I’ve decided to write this in order to essentially revisit a topic that I last addressed in a post a couple of years ago. This post, regarding the Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), has (based on number of views) apparently received a lot of traffic compared to other posts on this blog, no doubt because of the vital importance of protecting people’s right to communicate. Being profoundly aware of the importance of the right to communicate, as well as fully cognizant…
[Author’s Note, June 2020: This post is now out of date. It was written before the emergence of crucial new empirical evidence from Jaswal et al. that changed the RPM debate. I also feel that there are sections of this post that are not sufficiently nuanced given the complexity of this issue and importance of the right to communication. The post thus does not reflect my current perspective, which can be seen here: http://www.autisticscholar.com/rpm-and-fc/.] In recent years, a large segment…
Quick recap: in Part I, we discussed early intervention and how it could be improved. I think we covered some important points (the need to be clear about our targets, whether the term “ABA” is no longer helpful), but we ended with an important question: How are we going to ensure that our best and hopefully-ever-improving practices actually get implemented at the community level? Without a good answer to this question, any improvements we make to our best practices will…
As an autistic adult who is also a graduate student researching autism, I’m a member of two very different communities, and these communities have very different views on many issues. It’s like they see the world through two incommensurable paradigms, relying on fundamentally different sets of assumptions about the world.[1] The communities certainly don’t usually spend a lot of time talking to each other, at least in North America (the British are a bit ahead of us on that front). …
