In this paper, I think through three Intensive Interactions from my doctoral research-creation study to neuroqueer what passes as ‘literacies’ in the special education classroom. Using Nathan Snaza’s (2019) concept of ‘animate literacies’ as“marks that circulate in various media with affective agency,” and the scholar-activist concept neurological queerness, I consider how an attention to opacity, the more-than-human, and relationality might contest the notion of ‘competence’ in special educational literacy. This has particular implications in the after-lives of the coronavirus pandemic, where ‘catching-up’ or regaining lost time has become a powerful narrative in policy and practice.

In this paper, I contest the hierarchical neuro-normativity of literacy ‘competence.’ I do so using the scholar-activist concept of ‘neuroqueerness,’ as what queer theorist Muñoz (1999) might term a ‘dis-identification’ of neurodivergence that “work[s] on and against dominant ideology” (Muñoz, 1999, loc. 458). In this way, I understand the term ‘neuroqueer’ as a verb that does something to neurotypical hierarchies of cognition rather than an adjective that describes a type of practice. The concept of neuroqueerness has been used to bring new insights to the study of curriculum and classroom practice (Roscigno, 2020). While literacy scholars have problematised state-sanctioned notions of literacy for their raciality (Cushing, 2021; Wynter-Hoyte & Boutte, 2018), their separation of mind from both body and place (Flewitt, 2005; Hackett, 2021), and their separation of literacy skills from the ‘literacy event’ (Burnett & Merchant, 2020), the idea of neuroqueerness has received only a little attention in the field of literacy, and what little there is reinforces neuro-normative conceptualisations of literacy. 

For instance, Kleecamp (2020) draws from Biklen’s notion of ‘presuming competence’ to explore how young people’s stimming, disrupting, and refusing when engaging with texts demonstrates a kind of what she terms ‘neuroqueer literacy.’ However, presuming competence is really quite different from how I think about ‘neuroqueerness.’ Presuming competence is a way of ‘including,’ or recognising neurodivergent practices through the lens of an existing set of neuronormative capacities—here what it means to be literate. Biklen tries to map neurodivergent practices onto these capacities, re-emphasizing neurotypical literacy skills. By way of a contrast, Kim (2015), in contesting corporeal hierarchies. encourages us to reject the whole idea of humanist capacities, including ‘competence,’ and thus making them irrelevant in “recognising the ontology of an object.” In other words, presuming competence retains the humanist measures of capacity against which divergent body(mind)s fail to measure up. Likewise, presuming competence in the special education literacy classroom retains the deficit-centric perspective of a set of ‘literacy’ capacities, the failure to achieve which defines neurodivergence. By way of a contrast, truly neuroqueering ‘literacies’ should contest the whole notion of competence.

            These questions are of particular concern in the after-lives of the coronavirus pandemic, where the urgency of catching children up with pre-pandemic competencies has become a powerful narrative in international policy and practice. This has typically emphasised state-sanctioned disciplinary expectations of children’s progress in ‘literacy’ and ‘numeracy.’ Yet, this discussion fails to account for the ways in which these disciplines are grounded in homonormative and white supremacist notions of competence that (in the UK) nearly 50% of children were failing to meet anyway. A neuroqueering of ‘competence’ might pave the way to question what

My thinking in this paper leads me to address the following two research questions:

1. How might an attention to embodiment and the more-than-human neuroqueer humanist notions of ‘literacies’?
2. How might neuroqueering ‘literacies’ complicate the notion of competencies in the special education classroom?

I draw here from a 14-month in-school artist/researcher residency in an early childhood classroom in Leeds, northern England. The wider study was a series of music research-creation workshops, in which we explored how neurodiversity, typicality and divergence all unfolded through the process of composing music. As part of this project, I occasionally improvised with Abdulkadir, Moses and Rei, three 5-6 year olds from Pigeons class who spent all or part of their learning in a small, additionally resourced special education classroom adjacent to the main classroom, using the Intensive Interactions communication strategy. I recorded field notes of these instances, but not audio recordings. ‘Intensive Interactions’ is a two-way communication strategy for interacting with service users (Hewett, 2018). Rather than teaching linguistic concepts (for instance, through Makaton signs or picture exchange) or modifying behaviour (for instance, through social stories or applied behaviour analysis), Intensive Interactions emphasizes reciprocity and intimacy. The support worker attends, mimics, or responds to the service user’s every gesture, be it a stim, sigh, loll, or vocalisation.

After reading each of the vignettes, I explore how each problematises the notion of competence. In the vignette with Abdulkhadir, we bounced back and forth ‘tipping-tapping’ our plastic foods onto the ground. We did this with no clear sense of where the activity would go, or to what extent one was engaging with, alongside, or simply adjacent to the other. Research on autistic people often emphasises making the autistic body(mind) more transparent: to better narrate or understand the individual or autistic difference. Similarly, literacy is often framed as being about transparency, wherein the standardisation of language practices is essential to ensuring clear communication. However, my back-and-forth improvisation with Abdulkhadir is both deeply interactive and deeply opaque. Concomitantly, the second vignette complicates the notion of authorship. Rei’s and my interaction takes place both on and with a balance frame, and at times it is difficult to understand who is ‘leading’: Rei, myself, or the non-human balance frame. In this way, the choices behind authorship are unclear. Remi Yergeau (2018) writes that narratives that dehumanise—or compensatorily rehumanise—autistic people often centre the degree of volition associated with autistic practices. This understanding relies on a singular, bounded version of a rationale human subject: the same version of the human centred in curriculum and policy documents. Here, however, authorship is distributed between body(mind)s: between me and Rei as humans, but also between us humans and the affordances and limitations of the non-human spinning platform of the climbing frame. These vignettes problematise the idea of literacy competence, posing how autistic practices might be understood as literacies, without presuming competence in neurotypical notions of what it means to be ‘literate.’ This contributes to the field by posing a ‘neuroqueer literacy’ that neuroqueers the idea of literacies, rather than ‘literising’ (regulating and humanising) neuroqueerness.

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