Counter-flow

In an autistic unit the reallocation of the school break to fit into an extra science slot for the children in the mainstream school, sends into counter-flow the prescribed rituals of every child in the unit. But because the change in mood and the change in time-tabling are not explicitly linked, the political element of autistic behaviour is emptied of its true bearing. That is why you are left with separate encampments. Autistic “otherness” and mainstream lesson allocation which supposedly grow from entirely different rooting systems and so the justification of that separation is endorsed.
But what if the method of teaching and how it impacts on the biological metabolism and nervous impressionability of each pupil is researched as a systemic process of gear change and that this process becomes the main subject matter of concern? Not the given population contents generalised and collated from test readings of standard performance and variation so that behavioural difference is hardened into the school’s very architecture; its bricks and mortar and the potential for movement is entrenched at an earlier pre-selection stage where everything and everyone has a given place.
What if the very mode of presentation; how something can and can’t be seen, read and announced becomes as important as what appears to be there? What if that process; the distribution of the sensible, was what we looked at and looked for, adjusting our vision in order to notice what is moving by moving with it? Buildings could be made and unmade as part of this process of weight shift. Not a shoring up of change regarded as the ultimate insult to form but an informed translation of that movement.
April 2008 (extract)