This paper aims to describe how pupils, caregivers and education professionals make sense of ‘a pupil with autism’, the implications that follow for the pedagogical agenda and, in a broader sense, the idea of the person with autism as diverse or different. This paper presents the results of a study involving 23 pupils with an autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, 18 education professionals (teachers, head teachers, members of the Pupil Health Team), and 22 caregivers. 

The research was located in two special educational settings in Sweden and applies a methodology of text analysis developed at the University of Padua, Italy, never previously applied in studies concerning pupils with psychiatric diagnoses. 

The results show how the education professionals are working toward diversity, i.e. understanding the pupils as individuals and striving to incorporate the diagnosis as a part of the individual rather than the central aspect. However, the pupils themselves and the caregivers rather move toward understanding the diagnosis as central and the pupils as different from others. These results are relevant considering the idea of inclusion and diversity in school and the implications of understanding the person with autism as diverse or essentially different from other people, in school as well as later in life. 

The research connects to several international/European discussions among which: 

a)     the possibility of working toward inclusion while also practicing differentiation in placement for certain groups of pupils; 

b)    how to achieve an educational trajectory that allows the pupils to realise their full potential; 

c)     how to move toward the aim of the pupils becoming active members of the broader society and 

d)    the implications of understanding the pupils (the person) with autism as diverse and different. 

The research presented in the paper involves 23 pupil, 18 education professionals and 22 caregivers. The research involved a) a private upper secondary resource school with delimited reception, specifically profiled toward pupils with an autism spectrum diagnosis, and b) two special teaching classes, focused on pupils with an autism spectrum diagnosis, located within the premises of a public compulsory school. The data was generated through interviews ( with all pupils) and questionnaires with open ended questions (compiled by education professionals and caregivers). The MADIT methodology focuses both on how ordinary language is used to configure sense of reality (the process) combined with what the participants say (the content) (Turchi & Orrù, 2014). Through the concept of ‘discursive repertory’ (DR) the answers of the participants were analysed by observing how ordinary language was used to construct sense as the participants answered the questions. For example, as the participants gives their point of view of what it means to be a pupil with an autism diagnosis, they sometimes do so by simply describing a person, with difficulties and strengths, without any moral or qualitative evaluation. Other times they make a distinction between pupils who have a diagnosis and pupils who do not have a diagnosis. In the first case, the DR is considered a Description and in the second case the DR is either a Contraposition or a Justification. The Description is a generative DR and opens up the possibilities of interaction and, as an implication, opens up the possibilities of who the pupil with autism can be. The Contraposition and the Justification are stabilising DRs and thus stabilise the modalities inside of which the pupils, caregivers and education professionals interact. In the analysis, all the answers of each participant group are analysed and the outcome is a distribution in percentages of the different DRs that form the answers. MADIT is usually used to evaluate a situation in order to prepare interventions to render the modalities of interaction more or less stable, should it be deemed as useful or beneficial (in this case of the pupils). MADIT has been priorly applied in a variety of settings but never before concerning the education of pupils who have been diagnosed with ASD.

The results show how the pedagogical professionals attempt to include the pupils with autism in the broader community of pupils, seeing them first and foremost as individuals. This direction is that of ‘diversity’ where no pupil is the same as another, but they all belong to the same community. This result is shown in the distribution of the DR Description among the answers of the education professionals (37%). However, in the answers given by the pupils themselves and the caregivers, the portion of the DR Description is lower (12% and 11% respectively). Instead, we find a higher distribution of stabilising DRs such as Justification (27% among the pupils’ answers) and Contraposition. These DRs direct the process of sense making toward an understanding of the pupil with autism as different from other pupils, because of the diagnosis. This direction is that of ‘difference’ where the group of pupils with autism belong to their own community rather than the general community of pupils. Neither direction is necessarily ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but differ in terms of their implications. Considering the agenda of the education professionals, should they successfully realise their aim of diversity, they could benefit from being supported in rendering their aims clearer and how to navigate toward them. It would be possible to imagine an intervention with the aim of supporting the education professionals. The efficiency of such an intervention could be evaluated through MADIT by comparing the DRs used by the involved professionals and pupils at t0 and t1.

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