By Carla Cornelius

13.1.2021

In my several years of working in education, I have grown accustomed to thinking that visual support is what ‘must’ be used for children who have autism. Zealously, this is what I promoted as an Advisor and often felt defeated during visits and meetings with parents, when I realised that visual support was not being actively used.

It is only once I started working more directly with parents that I pondered on the use of visual support both as a practical system and as a tool to be used successfully with all children.

Practical System - In education, we promote the use of visual schedules, timetable, now and next board, choice board among others but these require a high level of planning and resource investment. You need time to make the resources and time to train everyone in their use only to see them disappear quickly behind radiators or cupboards gathering dust until another ‘expert’ practitioner comes along or a new child is welcomed in the setting.

Parents, often overwhelmed by the routine of the day and sleepless nights, find it hard to allocate time to make or use these resources. Sleep deprivation and child’s tantrums taking a toll on their motivation.

Being a practical person, I decided to research a more practical way to access visual resources and came across a few apps, whose use would be more adept to a technology driven society. Alas, these were even more convoluted than the paper ones, living no hope of a practical solution.

Then I came across this article: https://theconversation.com/children-with-autism-arent-necessarily-visual-learners-42758 and realised that I had to question my assumptions once more! The author suggests that not all children with autism are visual learners.

Here I come to my second point - A successful tool to be used with all children - I had forgotten the most important point, children are individuals and as such they are bound to present with differences in the way they perceive and access the world around them. For this reason, we could safely argue that our support strategies need to be individually targeted and flexible enough to accommodate these differences.

This implies that each child with autism will have their own preferred learning style.

So how do we motivate children with language difficulties, support them to follow instructions and reduce their anxiety when a change is about to happen? I believe that motivation and reinforcement can play a strong role in this.

Could it be that there are other reasons why a child may respond better to an instruction delivered with visual support? Does motivation play a part in the child’s response? For example, if I have previously been shown a picture/symbol of a pizza before tasting a flavoursome new food, I am more likely to respond positively to that picture in the future. However, if the activity or objects shown in the picture is not motivating, the use of an image would not make any difference to my compliance or feeling towards that activity or object. In the first example, I have been conditioned to think that the sight of the visual equates to a positive rewarding experience. Can the same be achieved by the sole use of a word or gesture reinforced with a rewarding experience? The answer is very likely to be a 'Yes'.

My conclusion is that we need to invest more actively in reinforcement and motivation alongside a multi-sensory approach when working with children and supporting them to respond to instructions and change.