Hi, I hope I'm posting this in the right place. I'm a speech therapist and the majority of my caseload consists of young children on the autistic spectrum. I have a question about ABA. Reading this board I see that many people have strong negative feelings about it. I'm interested to know what it is about ABA that autistic people tend not to like. I ask because I try very much to be respectful of my student's differences and diversity. I feel my role is in helping them learn to communicate, not to attempt to change who they are. Looking at ABA, I almost see two sides to it. There is a side that is more of a teaching method, used to teach information that any child would learn like counting, reading, etc. Then there is another side that seems more focused on trying to eliminate autistic behaviors.
I think that there are a lot of positive things about ABA as a general teaching method (for example, breaking complex learning tasks down into small, easily acquired steps, motivating students to learn, using repetition, making sure that concepts are truly mastered before moving on to new ones, presenting new concepts in a clear-cut way) combined with many negative things. So my question is, what do you think are the negatives of ABA (so that I can try to avoid them)? Or do you feel the entire method is negative in and of itself? I'm quite curious, I'd appreciate any input.
The people who speak up about ABA and admit to doing it are always the ones who say how nice and kind they are. We never hear from people who admit to using aversives, violence, and locking children in rooms.
Yet we know this happens.
Did you hear of the child killed recently during an ABA session?
Would you like to have training that aimed to remove your normal behaviours?
To use an analogy, if NTs are dogs, and autistics are cats, it would not be right to train a cat to bark, wag it's tail, and not purr. It would not be allowed.
Autistics are a minority group and should have minority rights.
We never hear from people who admit to using aversives, violence, and locking children in rooms.
Yet we know this happens.
Did you hear of the child killed recently during an ABA session?
That is horrific. To clarify, my post was not meant as a defense for ABA or a 'pro-ABA' statement. I just feel that there are lots and lots of things that are lumped together under the general title "ABA". I try to tease out the useful teaching methods from the negative aspects. Am I right to infer from you post that: 1. Aversives and 2. Suppressing autistic behaviors the biggest negatives, in your opinion?
BiddyRoy, on a side note, I have a great deal of difficultly understanding what you are saying, do others find that, or do they comprehend you well?
Just wondering.
Hi SLP
As a dsylexic person, breaking learning down into simple elements, is an understanding disaster for me: as is placing emphasis on my understanding one element before moving on to some next in a notional sequence; when I learn, I learn holistically; what I learn is very often other than what any teacher sets out to teach me.
Interesting (and, on a side note, this is probably how I would describe my own learning as well). To clarify, I got from your post that you are saying you'd learn better having something presented as a whole rather than 'built up' piece by piece. For example, if I were working on syntax with a student with a holistic learning style, it would be more helpful to present an entire sentence in context than to work on...noun...noun + verb...pronoun + noun + verb...prounoun + noun + verb + prepositional phrase...etc, etc. Or am I misinterpreting? I will have to spend some time digesting the other parts of your post, you have an interesting writing style and I want to be sure I'm understanding it correctly.
Hi Biddy Roy. I hope I'm not beating this into the ground, but I'm curious as to whether I interpreted your post correctly? Below is my understanding of what you said...
The failing with behaviouralism is simple.
Behaviour is how you are seen by others.
For anyone who is organised autonomously, as are those characterised autistically: such behaviour, while significant because the understanding of another; is very much secondary or tertiary.
The primary matter, for any person organised autistically, is their own understanding, their own subjectivity.
Behaviouralism, most anyhting cast in terms of behaviour, simply because of how it emphasises how others see a subject: actually carries an anti-autistic agenda.
So...behaviorism places a focus on outward behaviors or, more specifically, other people's perception of a person's outward behaviors. This is unlikely to be important to an autistic student, who may rely much more on their own internal understanding of a situation and place little importance on behaviors perceived by others.
This difficulty is compounded for the autistic, because the difficulty is mediated syntactically. A world composed on a behaviourl basis, has a syntax which subverts autistic occurrence.
What exactly does 'mediated syntactically' mean, in this sense?
I can experience the behavioural as abusive, and always as an exigency. I want in no way to be conditioned by any collective: I regulate my relations and interactions with others, on the basis of a personally autonomous ethicality; what the collective feels is simply environmental data, not something I would let influence me.
By this I'm reading that you're describing what I've heard a lot of concern over, i.e., behavioralism being used to condition 'appropriate' behaviors as defined by a portion of society.
Conception for an autistically organised person is, I think, something of a whole person action: a whole person action which mediates their person and world; where the fulcrum of this is a radical subjectivity, but a subjectivity capable of encompassing as much as needs to be encompassed.
The autistically organised person has, if undamaged, something of a feral basis to their occurrence: it's them and the universe of things, and a very personal journey, where things come into being in conception and understanding.
So, an autistic student will see things from their own unique perspective, and through this same unique perspective will interact with the world and learn about the world?
The behavioural seems based on some other understanding: where what some notional collective experience and understand is, is some datum, some neurotypical normal; where behaviourally grounded education seems intent on leading all children towards this collective understanding.
The trouble is, I think, when viewed from an autistic point of view: that collective understanding is so very often wrong, biased, partial; simply something of an arbitrary ideology in fact.
That ideology reflects some dominant world: and it may serve some constituency of the neurotypical well enough; but, for autistically organised and characterised subjects, such understanding can be profoundly harmful.
The difficulty in discerning this harm, beyond a general exclusion of autistic understanding, is that the harm is mediated syntactically.
So again, if I'm reading this right, looking at the harm in trying to shape 'appropriate' behaviors based on some arbitrary idea of appropriateness. And FYI, I strongly agree with this. I'm curious, though, as to whether you feel this applies to behavioralism in the use of shaping 'appropriate' social behaviors, or also in the use of ABA methods to teach academic skills such as learning to read, where you're looking at the acquisition of a skill as opposed to social behaviors. I guess that is the essence of what I'm trying to understand here. I fully agree that behavioralism should not be used to 'train' 'appropriate' behaviors. I'm uncertain as to how I feel about ABA being used to teach specific academic concepts though, if you hypothetically eliminate the whole 'appropriateness' thing.
Biddyroy - does not compute.
Cannot understand.
End transmission.
No offence.
Hi again Biddy Roy,
Thanks for your response. I will need to re-read again later today but I think I got about 50% of it. Like I said, I'll have to re-read, but I think the mental exercise is a good thing!
If you're not tiring of replying to me, could I post a more specific example of what I'm talking about and get your feedback on that? The specific example you gave for syntax was very interesting and I enjoyed seeing your opinion.
What comes to mind first as a speech therapist is the much-witnessed (by me, since I work with a lot of kids in ABA programs) method of teaching receptive vocabulary to children. I.e., the ABA therapist places a variety of items on the table and instructs "Give me the ball/apple/doll, etc.". Then maybe they move to pictures of these objects, and from their to verbally labeling these things. Any thoughts on a more appropriate way to teach this sort of thing to an autistic child? Thinking about your comment on holistic learning, maybe presenting them in context throughout the day, i.e., talking about a 'brush' when it is actually time to brush the child's hair?
Hyperlexia is a condition on the autistic spectrum -
What Is Hyperlexia?
Hyperlexia is a syndrome observed in children who have the following characteristics:
* A precocious ability to read words, far above what would be expected at their chronological age or an intense fascination with letters or numbers.
* Significant difficulty in understanding verbal language
* Abnormal social skills, difficulty in socializing and interacting appropriately with people
In addition, some children who are hyperlexic may exhibit the following characteristics:
* Learn expressive language in a peculiar way, echo ro memorize the sentence structure without understanding the meaning (echolalia), reverse pronouns
* Rarely initiates conversations
* An intense need to keep routines, difficulty with transitions, ritualistic behavior
* Auditory, olfactory and / or tactile sensitivity
* Self-stimulatory behavior
* specific, unusual fears
* Normal development until 18-24 months, then regression
* strong auditory and visual memory
* Difficulty answering "Wh--" questions, such as "what," "where," "who," and "why"
* Think in concrete and literal terms, difficulty with abstract concepts
* Listen selectively, appear to be deaf
How is Hyperlexia Defined?
Hyperlexia has characteristics similar to autism, behavior disorder, language disorder, emotional disorder, Attention Deficit Disorder, hearing impairment, giftedness or, paradoxically, mental retardation.
To develop effective teaching strategies and more typical childhood development, it is important to differentiate hyperlexia from other disorders. A thorough speech and language pathologist who is familiar with the syndrome of hyperlexia is a crucial first step. Psychological tests which emphasise visual processes rathere than verbal skills aid in identifying hyperlexia.
Hearing, neurological, psychiatric, blood chemistry and genetic evaluations can be performed to rule out other disorders but are not needed to identify hyperlexia
Biddyroy you said that you normally strive to use few words, why arent you doing that here? Is their a difference here?
If we cannot understand you then all communication is failing, we had a member who typed in text speech which was unintelligeble.
This is the same thing but on the other end of the scale.
Try this
- sort out the main ideas
- put them in as few words as possible
The hyperlexic perspective is like throwing a Bailley bridge across a chasm of some seeming confrontation.
I'm going to stray slightly off topic for a moment Biddy, as your post reminded me of something. I hope I'm not getting into stereotypes here, but one of the things I love about working with my autistic clients are there...(hmm, you could probably help as you seem to have a better vocabulary!)...peaceful, I suppose, personalities. Not that they don't become empassioned or for some of them even aggressive (usually as a substitute communicative behavior) but I've noticed that whole 'let's play war' instinct doesn't seem to be hardwired in the way it is with some of my other little boy clients. So often with little boys you put them together and two minutes later they've turned two pencils into rifles and are pretend shooting each other dead. I have been pleased to find that I've never once seen one of my autistic kiddos engage in this, their play seems to center more on analyzing and 'figuring things out', if you will. Again, not to stereotype. This has only been my personal experience but with so much violence in the world it gives me a bit of hope!
This tempts me to place even more emphasis on care, rather than education as such: where identity and self esteem become central. I suspect that there is mileage in allowing a sense of personal worth and identity to lead educational experience and attainment; rather than imagining that such sense need stem from educational attainment.
Perhaps how we best feed education into a particular autistic subject's occurrence is an inherently open matter.
Perhaps the notion of developing a theory of autistic mind, is not without merit.
Interesting. I was recently flipping through a book called Between Their World And Ours, by Karen Zelan (yes, that would be the same Karen Zelan who worked under Bruno Bettelheim but this is about her work after that period, which appears to be very dissociated from Bruno's earlier work), that seems to encompass that philosophy. Let me try to post the Amazon link here, if you care to check it out.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312313...oding=UTF8
I will have to add this to my reading list.
Crys and M,
In answer to your posts (I'm going to try to bullet point here to make this as concise as possible)...
Why I feel its important for me to learn about this: I am a speech teacher and work with mostly autistic children. ABA is pushed as the method of choice for most of these kids. My 'mission', if you will, is to figure out if ABA itself (i.e., the teaching method) is the core for people's dislike of this method, of if it's more a matter of what is being done with ABA (i.e., what people choose to teach using this method).
A very brief overview of ABA...it is a teaching method that relies heavily on the following:
Reinforcement, for example, if a student answers a question correctly or does something that the therapist asks, they are rewarded with food, time with a toy, etc. When ABA was first being used in autism punishments were also used, i.e., if the student did something wrong the instructor would give a loud 'no!' or even slap them on the thigh. Anyone that I've come into contact with says that this sort of thing is no longer used in ABA (and I'm certainly appalled by the idea), although Amy commented that some people may still use it and not own up to it. For the sake of clarity, I am not referring to any ABA program that endorses this in my post here, I think that sort of treatment is wrong, period.
Repetition and structured teaching, i.e., if a student is working on learning vocabulary words, the therapist will have a plan as to what words they are going to learn and in what order (animals, food, toys, etc.), and they will go over each group of words until it's clear the student knows them. This as opposed to a more eclectic approach, where a therapist might expose a child to a number of new words in various activities over time in an attempt to help them learn vocabulary. ABA is usually highly structured with the student sitting at a table and repeating each task multiple times in a row.
Breaking learning down into small parts, i.e., if a student is learning the alphabet, they may begin as simply as having the student match identical letters to each other, then identify letters by pointing to them, then naming the letters.
Presenting concepts in isolation when first introduced, i.e., if a student is working on adjectives like 'big' and 'little', they may begin by placing only two toys on the table, identical in every single way except that one is big and one is little, to isolate the concept being targeted (as opposed again to a more eclectic approach, i.e., playing with toys and labeling things like 'soft', 'hard' during play).
Again, my purpose in posting here was to understand if autistic individuals oppose ABA because they think it is a bad method in and of itself, or if they oppose ABA because they don't like the kinds of things it can be used to teach. For example, ABA is used to teach numbers, colors, letters, shapes, reading, and verbs. It unfortunately is also used to 'teach' autistic children to stop stimming, to play like NT children, to observe common NT social niceties (for example, children may be required to make full eye contact and greet everyone they meet with 'Hi, how are you today?'), etc. I can certainly see why this is a hot button issue and offends many autistic people.
What I can not understand is families of autistic children demanding as a right that they need to have full-time ABA therapies for their children at the cost of $40,000 per year of more. Somehow they believe that the ABA therapy will cure the autism.
Yeah, I tend to agree. I think there is a kind of mystique around ABA. It all sounds very official and there's a lot of scientific jargon attached, when in reality a lot of the teaching that goes on in these programs isn't very different from teaching you'd see anywhere else. I'm saddened to hear people's upsetting experiences with ABA. There is no reason for the things that have been mentioned here to be going on...things should not be withheld from a child who is being asked to do something they can't do, programs should always be set up so that learning tasks are well within the child's ability level. And as for the whole punishment issue, well, I will certainly not argue that there aren't bad practitioners in that field doing things they shouldn't be doing.
ABA originated from Ivor Lovaas' attempts to cure homosexuality
Now there is an interesting factoid...I had no idea! :lol: How bizarre.
I agree that there are many therapies out there today calling themselves ABA...where I am (Virginia) it's almost as if any therapy used with autistic children automatically gets that label.
It seems that you are trying to change his natural differences to please other people.
.. ... .. he would probably prefer to make himself laugh,.. .. .. .
.. ... .. I am afraid that what will happen is that the girls will be offended and not want to play with him and that will make him cry. ... .... ..
You are very right, I may well not be an ideal parent. I try to keep his perspective in mind. .. ... ..
It's like minority groups who speak a non-standard English that has it's own special meaning to them. I would never encourage them to abandon their way of speaking, but I would encourage them to be able to speak the standard for times when it's in their best advantage to do that. I don't want my son to stop being a minority but rather to understand as best he can more about the majority.
There's a lot in there.
I think it is about what sees someone being able to be who they are: and about being able to interact and negotiate with other people, who are fundamentally different.
And I think a child's lot is very much determined by who their parent is: where different parent's represent diferent ways of getting through; through the challenges which life presents.
I think that autistically characterised people do need to be brought up strong: able to eye-ball the NT universe; and face it down where necessary, and as they are minded to do so.
But, we equally need machinery and capability to relate and interact, and with those of that NT universe.
There's a tension between what Amy and itsok say and represent: which can be fruitfully explored.
The notion of becoming a carboard cut-out, speaks of what is a very real fate, for far too many. People are being denied what would see them grow strongly and independently.
I couldn't fully follow the metaphors of itsok's response to that: but I can warm to the general picture of what he says he wants for his child.
There is room for a revolution in how we view the autistic.
But, that revolution isn't going to arrive overnight.
And, in the time of transition, individual children still have to have as full a life as can be.
So, I think there is then a spectrum of ways of supporting autistic children, that are not wholly wrong.
Maybe there is something to be said for opening these ways to each other.