse of casestudies on Autism and Aspergers syndrome. It makes no sense seen from an integrational point of view to try to measure Aspergers’ responselessness as a simple impairment, like clinical psychology does. If we instead apply an understanding of communication as a continuous process that includes sign statements, both verbal and non-verbal – this would contradict the assessment presupposed by clinical diagnosis and thus create a whole new science of Autism where there is no status for signs. Signs, as a study object, are only interesting to the integrationist in relation to their functions for somebody and thus the study object has switched from language itself to the contextualization of someone. My claim is that integrating clinical discourse may not help Asperger-individuals solve their communicational problems since this diagnostic method is always considered from an outward fixative perspective. Instead, a discourse should be described as formulated by the Aspergers themselves in order to help them solve their problems in communication. As set out in the whole of the integrationist case and its approach to the making of sense introduced in this paper referring to the basic axioms of sign value (Harris, 1996, 1998, Toolan, 1996) and the integrationist approach to science and knowledge (Harris, 2005, 2009b) – for the integrationist, science should not attempt fixation of meaning but deal with integrational activity processes rather than outward descriptions. This essay only states the preliminaries of a study that draws the outline for my pioneering work on integrational psychology. I thank Professor Roy Harris for his great inspiration that continues to grow through my continuous reading of his many thought-provoking books on integrationism. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his help and valuable insight. References Asperger, Hans, Kanner, Leo, 1996. Hans Asperger & Leo Kanner. Videnscenter for Autisme, Fritz Grafisk, København (Copenhajen). Baron-Cohen, S., 1995. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and the Theory of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge. Björne, Petra, 2007. A Possible World: Autism from Practice to Theory, Cognitive Science. Lund University, Lund. Drew, Paul, Heritage, John (Eds.), 1992. Talk at Work: Interaction in Institutional Settings. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Frith, Uta, 2003. Autism: Explaining the Enigma, second ed. Blackwell, Oxford. Grandin, Temple, 2006. Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, second ed. Vintage Books, New York. Grandin, Temple, 2008. The Way I See It: A Personal Look at Autism and Aspergers. Future Horizons, Arlington. Grice, H.P., 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts, vol. 3. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41–58. Harris, Roy, 1996. Signs, Language and Communication. Routledge, London. Harris, Roy, 1998. Introduction to Integrational Linguistics. Pergamon, Oxford. Harris, Roy, 2005. The Semantics of Science. Continuum, London. Harris, Roy, 2009a. Integrationist Notes and Papers 2006–2008. Bright Pen, Gamlingay. Harris, Roy, 2009b. After Epistemology. Bright Pen, Gamlingay. James, William, 1980. The Principles of Psychology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Laing, Ronald D., 1967. Persons and experience. In: The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Penguin Books, Middlesex. Ochs, Elinor, Solomon, Olga, Sterponi, Laura, 2005. Limitations and transformations of habitus in child-directed Communication. Discourse Studies 7 (4–5), 547–583. Pablé, Adrian, 2011. Integrating the ‘real’. Language Sciences 33 (1), 20–29. Pomerantz, A., Fehr, B.J., 1997. Conversational analysis: an approach to the study of social action as sense making practices. In: van Dijk, T.A. (Ed.), Discourse as Social Interaction. Sage Publications, London, pp. 64–91. Sacks, Oliver, 1996. An Anthropologist from Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. Vintage. Searle, J.R., 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Tammet, Daniel, 2006. Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Tammet, Daniel, 2007. Born on a Blue day. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Tammet, Daniel, 2009. Embracing the Wide Sky. Hodder & Stoughton, London. Toolan, Michael, 1996. Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.
Film Family Life directed by Ken Loach, EMI films (1971).