Communication Unbound: How Facilitated Communication is Challenging Traditional Views of Autism and Ability-Disability

by Douglas Biklen

Book Overview

Facilitated communication is the means by which thousands of people who cannot speak or whose speech is highly disordered, and who were previously believed to be severely retarded, are revealing unexpected literacy abilities. This book describes how it works.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807732214
• ISBN13: 9780807732212
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Teachers College Press
• Length: 221 Pages
• Weight: 3.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.2" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Important but flawed, and of definite historical value

This book documents the author's discovery and subsequent study of facilitated communication, a technique that allows some disabled people to communicate by providing varying degrees of physical, cognitive, and emotional support to use some form of communication device during the communication process. This particular book mainly explores the communication aspect of facilitation, although any action can be facilitated.During the time period when this book was being researched and written, there were a number of stereotypes about autism and intellectual disability, some of which persist to this day. These stereotypes center on what the person knows and does not know, rather than what the person is and is not capable of showing. Some of these stereotypes, for some people, are shattered by facilitated communication, which allows people to show more depth to their thoughts than their speech and movement skills normally allow them to be capable of, at least to observers with the assumptions most non-autistic observers have.Biklen explores these stereotypes, but like many who work in facilitated communication, takes disagreement with them to the other extreme. At one point, he suggests that there are *no* cognitive aspects to autism, and that these are all illusions based on a faulty input-output system. While many autistic people, including those of us who speak or type without facilitation, know more and are capable of more than other people assume we know and are capable of, the suggestion that these cognitive theories have no merit is too far-fetched. Autism is not purely motor and sensory; it also involves thought, although to what degree and in what manner depends on the person. The book sometimes makes it sound as if autism is something along the lines of a very complex form of cerebral palsy, and this is not a good analogy for it.The author questions many of the things that facilitated communicators say, wondering if they are being too pessimistic about things like inclusion based on bad experiences. But he leaves curiously unquestioned the idea that a hatred of being autistic is a natural part of our emotional reality, rather than learned as surely as "inclusion will never work" is learned. The chapter title "I am not autistic on the typewriter" makes me wonder precisely what the person has been taught autism is -- the inability to communicate, some other stereotype? These questions go unanswered, and even unasked. An expression of deep depression is uncritically printed in a section marked "freedom of expression". Something is wrong here, if this is assumed to be what we should feel about ourselves.There are a number of important stories in here, stories of parents independently discovering facilitated communication, and stories of autistic people working painstakingly for years to develop a communication system of our own, only to have it ignored or even openly ridiculed by professionals. These stories need to be heard. Descrip

An open-minded exploration of new possibilities in autism.

Biklen's book is a wonderful and fascinating account of an attempt to put on one side forty years of accumulated prejudice on the topic of autism and ask what the actual, observable problem that these people have is. For most of the more severe cases, the problem involves communication difficulties. Other researchers had assumed that the communication problems were inseperable from the condition: Biklen asked "If we try and fix the communication problems, what would we find?" Using facilitated communication, a means of steadying a person's pointing to enable them to point to pictures, words or letters, Biklen was able to show that the abilities of these people existed but had been buried. This is not a cure for autism - all you have at the end of it is a person with autism who can communicate rather than a person with autism who can't - but anyone who has an interest in the contested territory of autism must read this book.