{"id":2323,"date":"2025-01-13T14:48:23","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T14:48:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/?p=2323"},"modified":"2025-01-13T14:48:23","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T14:48:23","slug":"if-walls-could-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/2025\/01\/13\/if-walls-could-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"If walls could talk…"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019ve often wrestled with how we understand and treat neurodivergent<\/a> children in schools. We tend to focus on diagnoses, behaviours, and interventions\u2014essentially reducing children to two-dimensional shorthand. This flattening of experience misses something vital: the human, emotional, messy, lived realities of these children. That\u2019s what led me to fiction, and why I believe it can offer teachers a fresh way to think about their practice with neurodivergent students.<\/p>\r\n

I wrote the short story If Walls Could Talk<\/em><\/a> from the perspective of the walls of a primary school to show how institutions like schools shape the daily lives of neurodivergent children. The walls observe and absorb the everyday moments that often go unnoticed, such as the quiet struggles and triumphs of children who don’t fit typical educational moulds; they feel the weight of their experiences. The walls see everything, feel everything, and absorb the daily rhythms of school life. They witness the quiet struggles and fleeting joys that many of us miss when we focus solely on academic outcomes or interventions. By giving the walls this voice, I could create a narrative that honoured the full complexity of these children\u2019s lives without resorting to the same tired tropes or diagnostic shorthand we often rely on in educational research.<\/p>\r\n

Fiction has long been used to explore and express human experiences. But what if it could be used to delve into the realities of neurodivergent children in schools? Social fiction\u2014a genre that combines storytelling with social critique\u2014has the potential to do just that. By immersing readers in the sensory and emotional landscapes of school life, fiction can give school staff a visceral understanding of what neurodivergent children experience daily. Fiction helped me explore emotions, bodies, and the spaces in between\u2014the things that don\u2019t always show up in data but are so central to a child\u2019s experience.<\/p>\r\n

What I\u2019ve found most powerful about using fiction is that it invites reflection in a way that traditional research sometimes doesn\u2019t. When teachers engage with a story like If Walls Could Talk<\/em>, they aren\u2019t just reading about school\u2014they\u2019re stepping into it. They\u2019re inhabiting the walls, seeing through the cracks, and feeling the tension and joy that fill a classroom. For me, this kind of immersive storytelling invites teachers to ask deeper, more empathetic questions: What does it feel like to be that child, in that space, at that moment? How might the structure and rhythm of the school day affect neurodivergent children differently? From this, fiction gives teachers permission to wonder, to ask \u201cwhat if?\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Another thing I love about fiction is that it opens up conversations. After sharing If Walls Could Talk<\/em> with colleagues, I\u2019ve had rich discussions about the often seemingly invisible emotional and sensory experiences of neurodivergent children. The story has sparked questions and reflections that wouldn\u2019t have come up if we were only discussing research data or policy guidelines.<\/p>\r\n

I also believe fiction can be a powerful tool for teachers to start these conversations with each other, with their students, and even with parents. By stepping into the world of the story, teachers can begin to find ways to talk about connections between mundane moments of school life and broader social issues like the impact of school structures, poverty, climate change, and the pathologisation of experience. Traditional research evidence often ask that teachers focus solely on one aspect of a child\u2019s learning, one new intervention, one facet of their experience, when teachers know only too well in practice, there is never only one thing going on at any one time in a classroom. In a story world it is possible to pull on multiple threads at once, to enter into the chaos and temporality of fleeting educational moments.<\/p>\r\n

At its heart, fiction is about possibility. When we use fiction to explore these children\u2019s experiences, we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking and being, we bring new worlds into view. We start from the presumption of what Gordon (2008)<\/a> describes as \u2018complex personhood\u2019 in which one respects the presumption that people’s lives are simultaneously straightforward and full of enormously subtle meaning\u201d (pp. 4-5). We move beyond the rigid frameworks of diagnosis and intervention, and instead embrace a more holistic, empathetic approach to education.<\/p>\r\n

If Walls Could Talk<\/em> is available for free as an eBook here<\/a> or in paperback by contacting j.pluquailec@shu.ac.uk<\/p>\r\n

Dr Jill Pluquailec is Senior Lecturer in Autism

<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve often wrestled with how we understand and treat neurodivergent children in schools. We tend to focus on diagnoses, behaviours, and interventions\u2014essentially reducing children to two-dimensional shorthand. This flattening of experience misses something vital: the human, emotional, messy, lived realities of these children. That\u2019s what led me to fiction, and why I believe it can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10265,"featured_media":2330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sioe"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/files\/2024\/10\/book-cover.png?fit=368%2C630&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7axDP-Bt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2323"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2323\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2406,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2323\/revisions\/2406"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.ac.uk\/sioe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}