Mary Hanley & Debbie Riby -- Attention, Arousal and Anxiety for Autistic and Neurodivergent Learners

Dr Mary Hanley and Prof Debbie Riby
Durham University

"Triple-A: Attention, Arousal and Anxiety in the Classroom for Autistic and Neurodivergent Learners"

Talk abstract: School classrooms are typically busy, complex multisensory environments, which are often quite unpredictable. They can lead to particular challenges for autistic and neurodivergent learners, especially because many of these learners experience attention differences, arousal/sensory processing differences, or heightened anxiety (what we refer to as ‘Triple-A). Research from our group has shown how attention (Hanley et al., 2017; McDougal et al., 2020 a), sensory arousal (Jones et al., 2020; McDougal et al., 2020b) and anxiety (Jones et al., 2020; McDougal et al., 2020b) have an impact on the engagement and learning of children and young people, especially those who are autistic. Our research highlights how these issues should not be viewed in isolation (McDougal et al., 2020b)– to be able to support children and young people at school, we must understand how these aspects of thinking and behaviour interact with each other. An important message from our research is that we need to think about the classroom environment itself, and how we ensure it is an environment that supports engagement, not detracts from it (Hanley et al., 2017; Jones et al., in prep). Using these research examples, we have been developing an online training tool which is aimed at raising awareness and understanding among educational professionals of ‘Triple-A’ challenges at school. In this presentation, we aim to give an overview of this research and the resulting training tool that has been developed.