Creating Positive Social Updrafts Through Play and Performance: Fostering Creativity and Community Among Youth Placed on the Autism Spectrum

• In Event: Cultural-Historical Research SIG Business Meeting. Creating Positive Social Updrafts Through Play and Performance: Fostering Creativity and Community Among Youth Placed on the Autism Spectrum

Abstract

This session is designed to explore the roles of socially-channeled play and performance in the developmental trajectories of young people who fall on the autism spectrum. The speakers focus on youth who are prone to feelings of shame, inferiority, depression, emotional distress, and other feelings in response to how they are treated by others based on their differences in relation to a perceived mental health norm. Vygotsky referred to these negative feelings as a “secondary disability” that follows from a perceived “primary disability” such as blindness or cognitive or neurological difference. When people are treated with scorn or pity over their points of differences, the secondary disability of feelings of lowered self-worth, argues Vygotsky, become more debilitating than the physical, cognitive, or neurological difference itself.

Concerned with the lifelong negative impact that such feelings may have on one’s human potential, the speakers offer possibilities for channels of activity through which youth on the autism spectrum may find acceptance, affirmation, and kinship with others. Each author illustrates how a positive social updraft may become available through which activity may be directed such that differences become considered less as deficiencies and other potentials become available and affirmed. A positive social updraft is available through an activity system that enables full involvement in worthwhile cultural action, particularly among those who are considered to be social or cultural outsiders who might otherwise be limited in opportunities for legitimate social participation. Notably, play and performance serve as means through which participants may be swept in the flow of a positive social updraft in which they may imaginatively experiment with personas, develop social skills that enable their acceptance, playfully explore boundaries, perform imaginative projections of their personalities, and learn the local etiquette required of engagement with others in particular settings.

The speakers assume that conceptions of human normality—particularly in mental health and other areas that typically produce deficit conceptions of people of difference—inevitably produce social hierarchies that work against the integration of people into the broader flow of social life. The authors assert that people of difference only develop “problems” when treated as different from and inferior to those whose development has more closely followed the evolutionary norm.

Authors

• Leslie S. Cook, Appalachian State University

• Peter Smagorinsky, University of Georgia

• Robin Post, University of North Carolina-Wilmington

• Christine Dawson, Skidmore College