As a follow-up to my book, Stumbling Through Space and Time, Studying With Dyspraxia surprised people. After starting my author journey with a personal story, I think people expected the same approach. Instead, I chose to develop a survival guide to university for dyspraxic students.
When I started writing Studying With Dyspraxia, I didn’t want to write yet another generic learning-strategies guide. After all, I know my disability community well. And I know this is not what they want to read.
In a LinkedIn article previewing my book, I explained that:
“Based on my own lived experience and the insights of others with valuable lived experiences to share, I wanted practical tips and advice.”
So what did that interview process look like?
I interviewed a mixture of university faculty, occupational therapists, and current and former students. The one thing they all have in common is that they’re all dyspraxic and neurodivergent.
Speaking to people studying and working at universities allowed me to feature lived experiences that are very different from my own.
If you’re curious how this approach affected the contents of the book itself, here are three key lessons you need to know about.
1. Other people’s assumptions can make disclosure difficult while studying with dyspraxia.
I think the biggest barrier of all is the uncertain nature of other people’s assumptions.
This Guardian-published documentary review demonstrates how other people’s assumptions serve as barriers. I believe these attitudes create obstacles to understanding.
However, this is not the first time I have seen narratives like these emerge.
Awareness of neurodivergence is certainly on the rise, but so is the presence of misinformation. To counter neurodiversity’s bad press, I wrote several articles that attempt to arm people with a lived-experience perspective. But efforts such as these are just a starting point for change.
Until that change happens, misinformation itself will affect the quality of life of neurodivergent individuals. For example, two of the people that I interviewed for my book were shamed for being neurodivergent.
Interviewees who had no trouble with disclosure told me that they require the right context for disclosure to feel safe, comfortable, and logical.
But the context of when to disclose isn’t always logical or straightforward.
To support dyspraxic readers facing the ambiguity of when to disclose, Studying With Dyspraxia has an entire chapter on disclosure and peer relationships.
2. When studying with dyspraxia, the learning environment matters
The characteristics of your learning environment matter for neurodivergent folks, because sensory processing differences are often a factor.
In my book’s glossary section I define sensory processing as “how the brain interprets input from the senses.”
- Hypersensitivity: over-sensitivity to specific sensory stimuli (noise, smells, etc.)
- And its polar opposite: hypo-sensitivity (under-sensitivity) to specific noises, smells, etc.
Ever wondered what living with sensory processing differences is really like? This 5-minute Life at BBC video is a useful introduction.
But how does this translate into the classroom?
In all aspects of your studies, you rarely have full control over the sensory characteristics of your environment, and that’s the problem.
The very presence of a noise or smell that irritates you prevents you from focusing on what’s right in front of you. Or it might even stop you from resting and recharging whenever you get the chance to do so.
Perhaps you have the opposite problem, however. Perhaps you need more noise, more smell, more of a specific texture to produce your best work. And others around you have always told you that your behaviour is too disruptive and too socially unacceptable. So you just struggle to focus and absorb information as much as you should.
All the above examples of sensory processing issues happen all the time.
Rather than seeing this truth as something to passively accept, my book includes guidance on how to introduce sensory processing-based accommodations to the classroom.
Much of the guidance is designed for students specifically, who may just need specific examples of strategies that have worked. University faculty are underpaid and overworked. So, when students understand what sensory processing differences they actually have, they can begin to ask questions like:
“Noise cancelling headphones make my surroundings less distressful. Can I wear them in the exam room to support my ability to focus?”
Then, university faculty members can make adjustments to the evaluation process based on rules and regulations on campus. To encourage cooperation between students and faculty, I encourage students to adopt tools like the exam room checklist, illustrated below:
The exam essential checklist is particularly useful because it helps students keep tabs on what they need on exam day to produce their best possible work.
3. When studying with dyspraxia, your learning strategies need to work for you.
When I was part of the special education system, so many of the boxes that others tried to place me in didn’t suit me well.
I remember a time when I was given the same accommodations as a student with ADHD because the assumption was that our access needs were the same. Luckily, my mother intervened. She reminded people that:
“I don’t struggle with lack of focus. I have the opposite problem of focusing too much.”
In primary school, I had significant difficulties with learning to read. It wasn’t the act of reading that was the problem. It was the environment and approach to reading that was the actual problem. Once I had the opportunity to learn to read in an alternate environment, I was great at it. In fact, throughout school, English was my strongest subject.
The problem for me was never a lack of ability. I was just presented with an approach to learning that doesn’t work for me.
Yet, even other dyspraxics have different learning strategies than I do.
And people of all neurotypes spend years of their lives being told how to learn, not what approach to learning is best for them.
The second half of my learning strategies chapter addresses this exact issue by giving people the tools that they need to customize their entire learning process.
Although we cannot control other people’s assumptions about our entire learning process, we can develop study strategies that work for us.
Since dyspraxia is one of the most under-resourced neurodivergent conditions, there are so many people out there who need a resource like this one.
And I want to play a role in creating a resource that makes a difference in the lives of people who happen to be studying with dyspraxia right now.
Personally, I am of the opinion that this recent post from Dyspraxia/ DCD America puts into perspective just how much we are failing to support the dyspraxic students of today.
And that’s completely unfair to the dyspraxic students of the past, present and future.
Hopefully, this book will continue to fill the gaps in support for dyspraxic students being under-supported by the university environments they work and study in. That’s certainly what the feedback I have got on the book itself seems to suggest. So perhaps I am on the right track!
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