170 Stephen Shore
begin with us playing individually in close proximity. Gradually, she would add
sections of tracks to our stations until they were all connected and we would visit
the stations of our classmates. Even though this activity occurred in the late 1960s
it appears my teacher understood the importance of developing social interaction
through areas of common interest. After a year at this children’s center for “atypi-
cally developing” children, I started regular school kindergarten at age 6.
The terror and wonder of elementary school and insights
for improving social inclusion
Although initially, kindergarten was uneventful, both my classmates and teacher
soon knew that my styles of social interaction and learning were very different.
Unfortunately, those differences were often met with bullying from my classmates
and lack of understanding from my teacher. Walking around the class repeating the
letter “B” and communicating attempts by trying to get them to imitate noises and
made-up words did not endear me to my classmates. The strategies of today such
as Social Stories™ (Gray, 2015), Power Cards (Gagnon, 2001), conducting social
autopsies, and the 5-point scale (Buron and Curtis, 2012), along with the concepts
of role playing and video modeling, would have been great in helping me under-
stand how to interact with my classmates.
Academically, I was usually about a grade behind in most of my subjects and often
pleasantly surprised when I was promoted to the next grade. Had current knowl-
edge of special education existed at that time I probably would have divided my time
between special education, with support of a paraprofessional, and a resource room.
In the next section I will examine a set of academic modifications to curriculum
(Cole, Horvath, Deschenes, Ebeling and Sprague, 2000). Designed for the general
education teacher, the nine categories of curricular adaptations can be designed to
emphasize social inclusion for students with Autism and other special needs.
Nine domains of accommodation
Often I find educators get lost in a sea of potentially thousands of curriculum
modifications and feel adrift as to which one or ones to implement to best benefit
the individual with Autism or other special education needs. As a result, I find it
beneficial to group these adjustments made to academic material and their delivery
into nine domains as adapted from the nine categories of accommodation described
by Cole, Horvath, Deschenes, Ebeling, and Sprague (2000) and also mentioned in
Understanding Autism for Dummies (Shore and Rastelli, 2006). Fitting into one or
more of these categories, these areas provide a nice framework to think about
modifications to curriculum and instruction. The domains are:
- Size
- Time
- Level of Support