Communication and Competence

Here is the abstract to an article I read for another MEd course. It's called "Presuming Competence" and is a wonderful dialogue between the researcher and an autistic high school student who spent much of his school career not being able to communicate in a meaningful way. AT made a huge difference in his life, and he is incredibly well-spoken. Well worth the read. Article can be found on ERIC.

Biklen, Douglas and Burke, Jamie(2006) 'Presuming Competence', Equity & Excellence in Education, 39: 2, 166 — 175.

"At least since the early 1990s, educators in inclusive schooling as well as scholars in Disability Studies have critiqued prevailing notions of intellectual ability and have suggested the importance of interpretive communities for constructing student competence (Biklen, 1990; Goode, 1992, 1994; Kliewer, 1998; Kluth, 2003; Linneman, 2001). This work follows in the tradition of education-as-dialogue, which some have argued is a sine qua non for conceptualizing education with individuals who have been traditionally marginalized (see for example, Ashton-Warner, 1963, Freire, 1970). The core of this article is a conversation between a university educator and a high school student with autism who types to communicate. Out of this essay, the authors find a series of principles for inclusive schooling, the most central of which is the idea of presuming competence of students."