Harnessing the Power of Lived Expertise: Evaluating a Majority Autistic-Led Autism Sabbatical Program

Does Autistic-led instruction influence adult learners’ knowledge and beliefs? A neurodiverse team, including instructor-facilitators and educator-students in a year-long autism sabbatical program, evaluated the primarily Autistic-led program. Four Autistic instructor-facilitators shared what they believed worked well in their teaching, challenges they experienced, how they addressed feedback, and recommendations for the future. We used content analysis to examine potential shifts in 24 student-educators’ beliefs, knowledge, and intended teaching practices, coding their open-ended responses to surveys administered at three points across the program. Findings suggest that Autistic-led instruction promoted meaningful perspective shifts among both instructor-facilitators and educator-students, including increasing focus on meaningful, hands-on learning opportunities among instructor-facilitators and greater respect for Autistic stimming, communication, and interests among educator-students. Educator-students shared that the program taught them to be more flexible and student-centered. Some indicated that they planned to teach their students self-advocacy skills to empower students to spark changes that will make classrooms more equitable and inclusive for all. Some planned to advocate for systems changes themselves, including by teaching their colleagues how to adopt more neurodiversity-affirmative practices. Some Autistic instructor-facilitators and some educator-students described Autistic instructors as key agents of perspective transformations. Others indicated that qualities that make someone a strong educator, like flexibility and responsiveness, may be orthogonal to autism. Tangible outcomes of the program include educator-students’ portfolios which include concrete tools such as innovative assignments that have been refined through ongoing dialogue between instructor-facilitators and educator-students.