In this video I discuss the strengths associated with intellectual disabilities. It is especially important to do this because people with intellectual disabilities have been denegrated for over a century because of the dark history of I.Q. testing in America, wherein eugenically-minded psychologists used words like ”moron” and ”imbecile” to describe these individuals, and where...Read More

In November, 2015, President Donald Trump was speaking at a rally in South Carolina when he began to criticize a New York Times journalist, Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a congenital condition affecting his joints. Trump’s beef was that the man had allegedly disclaimed having reported that Muslims in New Jersey celebrated the 911 attacks...Read More

Fifteen years ago, I wrote The Power of Neurodiversity:  Unleashing the Advantages of Your Differently Wired Brain.  At the time, few people knew the term neurodiversity, and the sales of the book were slow.  However, in the past several years, neurodiversity has emerged from obscurity to become a word that seems to be on everybody’s...Read More

This video is #8 in my series Introduction to Neurodiversity, based on a course I taught at Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in Education. It focuses on the gifts, assets, and strengths of those with intellectual disabilities. This is the neurodiversity that really needs the most publicity concerning the things that people with intellectual...Read More

When children are diagnosed with special needs (e.g. dyslexia, ADHD, autism etc.), the initial efforts to support them almost always revolve around helping them to fit in with the environment around them.  This of course is very important, but it leaves out a much-needed corollary to these efforts and that is:  changing the environment to...Read More