The term ‘Autism’ was first used in 1911 by Eugen Bleuler (1951) as a description of a form of schizophrenia. In the 1940s the first widely recognized descriptions auf autism were published by Leo Kanner (1968 [1943]) and Hans Asperger (1944) (Lord et al. 2020). Due to these publications languages a gap between German speaking and international/English discourse became evident and can still be observed in today’s educational discourse.  
Kanner's description of the cold ‘schizophrenogenic’ mother as the cause of autism (Sterwald and Baker 2019) was particularly taken up in psychoanalytic considerations in the 1960s and 1970s. Bruno Bettelheim's (1973 [1967]) description of "refrigerator mothers" gained popularity subsequently but is now considered refuted (Zankl 2012). Concurrently, and in addition, the first neurological descriptions of autism emerged (Hermelin and O'CONNOR 1963; Rimland 1964). Especially Rimland shifted the perspective in the search for the origins away from parental misbehavior towards neurological causes. In 1979, Wing and Gould (1979) first used the term ‘Autism-Spectrum’. This term is still present in medical publications such as the ICD-11 (WHO, 2019) today. Autism was first named in a medical diagnostic manual in the DSM-III (1980). With this, research on autism almost exclusively adopted a medical/pathological perspective as evident in the frequent use of the term ‘disorder’ in reference to autism. Approaches such as Baron-Cohen and colleagues' Mind-Blindness Theory (1985; 1995) are exemplary of this perspective. Baron-Cohen himself underwent a paradigm shift in the following years of his career towards a perspective of neurodiversity (Baron-Cohen, 2017), representing the evolution of the scientific discourse.
Through this period autism as a phenomenon was always part of the practical and scientifical educational conversation, presumably highly influenced by the previously described developments in the medical perspectives. As it’s evident for example in the Berlin guidelines on special needs education (SenBJF 2023) where the description criteria for ‘autistic behavior’ matches the diagnostical criteria for ‘autism spectrum disorder’ in ICD-11 (WHO 2020). Similar perspectives can be found in other practical and theoretical publications. This leads to the questions: On what background is autism discussed in the current pedagogical discourse? And how does it correspond to inclusive perspectives?
           
To answer these questions, this presentation will focus on references to autism used in current pedagogical publications (comparing the German and English discourse) and analyze their implicit meanings and realted models of autism. By doing this, it’s possible to show the current state of pedagogical autism research. This presentation will be based on the results of a scoping review. By taking the underlying models into account it’s also possible to question whether the most commonly used models relate to inclusive models of disability.
This presentation will use the descriptions of inclusive perspectives by Mai-Anh Boger (e.g. 2017) and Adi Goldiner (2022) as a framework.
In the work on the ‘trilemma of inclusion’ Boger uses a philosophical-analytical approach to show the relation between the perspectives of ‘normalization’, ‘deconstruction’ and ‘empowerment’ (Boger 2017). In a nutshell she concludes the inclusive theories can always only engage a maximum of two of these perspectives, while necessarily opposing the last (Redlich and Gerhards 2023).
Meanwhile Goldiners ‘Cluster of Disability Models’ summarizes approaches towards disability models in a three-dimensional scheme. The Cluster concludes that every Model of diability can be assorted in three axis: medical vs. social model; tragedy vs. affirmative model & minority vs. universal model (Goldiner 2022).            
These two approaches will be combined in a theoretical framework to assess models of autism from an inclusive perspective and examine their implications for theoretical and practical perspectives. Thus analyzing the implications of descriptions of autism between ‘neurodiversity’, ‘spectrum’ and ‘disorder’.

To identify the most common perspectives on autism in the current educational discourse a scoping review following the methodology by Elm, Schreiber and Haupt (2019) was conducted. In doing so the German discourse was approached via the educational repository ‘Pedocs’. This includes only open access publications from different fields of educational research. Only texts that were published between 2018 and 2023 and appeared through the search for ‘Autismus’ (n=137) and ‘autistisch’ (n=16) were included. 90 publications were excluded based on formal (duplicates and language) and content criteria (no clear perspective on autism), leaving 63 publications for further analysis. The English discourse is currently approached in a similar way through ‘ERIC (Educational Research Information Center)’. As this is used mainly to contrast the German discourse, only open access publications (via ERIC) from 2023 found through the search for the terms ‘Autism’ (n=48) and ‘Autistic’ (n=9) are included. The formal exclusion of publications is currently executed, based on the same criteria as for the German publications and will be finished in the time being. The publications will be analyzed for their utilized model of autism, based on terminology and references in the text. As a reflection the utilized models will be sorted according and in addition to Berdelmanns (2023) work on identification of models of autism. Finally the models are analyzed for their perspectives on autism from an inclusive standpoint, by utilizing a framework based on Boger (e.g. 2017) and Goldiner (2022). The framework identifies four approaches towards (dis-)ability, three of which based in an inclusive understanding, one based in an exclusive understanding. By assorting the approaches towards autism in this framework, we will be able to show whether the most commonly used models of autism in the current educational discourse have an inclusive background and which perspectives are emphasized, between empowerment, normalization and deconstruction in accordance to Boger (2017). In addition, the results will be compared quantitatively in their appearance and as a comparison between the German and English discourse.

In the German educational discourse an overwhelming majority of publications use at least partly – in direct reference and/or their terminology – models of autism in reference to medical publications. Most of these are non-inclusive by nature, as their main purpose is to describe medical deviation between health and sickness. DSM-V (Falkai et al. 2018) and ICD-11 (WHO 2020) are the most common examples for this (n=44). This strong reliance on medical perspectives might be due to a lack of a common pedagogical and inclusive model of autism, as it is suggested for example in the neurodiversity-paradigm (e.g. Walker 2015; Singer 2022). Though approaches like this exist in English (e.g. Jaarsma and Welin 2012; Perrykkad and Hohwy 2020; Anderson-Chavarria 2021), they are so far not widely recognized in the German educational discourse. The scoping review on the English discourse is currently executed but will be finished in time to be presented at ECER. Due to the different historical background of autism research (starting with Kanner and Asperger) the most common perspectives and models are expected to differ significantly from the German discourse. Another reason for this expectation is that the scientifical discourse on neurodiversity, which is an important inclusive perspective on autism as a phenomenon (Berdelmann 2023) is mostly in English and has so far only started to be recognized in the German educational discourse (Grummt 2023). Following this it’s expected to find more inclusive perspectives based on neurodiversity in the recent English educational discourse on autism, compared to the German. Finally this presentation discusses the necessity for inclusive models in research on inclusion and the (unconscious) implications of exclusive models in theoretical, practical and intermediate fields like teacher training.

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