Waking the Sleeping Dragon: Facilitated Communication and Radical Reconceptualizations of Autism and Cognitive (dis)Ability

• In Event: A Reach Beyond—Into the Reality of the Everyday Lives of People With Disabilities: Exploring Practice and Policy Innovation in the Lifework of Douglas Biklen

Abstract

The first twenty years of Doug Biklen’s career on their own would leave behind a deeply felt legacy in the lives of those involved with his work—his scholarly activism in the deinstitutionalization and school and community inclusion movements was at once quiet and unassuming, yet also steadfast and even relentless in its constancy. However, in this paper I turn to the years in which Biklen began writing a new chapter in his life’s activism and scholarship through his work around facilitated communication (FC) published in the Harvard Educational Review, “Communication Unbound: Autism and Praxis” (1990). This seminal manuscript offers a rich, detailed qualitative sketch of his observations of the typed communication of a number of nonspeaking autistic people in Melbourne at the D.E.A.L. Communication Centre.
Biklen purposefully places himself in the presumed position of the reader—sharing dominant cultural ideas about autism, about what it looks like, and about what its implications may be for cognition in a person who moves and who speaks (or doesn’t) such as these. He shares with the reader his own surprise with his findings and the ways in which those findings had required him to rethink what he thought he knew about autism: “…what I did not anticipate was that their [the young people whom he had observed communicating through supported typing] communication with me would assault my assumptions about autism and ultimately yield important lessons for education” (p. 291). Allowing the reader to vicariously experience his own conflict, Biklen imported enormous swathes of descriptive dialogue drawn directly from his qualitative field notes. In contrast to much of what was believed to be “known” about autism at the time, Biklen posits that “their difficulty with communication appears to be one of praxis rather than cognition…. By saying that the person with autism has a problem with praxis we do not presume a deficit in understanding, but rather in expression” (p. 303).
The publication of this manuscript initiated the onslaught of a maelstrom of outrage, resistance, protest, and slander, a powerful defensive salvo in what I elsewhere refer to as the “Autism Culture Wars” (in preparation). Biklen’s account succeeded in wakening what I call the Sleeping Dragon—the steadfast cultural and professional belief in the Truth about Autism and Cognitive Disability—as both had come to be known.

Author

• Alicia A. Broderick, Montclair State University