‘They’re told all the time they’re different’: how educators understand development of sense of self for autistic pupils

Abstract

School is a site of critical importance in the development of self, yet little is known about the ways in which school affects how autistic pupils come to describe and evaluate themselves. Educators are centrally positioned to support autistic pupils with development of an empowered sense of self. This article reports on a study which captured how staff in four English schools understood development of sense of self for autistic pupils. We found that educators perceived autistic pupils as being affected by both a particular biology and their social encounters with others. Our participants identified the school environment as a significant influencer on sense of self development but seemed uncertain how to make this more enabling. We suggest that one response could be to develop a framework of activism engagement in schools that might enable autistic pupils to work collectively with other autistic people towards a positive sense of self.

Keywords:

• Autistic
• self-esteem
• disability
• activism
• critical autism studies
• education

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the fellow researchers who worked on the Autism and a Sense of Self Project. These include Ms Helen Basu Chaudhuri and Dr Jill Pluquailec from Sheffield Hallam University. They also thank the four school-based researchers. Unfortunately, these need to remain unnamed to ensure compliance with the ethical conditions that governed the inquiry. The authors also thank Professor Katherine Runswick-Cole for reviewing an early draft of the article and the three anonymous reviewers. The authors appreciate how the feedback received has helped to develop the final article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In England, an integrated resource is a name given for a unit within a mainstream (non-special/‘regular’) school that provides a base for children with special educational needs and disabilities. Pupils can then access mainstream provision outside of the base but the time allocated for this varies per pupil.

2 Special schools cater for pupils with special educational needs through a high specialist staff to student ratio and specialist curricula and resources, supporting those autistic pupils for whom mainstream provision continues to remain inaccessible (Bowen and Ellis 2015).