Description

---

Katharine Beals describes the root causes of the language and learning challenges in autism, their various academic consequences, and a variety of tools and strategies for addressing them. Drawing on what the most current evidence shows about the nature of autism and which therapies are most successful, Beals discusses the implications for autism-friendly instruction in academic subjects.

Complete acceptance of individuals on the autism spectrum means rethinking assumptions about autistic students, about how we teach expressive language, about how we teach reading comprehension, and about what and how we teach in the many K-12 classrooms attended by autistic students.

About the Author

---

Katharine Beals is the author of Raising a Left-Brain Child in a Right-Brain World: Strategies for Helping Bright, Quirky, Socially Awkward Children to Thrive at Home and at School. She has a PhD in linguistics and is an adjunct professor in the Autism Program at the Drexel University School of Education, where she designed two of the program's five courses. She also teaches courses on autism at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. She specializes in language and literacy acquisition in autism, language technologies for autistic individuals, educational challenges for students with autism, and the problems with Facilitated Communication as an intervention in autism. She is a contributor at FacilitatedCommunication.org and also an autism parent.