Beginning

This year I'm going to be studying towards a graduate diploma in education and psychology at Victoria University of Wellington, which I'm very much looking forward to. I'm planning to document my thoughts and experiences along the way, key insights I'm having on my own personal learning journey, as well as reflections on neurodiverse learning experiences more generally in our education system.

My background has been working with children on the autism spectrum as both a teacher aide an a community therapist at an autism clinic in Wellington. It's been an interesting journey so far.

I've learnt about how vast the human experience is and how unique we all truly are. And yet, even with our all our differing needs we are also all influenced by the same educational principles. I've learnt how sensitive, resillient, patient and holistic you have to be when considering working with young people with more complex needs than your average person.

Of course we all require these things for optimum development. However, it is often the outliers that push us to truly reflect on these qualities that make good learning possible, stretching the boundaries and challenging our education system to authetically integrate models that suit everyone. This is one of the gifts of being neurodiverse and working with other neurodiverse individuals. What's best for neurodiverse people is actually what is best for everybody and really struggling with something actually gives you an opportunity to get in touch with the solutions intimately.

I've learnt about some of the joys and the frustrations of working in the public education, where funding constraints and a history of exclusion mean that our journey towards supporting neurodiverse folk is one that is fraught with a lot of pain and tension. But there is so much good work happening and lots of teachers, activists, therapists, specialists, managers, and support workers who finding creative loopholes to make some pretty cool things happen.

I'm going to be using this blog space to document my own personal learning journey as someone who struggled in the education system as undiagnosed with ADHD. Over the last few years, working in schools with neurodiverse children has meant that learning how to help them and their learning has also helped me with my own.

I've developed some core adaptive living skills, organizational skills, time-management skills, and generally been working on my executive functioning that has allowed me to develop consistency and confidence in my own abilities. .

The one last thing that I think I'll be reflecting on is technology. I've personally found using a number of different digital tools extremely helpful - but also with everything that is happening with Covid and recent technological advancements, I'm particularly interested in how it can be used to improve motivation and learning for neurodiverse individuals and their teachers in lots of different ways.

I look forward to writing more. I'm about a month off beginning my education and psychology papers. Currently, I'm working through a 100 level Statistics summer paper while I have been working at my summer job, applying all of the study and time management skills I've been learning, which has been successful so far. So, I'm excited to see how things develop as I take on a larger study load. I'm feeling ready for it.

Ma te wa!

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