Students with Autism: How to Improve Language, Literacy and Academic Success - by Katharine Beals (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Beals describes the root causes of the language and learning challenges in autism, their various academic consequences, and a variety of tools and strategies for addressing them. Drawing on what the most current evidence shows about the nature of autism and which therapies are most successful, the book discusses the implications for autism-friendly instruction in academic subjects, noting the ways in which today's classrooms come up short, and suggesting various adjustments that teachers can make. Instead of focusing on social and behavioral issues, general accommodations, and general ways to address learning difficulties, Beals zeros in on academics, on accommodations within specific academic subjects, and on techniques that target autism-specific deficits, situating the issue of educational access within the broader context of disability rights, neurodiversity, and debates about what disability rights and neurodiversity should encompass. Complete acceptance of individuals on the autism spectrum must include complete educational access. This means rethinking assumptions about autistic students, about how we teach expressive language, about how we teach reading comprehension, and about what and how we teach in the many K-12 classrooms attended by autistic students.

Review Quotes

"Finally,
a book with a truly comprehensive focus on autism-friendly curriculum and
instruction, rather than another re-hash of how to create an autism-friendly
classroom! Beals provides
the best description
of teaching language and cognition to children
and adults with autism I have seen to date. I heartily recommend her
book to all autism ABA practitioners."
Kent Johnson, Founder & Executive Director, Morningside
Academy

About the Author

Katharine Beals is the author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School. She has a PhD in linguistics and is an adjunct professor in the Autism Program at the Drexel University School of Education, where she designed two of the program's five courses.

She also teaches courses on autism at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in language and literacy acquisition in autism, language technologies for autistic individuals, educational challenges for students with autism, and the problems with Facilitated Communication as an intervention in autism.

She is a contributor at FacilitatedCommunication.org and also an autism parent.