By Sarah Healy, ILS Coordinator CLE Rockville
Our community of students, tutors, mentors, career development and independent living instructors all come from diverse backgrounds and CLE embraces our differences. All of our teaching and support is individualized to meet the needs of each student. We recognize their differences and change the way we teach. By finding ways to work with our students, we emphasize their strengths and acknowledge their challenges to offer the best services we can. We have an incredibly creative, talented, and supportive team and we are constantly adapting to meet the needs of our students across all realms of services. I see this during every session at CLE, the most recent being a tutoring session I sat in on.
When I sat in on this session I was able to see neurodiversity in action. Our student was having a tough time working with his new tutor. Later, during our advising session he shared that his tutor’s teaching style was not conducive to the way he learned. I asked if he told her this, and he said he hadn’t. Asking another person for what you need and advocating for yourself is hard work. Imagine asking someone to meet your needs while having trouble with communication, social interactions, and learning challenges. During our conversation, I provided language that he could use with his tutor, and knowing that advocating for himself is a challenge, I offered to accompany him to tutoring.
Instead of expecting him to learn through traditional teaching methods I figured out his way of learning and how we can adapt to meet his unique needs. The next tutoring session was a proud and important moment for me, the student, and the tutor. With our support, he asked his tutor to adapt her approach and explained how he learns. Not only did she gain insight into his learning, the student also recognized his own differences and was able to advocate for himself and ask his tutor to meet his needs.
This is what I love about working with our students and working at CLE. When challenges arise we ask each other, “how can we support this student?” or “what can we do to meet their needs?” We don’t ask our students to change, to fit into a mainstreamed way of learning. We teach them to recognize their exceptionalities, to see that the way they learn is different, and that’s okay.
I think that is what Neurodiversity is all about; seeing these differences, embracing them, and teaching our students that it is okay to learn in a different way. Seeing and experiencing the world in a unique way should be celebrated and accepted, not changed to conform what others perceive as “normal.”
