Anyone know anything about it? They're doing a 5k to raise money for first responders and my friend wants to help out, but doesnt want it to be surprise! Autism Speaks.
I've seen that ribbon of theirs only once, on the car of a friend whose sister is autistic. It was captioned with something like "support a cure for autism", but I don't remember exactly and felt awkward confronting her.
They definitely have a puzzle-pieces ribbon. Can't see any obvious connection to Autism Speaks, though.
At this point "ABA" is a meaningless term - the original use of it was supposed to be for things like "if the kid can't focus in this class, you should take an inventory and see if it's because of fluorescent lights or loud air conditioning or something, and solve that instead of punishing the kid", but then it got into "if the kid can't make friends, you should take an inventory and teach them how to make friends to solve that instead of having them continue to get teased", and then that slippery-sloped into "if the kid can't talk, you should teach them to talk because that will solve all your problems of not knowing what's wrong with them". Point is, I basically just ignore the word "ABA" entirely at this point and focus exclusively on how they describe their actual practices.
I saw someone make the point somewhere else on the interwebs that often, ABA doesn't actually care about or understand the reasons that people do things. And I mean, that's the whole foundation of ABA anyway; if you change behaviour, you change internal thought processes/brain pathways that cause that behaviour. So the logic then follows that if you made a kid stop flapping their hands, you'll change the brain wiring that makes them flap their hands in the first place! Which, uh. Is something any autistic person will tell you is bullshit. ABA has the whole process... kinda backwards? You can't change an autistic person's brain wiring. Teaching them not to stim doesn't remove to reason they stim in the first place, and just makes things worse (I say this as someone who effectively taught themselves "quiet hands" and let me tell you, not stimming is painful. Teaching myself not to do it didn't change how my brain works, sorry Lovaas. I still stim =P). So like, say I'm teaching a class, and there's say a kid in my class who is always pressing their head into the carpet if they're sitting on the floor, or always has their head on their desk. If I ask them why and they tell me that it's because the lights are too bright and they hurt, the logical thing to do would be to turn off the lights, and then ask the school if there are different lightbulbs I can get installed in the room. I might also talk to the kid's parents about getting the kid sunglasses or tinted glasses to wear at school. I wouldn't try to give the kid a reward chart and give them a sticker for every time they don't put their head on the floor or on the desk, because that's not going to fix the problem, that' just going to teach them that their pain is something that's not important, or that it's a nuisance. I'm teaching them to ignore their pain to appease others. But if I address the actual source of the problem, then I can change the kid's behaviour by changing the environment (turning of the lights, getting different lightbulbs) and by giving them coping strategies (sunglasses/tinted glasses). That's how behavioural analysis should actually work. It should address the cause of the behaviour, not just act like the behaviour is an isolated thing the person is doing to piss off the "normal" people. (If you had a kid who couldn't easily communicate the problem to you though, there would be much more trial and error to work it out.) There's a thing called positive behaviour support, which looks at behaviour as communication, and focuses on changing environment and giving coping strategies to disabled people so they can function as well as possible. Okay I'm done sperging about special ed >.>;
Anyway, to answer the actual question, they look okay to me. They have TEACCH as one of the therapies/teaching methods they recommend, and TEACCH actually takes into account that autistic people do things for reasons and have processing delays, and that autism is a part of the person, not a separate thing to be removed. Also Discrete Trial Training is a thing I've been taught at uni, and it gets used with all children. It's teaching-centred learning with a heavy emphasis on the teacher modelling the skill, with any errors made by the students being corrected immediately, and there's a lot of repetition. It's used often to teach basic skills like handwriting, word pronunciation, times tables, stuff like that. I mean any method can be used abusively, but the things they are saying are under the umbrella of ABA don't actually look like the shitty kind of ABA, is my point nwn;
