Future SPED Teacher
Hi everyone!
I am currently going to school to become a teacher and I am interested in working with disabled students. I have many years of experience volunteering and working with autistic people/children and my sister is autistic as well. I have worked as a para for about a year in an elementary classroom too. I have pretty major diagnosed ADHD, but I am not autistic so I obvs don’t understand the experience. I want to learn anything and everything that you wish non-autistic people knew, especially in relation to education and early childhood stuff. I’ve been hearing a lot of autistic people speaking out against ABA and their practices and it made me think that I should be looking to learn more about how to best support and teach my future neurodiverse students. I am very worried about not being educated enough accidentally perpetuating harm in some way. I’ll take any advice anyone wants to offer. Ultimately, no matter what kind of teaching job I end up in, SPED or otherwise, I know there will always be autistic students throughout my classes and that is so exciting to me! I just want to do right by them. If this isn’t allowed or I have said something wrong feel free to delete. Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read this!
Edit: I didn’t really know where to post this so I hope this is alright. I was trying to find a place that would mainly be autistic people and not parents or family members trying to speak on the matter.