Neurodivergent-Affirming Practices in Facilitation – Episode 63

In this episode, host Beth Cougler Blom talks with Marie Dubost about neurodivergent-affirming practices in facilitation and learning design. Marie shares insights from her work as an accessibility consultant, facilitator, and trainer, drawing on both professional and personal experience to highlight why inclusive practices matter more than ever.

Beth and Marie also talk about:

  • Creating learning menus to support choice and reduce overwhelm
  • Offering silent or low-stimulation options in participatory sessions
  • Understanding identity-first vs. person-first language
  • How inclusive design supports all learners, not just some
  • Why co-designing with participants can strengthen learning outcomes

Engage with Marie Dubost

Links From the Episode

Connect with the Facilitating on Purpose Podcast

Connect with Beth Cougler Blom

Podcast production services by Mary Chan of Organized Sound Productions

Show Transcript

[Upbeat music playing]
Beth 00:00
[Episode intro] Hello, welcome. I’m Beth Cougler Blom, and this is Facilitating on Purpose. I’m so glad you’re here. In this episode, I talk with Marie Dubost. She is an accessibility consultant, a trainer, a facilitator. I won’t introduce Marie too much because I asked her at the start of our conversation to tell us a little bit more about herself.

Beth 00:23
So I’ll just say that this episode is taking the episode that was two episodes ago—with Nora Loyst, which was about accessibility—this is taking that episode a little bit further and in one particular direction of accessibility and inclusion, which is neurodivergent-affirming practices that we can use and employ in facilitation and of course in our design of learning or meetings as well.

Beth 00:50
So without further ado, here is my conversation with Marie Dubost. Enjoy the show.

Beth 00:58
[Episode start] Marie, it’s lovely to see you. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.

Marie 01:02
Thank you for having me on. Thank you.

Beth 01:04
I was looking at your LinkedIn profile to get ready for our conversation and I love how you say you’re an accessibility geek or an accessibility nerd. You’re a facilitator, you’re a trainer. Can you just give me a little bit of your background, in the short story, of how you got to where you are today? Why did you become the accessibility nerd that you’re saying you are?

Marie 01:27
So, indeed, I have been facilitating events and experiences for some time, but before I did that in earnest, or even called it facilitation, or even before I discovered how cool facilitating great learning experiences was, I was working as a project manager in a disability-focused organization, and also coming myself from a family—I have a number of ancestors who are hard of hearing—so I understood some of the world of disability, and I learned a lot alongside disability activists, especially in Europe, and coming to understand how painstakingly slow the work of moving away from a medical model, and more of a social model, and more inclusive ways of working.

Marie 02:13
And when I pivoted towards facilitating learning experiences, I became painfully aware of the fact that all of this knowledge that I had acquired around how to create accessible, inclusive environments for people with various kinds of disabilities, including neurodivergence, was not really common knowledge in the facilitation and learning and development community. There was some amount of knowledge, but I felt that there could be more that could be done there.

Marie 02:44
I’m also neurodivergent myself, I have ADHD, and I came more late to that, because women tend to be diagnosed way later than boys and men, because the criteria and the standards for how we understand neurodivergence are also very much based on symptoms presenting in males, sort of like persons present themselves. And so coming to terms with that and coming to learn to understand how I can make my environment work better, and also as a facilitator, as a small business owner, it became really important for me to both create more knowledge for people who are facilitating, but wish to create more inclusive and accessible and neurodivergent-affirming environments.

Marie 03:30
But also, how can we as neurodivergent facilitators—and I know there’s a lot of them out there, and I love connecting with them—how can we also create some amount of community for ourselves, and make sure that—you probably know the saying nothing about us without us—that we ourselves are able to voice and share what would make a neurodivergent-affirming environment that we would love to learn in, if we were the learners, and how to help shape those learning environments to be more inclusive for everyone, including whose disabilities are not visible.

Marie 04:06
As you know, that’s the majority of disabilities, they’re not visible, and that includes neurodivergent individuals. So that is how I came to do this, the collision between my love of creating great learning experiences, and my love of the disability community, and the wonderful people within it, and how to make sure that they can have as great an experience as anyone else, and that they’re also able to progress and thrive. Also, because we know that, for example, unemployment numbers in the disability community and so on, including for neurodivergent and autistic individuals, are very high, and part of that could also be linked to the fact that we are not always designing working environments and learning environments that allow them to be at their best.

Marie 04:52
So I also want to make sure that this contributes to this greater goal to help advance the more equality for disabled people and for neurodivergent individuals.

Beth 05:03
Thank you for sharing some of your journey because it’s a professional journey, but it’s a personal journey too. And it strikes me as a gift, you know, that you’ve had those experiences where you worked. You also have had the family members that you’ve paid attention to, you realize something in yourself. And I think you’re right, I’ve had the same kind of conversation with other facilitators or other learning designers that I know, that some time along the way they discovered that they did have ADHD or something else themselves, that it’s been a revelation and a really useful thing to discover about themselves. But maybe more of us who are in the field, designing and facilitating for others, and we realize that about ourselves, we, maybe it helps us care more and we then do more of the work because we needed it or, you know, like our colleagues needed it. And then now maybe they can do it for our learners or for our meeting participants. So you said it’s slow and I know it’s, it’s been slow. Do you feel like it’s speeding up a little bit? Like our interest or our care in this work?

Marie 06:05
It’s….[lets out a sigh]. I wish I could give you something really positive there. [Beth: Yeah.] I will say that there is some amount of this destigmatization specifically around neurodivergence that is happening. I know that some people are a bit shocked, maybe some people might even be alarmed, at the increasing rate at which people are becoming diagnosed or are self-identifying as being neurodivergent.

Marie 06:27
Sometimes people might think, well, maybe this is a bit of a trend like where everybody’s identifying as such, but I don’t think it’s because it’s a trend. I think it’s because the stigma for disclosing it and for identifying as such, and then later on for requesting the accommodations and the changes that would allow someone to thrive, whether it’s at work, even in other environments beyond work, is it’s making it a lot easier for people.

Marie 06:57
I also hinted at the fact that women and girls get diagnosed much later. That is also increasing and contributing to this acceleration of identification or self-identification or diagnosis and is also broadening our understanding of, for example, you’ve probably maybe have been exposed to media where this autistic boy stereotype, right? The boy who loves trains and who likes a certain idea or who has ADHD and is hyperactive in the classroom.

Marie 07:32
But the way it presents in girls and women is different, actually. It may not be that girls and women are shifting in their place or moving around a lot, but maybe the movement will be projected onto something else. Women and girls also are learning to mask, so that’s another concept as well, the idea of masking, which is essentially to spend quite a great deal of energy looking and sounding and behaving in the way that is considered the standard, the neurotypical standard. Women and girls can become really apt at doing this and because they’ve been masking and hiding it for much longer, they become really good at it and they spend, like I said, they can waste a lot of energy on doing that. Because there’s less stigma in identifying or diagnosing, because there’s a whole group of the population that is becoming more comfortable as well and finding more avenues for identifying and diagnosing, we’re seeing that it’s a lot more prevalent.

Marie 08:36
I should hope that this means it will translate to a greater understanding because now it might be difficult for people to say, I have never met or heard of a person who has any of these conditions that are grouped or understood to be under the umbrella term of neurodivergence or neurodiversity.

Beth 08:57
Yeah, yeah. So we’re realizing…even in conversations as a parent, I’m realizing how many parents out there in the world are supporting a neurodiverse child or teen or yeah, family member for sure. So let’s hope that the more we all keep talking about it and trying to support each other in it, it results in positive change, especially in our learning environments, which we’re talking about today.

Beth 09:21
Now, I’ve been looking at your accessibility checklist on your website. Actually, I think I signed up for your newsletter. So everyone signed up for Marie’s newsletter and you’re going to get her accessibility checklist. [chuckles] And it, I’m remarking to myself as I go through them that it seems like a lot. And I say that in just an honest way, as someone who’s been in this field for more than 20 years and I, I care and I, you know, I’m learning all the time and so on. But even I think, oh wow, there’s a lot, there’s a lot here and they’re excellent checklists and they do make me think, okay, I have to do better. I will do better. And we’re working, you know, we’re always working to create documents ourselves to do what you’re saying we should do, right? To let people know what to expect. But it is, I recognize all it’s kind of like both is happening. It feels like a lot and it also feels like something we have to do. So what do you say for even those of us who’ve been doing this for a long time? Convince me. I mean, you know how to convince me, but convince me like, why is it worth it to take the time to do the work we need to do to be able to design for all?

Marie 10:29
I should probably start by saying that as much as I love these accessibility checklists and I put a lot of energy in them, I’m going to look at redoing them, not just because I have more things to add, but also because I realized that the way I framed them, I called it a checklist, but it’s really more like a list of things to consider and share with your participants more so than do you have this, do you have that? Because not everything will be needed in an event and any kind of learning event you may not have the possibility to do all of it, but some of it, you use your own judgment and you see what applies. But I need to maybe find another way to frame that information.

Marie 11:07
So why do this? I think you’ll find that it’s not just that we’re talking about like really large numbers of the population that are going to be benefiting from these adjustments. In extension to all of the people who will be benefiting from it, even though they don’t really qualify or identify as having any of these conditions, but they are temporarily, for example, facing overwhelm, facing anxiety, having some situation in their life that makes it maybe difficult for them to focus or process a lot of information quickly at any given point. So this is going to benefit way more than just the group that you’re thinking of targeting.

Marie 11:44
It’s also because when you design a learning environment that is inclusive for the group that is most likely to be socially excluded or the group that is most likely to face barriers, you’re sort of inclusion proofing your design for the future. It’s a bit of an investment upfront to have all these considerations, create all the templates and the things that will help you, but it will help you gain time in the future. And you’ve touched on this in a previous episode with the lovely Nora. You are doing this, creating this inclusive design by default, rather than asking people to mention what they need and thinking of it as a one-off accommodation, but thinking more of it as we create as inclusive an environment as possible and request an accommodation ideally is the, let’s say, the thing that is coming on top of that, but most of it hopefully will be taken care of by an inclusive and accessible design.

Marie 12:41
But you are creating a space that is sort of future-proofing your sessions. I should also mention that there is tremendous talent and potential in neurodivergent and disabled individuals. I should also mention I’m using identity-first language here because in the neurodivergent, and especially also in the autistic community, people tend to prefer identity-first language, but I’m conscious that in some pockets of the disability community, people prefer person-first. So I’m just conscious of what the majority in that particular pocket of the community prefers, but I’m conscious that to some people, sometimes this kind of language might surprise them.

Marie 13:22
But there is so much potential in neurodivergent people, and I’m not just talking about this whole narrative around unlocking the superpowers and so on. Some neurodivergent people are feeling a bit icky about this because, well, first of all, it’s fine when you say that about a child, you know, hey, champ, you’ve got your superpower, let’s unlock it.

Marie 13:44
When you say that to an adult, it sounds a bit infantilizing. But also because although there are some great talents and abilities that can be enhanced through some of these neuro-conditions and differences in people, my idea would be that we should include everybody, not just because they have some special power to offer [chuckles] to their work environment, to their community, but also just because they are.

Marie 14:14
It should also be noted that a lot of the time you’ll hear about neurodivergent conditions or situations that people are born with, but you can also acquire one through life. It’s a bit more rare, but through traumatic events, through traumatic brain injury, through, I’m sure you’ve heard of people with long COVID and the brain fog, difficulty focusing, memorizing, etc. There’s a lot of things that could also happen. So when you create, and this is my final and last, and I hope a very potent argument for inclusivity and accessibility, when you create an accessible and inclusive learning environment, you are future-proofing it potentially for your future self as well. You’re creating an environment that’s going to be welcoming, that you or the people that you love may appreciate being able to benefit from should something happen in life that could cause them temporarily or for whatever reason to need such care to be put in inclusive design.

Beth 15:10
Yeah. And maybe we think more about ourselves as learners too. I mean, we’re facilitators, but we’re learners in other people’s environments quite frequently, aren’t we? And maybe it helps us think, well, does this work for me?

Could I have used something else? Could I have used choice in that situation? How did that make me feel? You know, maybe it just helps us explore our own feelings and needs more too, as we come into it, maybe thinking about others sometimes and how we can support learners. But really we’re, it gives us tools and ideas and strategies to support ourselves as learners as well?

Marie 15:44
Absolutely. It’s sometimes a difficulty when you are designing learning sessions and learning experiences that you have this curse of knowledge, right? You already know what the goals are and you already have a sense of how certain activities will go. But in this particular exercise, you have to try and put yourself in the shoes of somebody who needs to have a reduction of overwhelm and cognitive load, somebody who may be facing social anxiety or anything like that and who could really use an environment that is not going to overstimulate them or force them into social interactions if that’s just not their cup of tea for today or in general. So, it is forcing us to really look at this empathically and put ourselves in the shoes of the learners and think, okay, is it potentially something that could be overwhelming?

Marie 16:34
Are there alternative activities that I could offer that are going to reach the same learning objective and are going to allow them to unlock somehow the same knowledge, but in a different way, right? And I was thinking about it earlier, like, what would be a good example for that? It could be that you’re giving the learners a menu of things to do. I don’t know if you remember those books. I grew up in the 80s, I’m disclosing my age here, [laughs] but I grew up in the 80s and I remember these books where you chose your own adventure. Do you remember those? [Beth: Yes!] You had to read like a couple of pages and at the end it said, like, you know, if you go down the stairs, go to page 23 and if you open the door to the cave, go to page whatever. And the funny thing about these books is that, first of all, they made you the protagonist so they were phrased in a way that you were doing this and that. So you were really giving agency to the reader and you’re giving them a choice on where they want to go.

Marie 17:32
If you think of this similar approach to how a learner might experience your course, giving them the agency to say, well, we’re going to learn about experiences of XYZ and we could be having a discussion about that. Maybe you have a 1-2-4-All-type activity planned out or you can go into this silent room. Maybe you can say that you would like to do that by putting a specific emoji in front of your name in Zoom or, you know, raise your hand if you’d rather to do that. And you’re going to instead read this short article about the topic and have a silent reflection around a specific question. So there’s going to be different ways to get at the knowledge by offering different options. And so in this sense, you’re not forcing the interaction on the participants, such as one example out of many that I can think of that is neurodivergent-affirming and also giving agency to the learner. Again, it’s a lot more work for us as trainers and facilitators because we now have to think about the menu of activities that can be offered that’s going to work for the timeframe, that’s going to work for the learning objective.

Marie 18:41
It’s so much more reflection, but it makes your work as an educator and a facilitator so much more rich and interesting. And it can really create something for your participants that’s really quite magical and incredibly valuable rather than this linear one size for all kind of like learning experience, which could happen sometimes by default.

Beth 19:05
Yeah, I totally agree. Those times when I’ve been really intentional to do that, it feels good that it’s not only allowed me to provide that choice to the participant, but it’s actually made me think more intentionally about the design, the purpose and the goals and the outcomes, as you say, or objectives. Like what am I trying to lead the learners to here? And the more I’m clear about that, then I can back it up and say, okay, yes, they can go into the quiet room. They can work on this other activity by themselves.

Beth 19:36
And that’s the key. They’re still doing the activity, aren’t they? They’re doing it in a different way. We all come back to the main room and, and we share while other people have been in breakout rooms or whatever, but it’s forced me to become more clear about my goal. And I’ll share a little, I can’t share too much because it was a client example, but I had recently a client try to push back to be inclusive, I’m using air quotes, inclusive [chuckles] to a participant, but what they were asking me as the facilitator to do is allow the participant not to achieve the goal that I had set forward as, as the instructor, basically, right? And they said, oh, it’s inclusive to allow this person not to do these things because of inclusion. And I’m like, well, that that’s not inclusion. Inclusion to me, and I think we’re saying the same thing, is that, you know, I as the instructor or the facilitator get to set the goal. And if I, or the participant, or even the client have a different way that they suggest that works for the participant to get to the same goal, that’s inclusion, right? But they were asking me to change the goal. It really ticked me off actually. Cause then I had to, it was a teachable moment, hopefully for me and the client saying, that’s not inclusion. When, when you just throw the goal out the window and say, this person doesn’t have to do it. I say, let’s still do the goal. You know, we want them to reach the goal, but a different way to get there is inclusion. Am I right on that? Was it, is that a good way to say it?

Marie 21:01
I think that’s a good way to say it. I would probably also add to this, and I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept of Universal Design for Learning [Beth: Yeah.] and also this menu approach of letting people choose activities and so on. I guess you could also say that reframing the goal with the participants is also maybe also another way to go at it, but I agree that if you are able to provide a menu of activities that are allowing this participant in their own way to reach the same lesson, to reach the same learning goal, it’s a great approach. I would also think that perhaps letting the, involving the participants in defining and understanding what kind of goal they want to reach and why is also very powerful as well.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re shifting the goal post for this one particular participant. It’s maybe that you’re able to give it perspective that is more meaningful to them. What the context would be here. But I agree that I think while it’s an extra effort on the part of the, an education provider, the facilitator, the trainer, it’s definitely worth it to do that.

Beth 22:11
The piece about reframing the goal with the person, I like that too because it makes me think we actually can be wrong about what the goal really is. Because sometimes in my learning design side, you know, I’ll have those conversations with the subject matter expert and they’ll say the goal is whatever it is.

I can’t think of a good example but you know, let’s say writing will be part of it and so in our conversation I’ll realize that writing is actually not part of the goal. Because sometimes writing, learning how to write and write, you know, clearly or whatever it is, that can be the goal. But if writing is not the goal, it’s just the way that they’ve gotten to the goal and the goal is, you know, expressing their values or whatever it is then, you know, if we’ve allowed writing to become the goal then that’s the wrong goal so maybe the participant sometimes can help us sort it out. Because we can be wrong as designers and facilitators of learning if we’re not really thinking intentionally as we could be so maybe the participants can help us uncover some of that as well saying I kind of see what you’re going here. Is this the goal or is that the goal? Like have a conversation about it as well?

Marie 23:13
Absolutely. And maybe the participant tells you, well, I understand what the goal is, but writing is not my forte. [Beth: Yeah.] In fact, I struggle with it. Let’s say I’m dyslexic and I’m finding it difficult to work with the written word, but there are other ways that you can express an idea or that you can show that you have learned an idea. And so then you could also look at what the participant can suggest maybe as alternative ways and then see how you can integrate and so on. So you can also imagine that you can co-create a learning experience with a participant’s input in this case so that you’re able to take into account their particular situation.

Marie 23:52
Because like you said, the participant in the end is the most knowledgeable person on what particularly works for them and their cognitive load and how they think and how they process information and so on. So their input could be really valuable here.

So indeed, co-designing with the participants can also be a great thing. Again, it’s an even more advanced thing. I was thinking of this, actually I brought it up because I thought you would really like this. This is a book called Equity by Design by Mirko Chardin or Chardin [said two different ways], I’m not sure how you pronounce it, and Katie Novak. And this one is on UDL. It has a lot of great tips on universal design in learning.

Marie 24:40
And at the end, it also summarizes what Universal Design for Learning, kind of like the progression of rubrics in terms of how to give people multiple means of engagement, multiple means of representation of information, multiple means of action and impression on any given topic. And from there, you can also have a lot of ideas that you can also see that in the more progressed, let’s say, version of that, you can also have a co-creation of the learning objectives with the participants. I’m conscious that sometimes when a client contracts, you are talking with them and you’re kind of going off of what they want the learners to learn. So being able to massage that into the contract, yes, I have your learning objectives, but I would like to verify them with the participants to make sure that this is what they need. And I think you’ve talked about this as well in your book, right? Of having one version of events from the client, the brief, and then coming into the classroom or the learning environment and realizing that what the participants need is something else. [They both chuckle.]

Marie 25:45
And having to adjust on the moment, that can also happen. But indeed, it’s being able to have this flexibility of giving essentially more power to the participants in how they participate. I should also mention here that a lot of educators and trainers, especially during COVID, we have become so keenly aware, Beth, that we want to have participatory learning experiences, right? No lecture here, no death by PowerPoint. It’s going to be so interactive and people will be sharing and exchanging and so on. And we tend to sometimes design our experiences really with this sales point of there will be so much sharing of everything going on at the moment.

Marie 26:29
And we can sometimes overdo it with the breakouts to the point where it’s overwhelming for people to be involved in breakouts after breakout after breakout. It becomes exhausting as well because for some people, being in a breakout is not just being in a breakout, speaking your mind, it’s like a social performance almost like you have to mask again, maybe there are strangers in the room and so on.

So providing a silent option can be one way to sort of give a caveat to that. Well, there’s going to be a silent room, you can go in camera off and we will share instructions in the chat as to what you can do to tackle this topic. It could also be that you have shared agreements at the start of the sessions to clarify what they can and cannot expect. I would even suggest that you can share this before the sessions begin and maybe a couple of days before. How many breakouts will there be? Are you able to go to a silent room instead? How many breaks will there be so that people know if they will be able to look after their bio needs in different ways? This is also accessible for a number of other things beyond neurodiversity. Will you be calling on people if they don’t volunteer or clarifying, I won’t call on you unless you volunteer so people know that they’re not going to be like, oh, I have to unmute and I was really not prepared for that. And then obviously if you do that, you follow up on that promise. [smiles]

Marie 28:00
But giving people information ahead of time of what they can expect can also help them decide if they will go to the learning event or not. It can make the difference between I will sign up or I will not sign up or I will come to this session or not because there is some life event that is bringing me to a certain state and I’m not sure I can handle a succession of breakout rooms and sharing about this.

But if you let people know ahead of time how they can participate in a softer, gentler way, but still meaningful way, you also make it a lot easier for them to know if they want to join or not.

Marie 28:41
I’m conscious again that when we do this, it goes against our instinct to create an experience that is definitely not a university lecture and so on. But as you know, there’s many ways that people will be able to reflect with the microphone off and the camera off and to be able to engage with the material in other ways that are still meaningful but are not going to be death by PowerPoint either. So it’s about us trainers and facilitators to become creative and, okay, what does that look like? What does it look like when the session is getting to be a bit too much? What alternatives can I provide? How will I communicate them? Et cetera.

Marie 29:20
It could also be that you make sure that people are not having to read a lot of information in a short amount of time. I made this mistake once in a session. It still haunts me. You know how like, you know, make a mistake as a facilitator. [Beth laughs: Oh, yes! All the time.] Not waking up in the middle of the night, you know, sweating, but it nags at me a bit. [Beth: Yeah.] I created a silent breakout because I wanted to give my client the opportunity to have the silent breakout.

Marie 29:48
But then I gave them an article to read in silence and to reflect on, but the article was way too long. I should have provided an abridged version or shortened it. And somebody complained that it was like too much. I forgot that I can scan through text really fast, but it was not an option for them. And they complained afterwards that it was overwhelming.

It did not sort the whole reducing the overwhelm thing, which the alternative being the breakouts.

Marie 30:14
And so, you know, you live and you learn as a trainer, as a facilitator as well. [chuckles] There’s many ways that you can go at it. And my other encouragement to trainers and facilitators is it’s a learning curve. Like I said, even I still can still make mistakes, you know, as long as you’re committed to go in this kind of like wheel of, you know, continuous improvement. I think you’re on the right way. It’s a lot, like you said, even the checklist, it’s so much to take in. You cannot do it all immediately. And that might even be overwhelming to tell yourself, I have to do it perfect or not at all. Then you won’t do it at all. So my recommendation would be see where the improvements are possible, and then see how you can gradually implement them, test them, ask participants did that make a difference for them, yes, no, et cetera, and see which ones are like winners that you can now integrate into your best practices time and time again.

Beth 31:11
I think you even talked about asking a specific question around accessibility in feedback forms. As soon as I read that in your document, I thought, oh, I don’t think I’ve done that. Because we often just ask blanket questions about what worked for you, what didn’t work for you, but to really give it credence and say, how could I have made this session more accessible to you? Or however we want to phrase it, gives an overt invitation. But let’s assume that we’ve done all the things ahead of time by providing the document to the group ahead of time about all the things we did think about. And we did become more overt about that. And that’s something I’m still, we’re working on that document right now in my practice so I can really, Nora called it naming what you know. So this is, you say, we’re always learning. And I’m learning right now to, I think I’m doing okay, but then there’s so much more that I can do. But even the feedback, haven’t done that piece yet. Let’s add it to the feedback form and just ask our participants to help us keep getting better. So just a tiny tip like that is something that can be really transformational for our next group that we work with.

Beth 32:19
Appreciate a lot of what you’ve said, well, all of what you’ve said in those checklists, of course, and this conversation, too. [Marie: Thank you.] I wonder if we can talk about language a little bit as it relates to neurodiversity, because I’ve been finding myself kind of stumbling over the language. And I know, you know, you speak a few different languages and maybe there’s sort of differences and different ways to address this in different languages. But I heard the term neurodiverse minorities in actually a course I was working on the other month. And I thought, OK, I haven’t heard neurodiverse minorities yet. And so and you talked about person first versus identity first. Do we say neurodivergent individuals, people who are neurodiverse, all of the above? Like, how do we be inclusive with our language when speaking around this aspect of accessibility and inclusion?

Marie 33:11
Neurodivergent and neurodiverse generally is a good adjective that you can tack on to this. I think the term minorities, and I’ve seen it in a few places as well, helps reinforce this idea. Neurodiversity is a difference in how the neurological or the cognitive function from what is considered quote-unquote neurotypical. We try to move away from a language that tries to imply a deficit or to imply that there’s a norm that neurodivergent people are deviating from.

The term minority reflects the fact that if we are like 1 in 10 or however many, 1 in 11, or there’s different statistics and it depends also who you include and so on or who you don’t. But numerically, it is a minority. It is mathematically correct. I generally find that certainly in autistic communities, people tend to prefer identity-first language. Possibly, I suspect so in part because, like I said, people are more able to disclose, to self-identify, to get diagnosed, and also because the stigma is going down. It’s easier for people to identify as such.

Marie 34:28
It could also be because it is linked to how your brain is wired essentially. It’s very difficult to divorce from your identity. Person-first language was born out of the disability rights movements of the 60s to really reinforce the humanity of the person so that we think of them as a person first and we include them in this sense of brotherhood and humanity.

A lot of times, neurodivergent people will prefer identity-first language because their neurodifference is so connected to how their brain is wired and how they live, how they function, what kind of jobs they have, what kind of preferences in hobbies, what kind of friendships they have. It’s really difficult to distance it or divorce it from themselves as if it was something that they just happen to have.

Marie 35:19
I’m a person who has ADHD and who has brown hair as if it’s just another facet or characteristic. Any kind of language where you’re not framing it as a deficit or diverging from a norm, assuming then that it’s like a deviance is generally positive. Framing it as a minority is mathematically accurate.

Maybe if it helps people understanding, okay, so what do we talk about neurodivergence? Maybe what kind of people are we talking about? You’ve heard of ADHD and you’ve heard of autism spectrum disorder. You may also even have heard of audDHD, which is like a combination of autism and ADHD or attention deficit. It will also follow any kind of condition where the brain is wired in a way that’s different from what is generally considered as typical. It could also be, for example, dyspraxia, which is where the movements, for example, the movement of the hands or the limbs are not conducted in the way exactly that the brain intends. That could also affect, for example, how somebody interacts with your, I’m trying not to use any brand names, but your whiteboard software that you might use in some learning environments that require you to have a lot of precision in your mouse movements.

Marie 36:41
That’s something like this is going to be more difficult for such a person to use. It could also be something that is coming from aphasia. Aphasia has more to do the language centre and how it communicates with the brain, which could be following a traumatic event. It would also be including Tourette’s. You’ve also heard of dyslexia, dyscalculia, which is also with numbers. There’s going to be a lot of conditions that are going to fall under this umbrella.

In general, it’s a good idea to see what people within the community tend to prefer to use as language. Again, there will be regional differences. What you say in Canada and what you say in Great Britain and what you say in Australia and New Zealand and continental Europe may not be the same. Then whenever you refer to a person, an individual, it’s probably also a good idea to ask them how they would prefer to be referred to. But when you refer to a whole group, you can’t check with everyone in the group. I would say if you go on the website of a disability advocacy group that represents that particular group of people in that geographical context, there’s a fairly good chance that they will be using the kind of language that people tend to prefer using or have used about them.

Beth 37:54
Yeah. And recognize that it evolves. And I’m going to be, you know, full disclosing here that you and I talked about my book offline when we had our earlier conversation. [Marie smiles: Yeah.] And Marie’s probably going to be embarrassed, but Marie helped me realize because I haven’t read my own book for a while. I must admit that I talked to a person first language and said, I think at the time, you know, it was five years ago that that was what was being recommended and I recommended it. But of course we, you know, say right here, things have changed and we have to be gracious with ourselves.

I think that, you know, we can be quote unquote wrong over time because things change, communities change, people are individuals, as you’ve just said. So Marie helped me realize there’s another mistake in my book. [Laughs] But I knew that chapter or that piece on inclusive facilitation would be likely if anything was going to really change, it’s that piece. And we have to just keep evolving and learning as we go, don’t we?

Marie 38:50
Exactly. And this language evolves. I don’t think it was necessarily wrong when it was put out. I think there’s a lot of, in academia, even at the UN, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, there’s a lot of text out there that is using person-first language. So I don’t think anyone can fault you for having thought, well, that looks to be the official language, even the UN uses that kind of language.

So that must be the way to do it. It’s not a mistake so much as you were going off of the information you had, and I can absolutely see where that information could have tripped you up in that time because there’s quite still a big part of the world that continues to use this kind of language.

Beth 39:28
Yeah. I mean, we, we can never get it a hundred percent right with any of this stuff, right? With, with any, I mean, we’re talking about accessibility and neurodivergence today, and supporting that in our facilitation, but it’s basically anything to do with our work, that things could change. And we evolve in our careers and our knowledge over time, don’t we?

So we can’t, as long as we recognize that we said something then and we say it now and it’s different and we’re learning, then we’re on track in a way. Like we’re all, we, we have to be always learning. We’ve chosen a learning related field, haven’t we? [laughs]

Marie 40:01
That’s what keeps it exciting and interesting, right? We’re never bold because we’re always learning and progressing. And I would encourage other facilitators and trainers to look at it from that perspective as well and to enjoy the journey, knowing that there could be a bit of messiness in it and maybe some errors along the way.

I’ve shared one mistake I made in a session. You make that mistake once and then you never forget it, and then you make sure that the next times you get it right. As long as we also give ourselves the grace to not be perfect all the time. I would rather take gradual improvement that is steady than advocate that people have to get 100% right or not come at all, because then it’s very discouraging for people. And I still have a lot of friends in the disability activism groups, and I know that sometimes people feel like, oh, change is so slow and it’s exhausting, and I understand that. But also we need to encourage the wins where they can be. And learning environments are so important, as I mentioned earlier, because learning is where we get access to information that can help us evolve in our careers or evolve as individuals. And so it’s really essential that those experiences be inclusive so that we can level this playing field.

Beth 41:21
I know when I worked with faculty, when I was at a university as an instructional designer that I took the, you know, it’s that partnership with faculty that we have and sometimes they were very new to teaching. They knew their subject, but they were really new to teaching in that environment or any environment.

And I took an iterative approach with them that we had, we were going to focus on some wins this time when they taught their course and then they’re going to learn some things, get some feedback. And then next time, we’ll, you know, we’ll add on and we’ll try to do a few more. Because it was usually about engagement in general, right? Rather than lecturing, going to the engagement. But I think we can maybe take the same approach that if it’s iterative, if we’re always advancing, you know, you shared a story of a mistake. So if we keep on LinkedIn or wherever we happen to be, you know, talking with other facilitators, other designers, if we share, you know, with humility and honesty, like I just love when I see people sharing that kind of stuff on social media, because we haven’t figured it all out yet and we do make mistakes and we’re humans. So I’m always looking for that kind of learning, right? When it’s been pivotal for you, it’s probably pivotal for the rest of us too.

Marie 42:30
Yeah, and also look at it from the spirit of discovery. I’m showing off one of those like squishy fidget things to Beth here. It’s a, it’s kind of like a jelly-ish thing, but it’s less messy than slime. I’m always amazed whenever I experiment in session, trying to bring new things to see if it’s going to stick. And one of those things that I also sometimes do is I bring fidget toys or pipe cleaners or like little type things like this, and I put them in a corner and I just say, that’s the fidget toy corner. And I don’t make too much of a mention of it.

Marie 43:02
And you would be amazed at how many times these professionals with 30 years of experience, you know, very serious people wearing suits and so on will go and start playing with the fidget toys and kind of like be lost in conversation while making a pipe cleaner flowers or a bouquet or something like this. You know, being able to experiment. Because when you’re able to experiment with these things, I mean, I mentioned the fidget toys because they can be helpful for people to have in sessions. I may look distracted playing with this in front of you, but actually it helps me focus in a very paradoxical way. [Beth: Yeah, I get that.] So I can’t quite explain it. Um, but also bringing it into the, the learning environment, de-complexifies it and makes it less, uh, how to say less shameful to play with it, because now you’ve got a few people playing with it. Some of them are not neurodivergent, but they just appreciate the little distraction and so on. So it’s also experimenting with this.

Marie 43:58
Maybe you’re experimenting with a new, uh, format that you hope is more neurodivergent, um, affirming, giving people more options, more ways to acquire information, process information, more ways to discuss it, giving people more breaks, less overwhelm. Maybe it’s about, um, making it not so overwhelming in like in the sensory sense, in terms of like everything about the learning environment. It’s a physical learning environment in terms of like sense, lights, noise, et cetera, and experiment with that and see how it goes and, uh, and learn from that.

So if you also approach it from the perspective of experimentation, I think you can also have a bit of fun and saying like, okay, this worked or this did not yield any results. Maybe I’ll try it again. Maybe not, but, uh, being able to, to try with that. So I think you can also have a bit of, of fun in creating more neurodivergent-affirming and more inclusive journey.

Beth 44:52
I agree. And I’ve been using fidget tools for a while. And I’ve had participants come up at the end and specifically thank me for having that—because I put them on each table. And so it, you know, when you come in the room, you see nice supplies, nice sticky notes, right? Markers that work and fidget tools on every table, it kind of signifies maybe this session is going to be a little different than what you’ve had in a good way. But I’ve had people come up and say, thank you so much for having those on the table because I, you know, have ADHD and I really needed that or that kind of thing. And so we listen to the participants and what they say. [Marie: Mm mm.]

Beth 45:27
Can I ask you how you’ve made invitations to participants? Because there are the things that we haven’t anticipated that they are going to need in the session. So how do you make those specific or blanket invitations to participants to, you know, if you haven’t designed choice that there’s a silent room or a quiet room as opposed to a breakout room, how do you say, Hey, you know, tell me, tell me what you need. Are there specific things or phrases that you have fallen into?

Marie 45:57
Sometimes I design it, clearly my intention was that the main thing is that people are going to break out, but I offer the silent room as an alternative. Maybe in this case, I will say, well, if it’s a Zoom room, I will say, well, please rename yourself and put this kind of emoji in front of your name that I know that I need to place you or the tech host can place you in the silent room. It could also be that I will show the menu and I will put it in the chat as well because it’s really useful to also signpost information in the chat. Make sure that you’re selective in how much information you share in the chat.

Marie 46:34
You don’t want to overwhelm people, but I find that signposting key things that are happening or like, now we are at this part of the agenda so that people know where they are. All of that also helps with the cognitive load of where are we, what are we doing, instructions in the chat as well. Maybe the instruction is, if you would rather do activity one, do this. If you would like to do activity two, do this, activity three. I try to present it as, oh we have this exciting choice ahead of you. You can do this, this, or this. I really try to present it as if they’re all three perfectly valid choices.

Marie 47:10
I’m not trying to place a judgment of value on, this is the better choice or anything like this. Presenting it in that kind of way and really emphasizing this idea of having the learning menu and the different kinds of alternatives and then the invitation is whoever wants can do this. Of course, if I find out that only two people are willing to have a conversation, it’s really more like a dialogue at this point, I might try to see if the group sizes can be adjusted, but then maybe it teaches me something. If actually very few people would rather engage in conversation with one another and so many more would like to have a silent activity, it’s also maybe a signal for me that something about my session design is feeling a bit too much or that I need to make the incentive of exchanging with others even more exciting by making sure that this activity is maybe even better designed or better presented.

Marie 48:08
I would try to make this invitation neutral or maybe positive exciting, but also maybe I might say to people, if you would rather this, this, or that, send me or tech host a message, a private message in the chat. I can also maybe sometimes give people the option of not disclosing to the whole group where they want to go, but at least one person is able to centralize this. It doesn’t work for really huge group sizes, even more difficult to keep track of, but that can be another way, but that would be my way of framing the invitation for the variety in activities.

Beth 48:46
And you mentioned the tech host too. So having support for you as the facilitator is often a nice thing if possible.

Marie 48:53
I think if possible. The advantage of the tech host is that they can also serve as a kind of like tech support or a person who can be messaged with time sensitive information pertaining to how people are able to participate or if they have to step out or something like this at any moment. It also frees me up because it’s also really overwhelming for me to facilitate a group of 25 people and keep track of all the private messages in the chat of people telling me, no, I would rather do this or and so on.

Marie 49:22
And it gives the participants a kind of go-to person to communicate this kind of thing. I think it’s really valuable to add a tech host or a co-facilitator or somebody who can serve that role so that you can focus on really sensing where the participants are at and then somebody is also able to keep an eye on the chat and flag to you anything that’s relevant. And if you are going to encourage your participants to type in chat instead of verbalizing something as an alternative, then you also need to be able to keep track of what is happening in the chat, especially if it’s very active or there’s a lot of participants. And so to deliver on that promise, you might also need a second pair of eyes on the chat to keep track of that.

Beth 50:04
Yeah, we could do a whole other separate episode just on virtual facilitation itself. But there’s all sorts of things in person that we’re doing as well. But sometimes it’s just a little bit easier to access the facilitator or the co-facilitator in person. But there are ways, aren’t there, in those virtual environments we’re using them?

Beth 50:22
Marie, I know it’s, again, I said this with Nora, I’ll say it with you, I know it’s so difficult to just say, well, just tell us everything that you know about supporting neurodiverse learners [laughs] and designing for them. And you’ve given us so much here, but I wish we could talk for two hours, but I got to let you go. Is there anything that you want to leave us all with around this topic area that you think is a final message that they need to hear?

Marie 50:47
I think we’ve mostly shared the essence of things, but hey, this is your other neurodivergent-affirming learning environment tip, summarizing things so that people can once again, reinforce their learning and have kind of like a takeaway. So I think the takeaways are that you are going to face situations as facilitators, as trainers where you want to make your sessions more neurodivergent affirming.

Marie 51:13
My first invitation would be to look at how your session is designed and how the invitation to that session, how the information that you provide beforehand is helping people understand what to expect and how they’re expected to show up. Maybe also something about the norms, what kind of participation is expected from them, so that they can decide whether or not they will join or whether or not they will skip it.

Marie 51:37
And during the session, be ready to adapt. It might require more work from you upfront to design a menu of learning activities and to reflect on, okay, what is a different way to do this or that? But I think this investment ahead of time is also going to make your sessions richer and then to see how you offer it. My invitation would be that to reduce the cognitive load on participants, make sure that you can share like really these key takeaways also in the chat, summarize at the end, maybe send a handout or a summary also by email afterwards.

Marie 52:16
And as much as possible, avoid calling people out if they are not, let’s say, oh, so-and-so, you have been very silent and so on. Let’s try to avoid doing that, but create gentle invitations for people to participate or be clear with them how we would like them to engage and provide them multiple ways of engaging with the content, with one another, with their learning objectives.

Marie 52:43
I think those are all really nice things to do. But most importantly, be gentle with yourself and give yourself grace to progress and to keep learning and to potentially maybe even make choices that you realize afterwards, well, that wasn’t the best way to go at it, but now we learn and we know because that is going to make such a better learning environment. Maybe you are a neurodivergent yourself and you are able to create the learning environment that you wish you had had, perhaps at some point in your life, or that the environment that you wish people that you love who are also neurodivergent wish they had had, but also understanding that it’s a hidden disability that is so prevalent that it’s almost impossible to go at something and think, oh, well, there won’t be any neurodivergent people there because most likely you won’t even know it.

Marie 53:37
So I think it’s safe to assume that any of these adjustments will benefit people who know of a particular condition or anyone who is temporarily finding themselves overwhelmed, facing anxiety, facing a lot of cognitive load, and who could really appreciate all these efforts you make to make it easier and more impactful for them to learn with you.

Beth 54:00
What a wonderful summary. I wish every guest on the show did that. [Laughs] I probably should do that for guests. Myriam does a good summary on her podcast, but thank you. That’s just a lovely encapsulation of, of so many of the strategies and the reasons why we want to design this way and facilitate this way and keep learning in our field about these, these aspects. So I look forward to staying connected to learning from you on social media and in other ways. Thanks again for having this conversation with me.

Marie 54:31
Thank you so much.

Beth 54:34
[Episode outro] Well, as always, I really enjoyed my conversation with Marie and I love when I get to listen back to my own episodes with my guests and remember our conversation a few weeks later after we recorded it. I always learn something new, even when I re-listen to the episode. And so I hope you’re enjoying them as well. As I re-listened to what Marie and I had talked about, I’ll just highlight two or three things that she said which are still resonating with me.

Beth 55:06
One is that she said that it’s worth the upfront investment that we make when we do this, what she called future proofing of our sessions for our participants. And she also, if you remember, said we might even be doing this for ourselves because of those temporary or hidden disabilities that might come up. We might be in the situation where we need something different than what we always have. And if we’ve done the work to learn about it, to provide it for our learners, maybe it helps us to be able to support ourselves if and when that time comes. So the upfront investment is worth it, not only in the moment for the participants that we have, but for our future participants and maybe our future selves as well.

Beth 55:55
Another thing that Marie said was just the caution around being really, really participatory in our environments. And this struck a chord with me because when I facilitate, I really design and facilitate very participatory sessions. It’s part of what I think I bring to the world, bring to my work and my participants and clients. But actually, there’s a caution there that she’s giving us as well, which I want to really take to heart. So it’s the potential for really participatory sessions to be overwhelming to some learners. And I loved what she said, which was that we could invite and give choice to participants so that they could participate in a softer, gentler way, another way that works for them rather than maybe our first thought about how we were going to design the activity. So, yeah, just a caution around that potential for very participatory environments to be overwhelming.

Beth 56:55
We don’t want to not create participatory environments, but we do want to create what she calls that learning menu that has a variety of options within it. And the key piece she said about that was that all options within that are valid and none is better than the other. So it’s not like there’s kind of a default that is the best. And if you’re going to go into the quiet room, then that’s less than.

Beth 57:21
So she’s saying present all the options as valid in that learning menu for the participants. And that will be a good thing to do to be inclusive.

Again, I’d like to thank Marie Dubost for coming on the show. I learned as always, and I hope you did as well. Now, I’m not sure if you can hear it in my voice, but I have been ill. And so I think what is going to happen, the next episode, is the silence episode, which I talked about at the end of episode 62 with Julie Dirksen. I set up that this episode 63 was going to be a silence related episode. It is not because I’ve been sick. [laughs] So I’m giving myself a little break here. I’m putting Marie’s episode in first because we had already recorded it, thank goodness. And so this just means the next one should be the silence episode. And I look forward to presenting that to you then.

Beth 58:17
Thanks again for listening. If you’re looking for the show notes or the transcripts for this episode, you can find everything on facilitatingonpurpose.ca. I’d love if you gave me any feedback you would like to send me about any episode, including this one, including how it could be made more accessible for you.

And I’d like to thank Mary Chan at Organized Sound Productions, who works diligently in the background doing the great editing she does for every episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please rate the show, send it to a friend or a colleague. I’d really appreciate that kind of support. Thanks and we’ll see you next time.

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