critical pedagogy in speaking on autism

Critical Pedagogy. Term coined by education liberator Paulo Freire. (Pedagogy is a big word for teaching approach). Local good critical pedagogues the Ragged University were discussing it today. It's when the learner has just as much say as the teacher, on whether they buy what they are hearing, questioning sources, making their own judgment, it's a dialogue. If the teacher wants their view to carry they have to evidence why on its evidential merits. It's a dialogue of critical thinking. Because whenever purported information is given to you, critical thinking on its merits is always the right response. It's part of being careful.

If someone puts on a talk to tell you about autism, critical pedagogy requires that you get a decent go at discussing whatever you need to about it.

Critical pedagogy shows why it's no good to have a public talk on autism given one-sidedly, with just a few quick single questions at the end, by a set only of articulate and economically successful 20s-30s aged aspie speakers, telling their audience "autistics do this", "autistics do that", with no sources cited, no other evidence than that they personally are autistic and say so. As if they could speak for the entire spectrum, with its breadth of ability range, which clearly they can't. That type of autism promotion is not critical thinking nor subjected to critical thinking.

So watch critically the form and nature of events billed as public descriptions of autism, if you choose to go to any.

Maurice Frank

common sense asserting of your fair place socially could get you criminalised

www.change.org/p/uk-government-house-of-parliament-uk-prime-minister-reform-of-protection-from-harassment-1997-act-stop-the-wrongful-criminalisation-of-individuals-with-conditions-that-affect-social-understanding?recruiter=69061609&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=share_facebook_responsive&utm_term=des-lg-no_src-no_msg&fb_ref=Default A petition by ASSGO on the law on harrassment passed in 1997 after a media panic about stalking.

We need to be careful that able autistics have a normal citizen's capacity and hence not to lump all autistics together with learning disability and mental health in arguments about lack of insight into an action's social effects. Some actions are totally fair and logical and fall foul of PC. So I'm not wholly happy with the petition's wording. But have signed because it is an important civil liberty point for all autistics to prevent logical fair sensible actions of assertion of fair place in society, from getting classed as harrassment because a malicious person unfairly has a stronger social influence and power base.

For we already live in a time when it has become logically impossible for straight men to take any step at all towards acquiring a partner because absolutely any such action can count as an offence of sexual harrassment and get us into trouble. This at the same time as music and TV still peer pressurise for partnering. A total mixed message in the culture, saying to all straight men: we assume you have failed or are suffering unless you do something which we might charge you with harrassment if you do.

As I wrote in my submission to parliament's enquiry on loneliness: "The correct awareness of safety for women and ending a sex object view of them has led to the opposite swing of a PC presumption against men in every boundary colliding situation. Men now perceive, that in any dispute over accidental social or physical collisions, whoever actually caused them, we are the ones who are more politically convenient to blame. This has gender unequal impacts on safety of acceptance to be in social spaces, hence to feel secure in them, hence on exclusion and loneliness."

This is a strong reason why the petition is right.

Maurice Frank