AUTISM

Autism

Abstract

This study highlights many key aspects of Autism in thorough detail. It explains the approaches, effects, consequences and long term implications of autism in a holistic manner. The study also discusses key issues related to autism in children and thoroughly explains the impact of autism in children especially during the learning process.

Autism

Introduction

Autism is classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) and American Psychological Association as a developmental disability that results from a disorder of the human central nervous system. It is diagnosed using specific criteria for impairments to social interaction, communication, interests, imagination and activities. The causes, symptoms, etiology, treatment, and other issues are controversial. This paper discusses Autism and effects on the family.

Children with Autism

Individuals with autism present some key challenges for those concerned with their education and care. For individuals without autism fundamental teacher beliefs about the nature of the learner and about the acts of learning and teaching may enable the construction of a template of effective, and ultimately good, practice. Yet in autism standard templates may not apply. For example, teaching and learning in respect of the non-autistic is predicated typically on the assumption that communication between teacher and learner happens. What often remains at issue for teachers is how that communication can be made to happen more effectively. Yet, according to the diagnostic criteria of DSM-IV (Trevarthen, Aitken,, Papoudi, Robarts, 1996, pp. 78-89), the learner with autism, by definition, lacks awareness of primal aspects of communication that inevitably leads to lack of key understandings and an inability to develop general abilities and specific skills. So, where it may be possible to provide, for example, signing as an effective, alternative way of communicating for individuals with a hearing impairment, such provision in autism might lead to the child signing to the 'listener' but with his/her hands obscured under the table. This seemingly bizarre action by the child is understandable if one accepts that the normal precepts underpinning what counts as a communicative act (that is, a purpose and an understanding of the needs of the listener) will not be available to the child with autism.

In short, the functional communication skills might be taught but those skills would not be applied by the child in an effective and meaningful way. Similarly, for educators generally, teaching and learning is essentially a social, interactive event—the transmission of sociocultural knowledge in a largely social dimension. However, for the individual with autism, it is not so much that learning about social events is difficult or that learning with others is hard, but that when learning occurs, it is not mediated by social understanding—it remains at the level of the personal, is wholly objective and therefore will seem, to the observer, mechanistic and 'rigid'(Trevarthen, Aitken,, Papoudi, Robarts, 1996, pp. 78-89). And again, where usually one can assume that a child has the ability to imagine and that therefore what is required of the teacher is to find ways of stimulating and extending that child's imagination, in autism no such assumption can be made, impairment of the ability to imagine being a prerequisite for the diagnosis. It is more a question of accepting that the autistic way of thinking is not ...