How can children exercise their agency?

Hat commercial products are currently available? Of the 3,767 Alexa Skills designed for children, we found only 42 that attempted to support interpersonal abilities or self-awareness in a way that might foster SEL – and these Skills involved interaction styles that we believe are insufficient to support learning. We saw the same simplistic interaction patterns over and over again, which we labeled The Bulldozer, The One-Track Mind. Bulldozer Skills prompted the user to provide input, but then continued on their conversational path no matter how the user responded. One-Track-Mind Skills compelled users to engage in a narrow conversation on a single topic, for example through forced-choice responses. If the user’s reply deviated from the defined script, the CA would respond that it did not understand, or repeat the question, or stop working entirely. Delegated Skills prompted interactions between users, but did not actually participate in those interactions. And lastly, Lecturer Skills talked at users without interacting with them. Reading opens doors to the world – it gives us new information and different perspectives. Across schools, teachers work hard to help children develop a lifelong love for reading so, they can enjoy these benefits. But what motivates children to pick up and read a book? And how can educators encourage lifelong engagement with books?. Reading opens many doors, Buckingham says. “Beyond its enormous impact on education and employment, reading provides leisure and relaxation, information and empowerment, even comfort.” There is clearly a strong evidence base behind phonics as an approach to reading English, taught alongside the other elements of reading. It’s time to stop thinking about children in terms of specific deficits, and start thinking about them as individuals with strengths as well as impairments, so that all children can get the help they need. As castle points out, “understanding someone’s strengths as well as their difficulties might be crucial for designing effective interventions”. Sue Fletcher-Watson: People have been pointing this out for years, but it just doesn’t seem to have translated into action. If something has changed, it’s probably that our research methods have opened up – our options have expanded, like the capacity to recruit really big samples. There’s more support from funders for large-scale recruitment and combining datasets, which are required for research that isn’t bound by hard diagnostic boundaries.  I think it is getting through, partly because of the increasing role of communities in this kind of research. There’s more and more collaboration among parents, teachers, speech and language therapists, and most importantly, with neurodivergent people themselves. Almost all of those stakeholders say that people don’t fit into these clean categories – they have a complex profile of strengths and needs that change depending on the context. A child might be thriving at school, from a teacher’s point of view, but then have a total meltdown when they get home, for example. There’s also a broader emphasis on the impact of research, on making a difference. You’re not going to make a difference in real people’s lives if your research takes place on an alternative plane of reality where everyone is a pure, clean version of a diagnostic category. It’s partly about how research is set up as an industry. Historically, research that has been easy to publish and well cited shows neat and tidy significant differences with a nice, concise theoretical explanation. Findings like that are easier to communicate than the message that everything’s messy, and we don’t understand it very well. There’s no doubt that the term ‘disorder’ is pathologizing. We should get rid of it. Research into adult psychopathology has left a really influential legacy in terms of how we understand early developmental diversity. When you have a brain injury, like a stroke, head trauma, or a neurodegenerative disease like dementia, that suggests that there is a healthy brain that has somehow gone wrong. When you’re looking at people born with a brain that operates in a certain way – an autistic brain or an ADHD brain, if I can use that language – that disease model doesn’t work. It takes root in part because children don’t get diagnosed at birth, they get diagnosed at three or later. That allows people to think that maybe they weren’t autistic before and something went wrong. That’s just not accurate. ’ve seen people suggest the term ‘condition’, but I don’t think that’s an improvement, it’s a wishy-washy euphemism. I talk increasingly about neurodiversity and neurodivergent. It is a less judgmental way of talking about deviations from the neurotypical majority pathway. With autism, we can just call it autism without the ‘disorder’, and dyslexia maybe okay. I would probably like us to be in a post-diagnostic world, but I haven’t thought that through in enough detail to be totally confident it would be an improvement. A world where no-one gets a diagnosis sounds terrifying to lots of people. It sounds like a world in which your needs won’t be recognized and there’ll be no adaptation to those needs. There’s probably a quicker way to move from identifying that someone has needs to provide support for those needs, without going through the intermediate step of assigning them a clinical diagnosis. Clinical diagnostic labels don’t map onto the strengths that people have and the needs they might want support with. Labelling is a sort of detour on the way, but it’s very functional in our current system because it unlocks services. Labels are also important to people’s identities. They create community and an opportunity to find people who share the same experience. A worry about removing diagnostic labels is that people might find it hard to connect with others in similar circumstances. Aiming for a society in which we do not judge or pathologize each other based on our differences is a good thing. But the goal should not be a society that pretends there are no differences and that no-one needs help. When the narrative around neurodiversity is that “everyone’s different and that’s okay”, it can sound as if everyone just needs to muddle along. We don’t want to withdraw support or understanding – we just want to withdraw the negative value judgement. It would be nice to get to a destination where differences between people didn’t matter, and support freely given at the point of need was built into the system.