Katie Rose Guest Pryal: She did an incredible job. I read a piece that she wrote for this magazine called Haslet, and it changed my life. I was like, it’s possible to write about your kids without being awful. Okay. It’s possible. Who knew? Okay. So this is it. And I came up with this like ethical, these ethical guidelines for myself and I started this column and the first piece I wrote for it was the most red piece in the magazine in 2018.

The most red piece. And I think I hit a nerve, which was good. And and that was from 2018 to 2019. Wrote it monthly and then and then COVID happened and I had to we. I couldn’t do that anymore. I just had to take a break from just about everything. Some people like wrote 10 books during COVID.

That was not me. I was not that person. So then I pulled them out again and I said, let me take a broader approach. Let me look at the research that underlies. This, these personal stories, right? What are the institutional issues that caused my 6-year-old to be kicked off the little community swim team because he was annoying, right?

Keith Edwards: Hello and welcome to Student Affairs Now I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Katie Rose, guest PRIs, your Kid Belongs Here, pushes back on ableist systems affecting neurodivergent children, college students, and the rest of us. Drawing on personal stories as a parent and expertises as scholar, PRI shows how exclusion is less about a child’s differences or behavior, and more about the norms that institutions enforce.

The book argues for a cultural shift from viewing neurodivergence as a deficit to embracing it as a difference that enriches learning communities. I’m so glad to have you here for this conversation. Student Affairs now is the premier podcast on online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode, or browse the archives@studentaffairsnow.com. We’re sponsored by Evolve. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence. Empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education and Huron’s education and research experts help institutions transform their strategy, operations, technology, and culture to foster innovation, financial health, and student success.

As I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his. I’m a speaker, author, and coach, empowering, exceptional, higher education leadership for better tomorrows for us all. Through leadership, learning, and equity. You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com and I’m recording this for my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Katie, welcome. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your work. Thank you for writing the book. Thank you for joining us for this conversation. Why don’t you just go ahead and introduce yourself a little bit for folks who don’t know you.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Sure. Thank you. That was a wonderful introduction and I’m so glad to be here.

I am a neurodivergent. I have bipolar disorder autism, A DHD, so A DHD. I’m a author, a speaker, a neurodiversity affirming writing coach and an educator. I’m still, after all these years, an adjunct professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. And when I was in higher ed, I specialized in disability law and that was my area of research.

So it transitioned nicely to my writing career. And then my most recent books are Your Kid Belongs Here, that’s coming from Johns Hopkins in November and a light in the tower. A new reckoning with mental health in higher education, which came out with University Press of Kansas in 2024 last year.

I also write fiction romance novels. Woo. But they all feature neurodivergent characters because I have learned that I cannot write a neurotypical character. I just dunno how. So that’s that. And then I also write essays and, more newsy pieces for places like Catapult and The Chronicle of Higher Education, where I used to be a columnist and still write occasionally.

And I was nominated for a Pushkar prize. I have a Master’s in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins. My law degree is from the University of North Carolina, and I have a doctorate in rhetoric from University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. The diversions there is coming through, right? These different books and romance novels. A jd, a PhD and a Master’s in Fine Arts. Is that right?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: For creative writing? Creative writing,

Keith Edwards: yeah. All over the place. All over the place. I love it. That’s just such a short, succinct glimpse into you. Mostly professionally. By way of entry into into this book.

And this topic, I just wanna invite you how did this book come to be and tell us the full human story of that.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yeah, sure. I I am a late diagnosed autistic, person. Which is not unusual now, especially for women. And people assigned female at birth or afab. Okay.

And so my pronouns are she her, by the way. And and like many of us in this group researchers refer to us as the lost generation of autistic people. Like many of us, we, find out that we are neurodivergent autistic, A DHD when our children are diagnosed we look at them, say the schools or pointed out or something like that.

And then we look at them and we’re like, no, they’re not, because they’re just like me and I’m not autistic. Okay. So yes. And then, so then if we’re lucky like I was, then our insurance covers testing and if we’re not lucky, then we find a good self-diagnosis tool online.

And which is a perfectly acceptable way to do this. And we discover a lot more about ourselves. And how for me being a DHD, because, when I told my parents that I was diagnosed with A DHD, it was like this most bizarre conversation. My mother goes, oh yeah, you were, we, you were diagnosed as a DHD as a kid.

And I was like, I was, I had no idea and I definitely did not get like any supports for that. I’m not sure what kind of supports existed in the eighties, but definitely not any I received. It was, would’ve been nice to know before, like a couple years back when I was writing this book. But the I find that very funny and also quite Gen X. That’s like the most Gen X story I can probably tell about myself right

Keith Edwards: now. Oh, by the way we, we have always known this about you and just

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yeah. We just ignored it. Okay. Yeah. Everything else. Broken bones, what’s a broken wrist here or there, it’s fine.

So the in fact, before I was diagnosed, I started a column. Writing a column about my experience parenting my children, and I had never written about my children before. I actually had a very strict policy about that. I had been writing for the public for many years at that point. Sometimes in ways that blew up and, got me those, those lovely Twitter death threats that we used to get.

When we would write something. Angered people or whatever. And I just wanted to keep my kids outta the public eye. I still don’t use their names, and I don’t I don’t put their faces up, even though my oldest is 16. Occasionally I’ll post a picture of him on horseback, for example, and with his permission, he doesn’t have his own social media, so he’s he thinks, kids their age think it’s dumb.

So I’m like, that’s right. Is it okay? Is it okay? If I put this photo of you, he is a, he rides horses, jumping this incredible jump and he’s yeah, that’s fine. And I’m like, okay. Just so you know, the internet’s forever, blah, blah. He’s oh my god, mom, stop. And I’m like, okay.

But I’ve been very protective of them and when I started writing this column, the only reason I was willing to write it was because it was edited by a wonderful author named Nicole Chung, who edited, who was the editor in chief of Catapult and the editor of my column. And she also does a very good job writing about.

Her neurodivergent child. She did. It was in, she did an incredible job. I read a piece that she wrote for this magazine called Haslet, and it changed my life. I was like, it’s possible to write about your kids without being awful. Okay. It’s possible. Who knew? Okay. So this is it. And I came up with this like ethical, these ethical guidelines for myself and I started this column and the first piece I wrote for it was the most red piece in the magazine in 2018.

The most red piece. And I think I hit a nerve, which was good. And and that was from 2018 to 2019. Wrote it monthly and then and then COVID happened and I had to we. I couldn’t do that anymore. I just had to take a break from just about everything. Some people like wrote 10 books during COVID.

That was not me. I was not that person. So then I pulled them out again and I said, let me take a broader approach. Let me look at the research that underlies. This, these personal stories, right? What are the institutional issues that caused my 6-year-old to be kicked off the little community swim team because he was annoying, right?

What? There’s something going on here, yes. It was extraordinarily painful for me. I never told him that it happened, i, you know it, but as a parent I’m like, are you serious? What was the problem? And they’re like he swam backstroke instead of freestyle.

And I’m like, so what? He’s six. They’re all six. They, none of them are doing anything right. I said, did he splash water in people’s faces? Was he ignoring you? Was he all the things that you would consider poor behavior? No, none of those things. They literally just thought he was annoying. Okay.

And they came up with some, excuse. And that excuse was one that we’ll talk about again in a minute, which is. He needed too much individual attention, and I have heard that so much in my life. Needs too much individual attention. And any parent of a disabled kid, neurodivergent kid included, will have told you they have heard this before, as an excuse for why their kid can’t join the community soccer team, or take piano lessons or be in the chorus or whatever.

It doesn’t matter. And I delved into the research. I used my research skills, and my disability studies background delved into the research. And then I also interviewed a bunch of other parents from a bunch of other backgrounds about their experiences and found so many common threads.

It’s wild. Okay. How many common threads I found? And my goal was to discover basically how society and its institutions affect our families. And what I found was this systematic exclusion of neurodivergent kids from public life schools, clubs, the grocery store. Okay. The shopping mall. And it’s, and the methods were shame and stigma or something called social policing. Those frowns that you get when you know you’ve done something wrong. And so much more. So that was, that’s how the book came to be.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yes. You mentioned the very first sentence of the book is, I never thought I’d write about my kids.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: That’s the very first sentence. And then explains this, and then explains why and how and the rules that you have and so I really appreciate that this is, as you shared, this is a little bit about your own experience. Yeah. This is a little bit about your kids’ experience, and this is a little bit about your experience as a parent to your kids.

Yes. This is a little bit about your expertise and higher education as a faculty member and disability rights and law and legal, and so bringing all of that together, which I think really makes it rich because there is this human story and connection. And also expertise and knowledge and and guidance and direction.

So appreciate you sharing that context. ’cause I think it really helps bring the richness of the book to life. It’s, this is not a law book. No, but it’s also not a memoir either, right? Yeah. It’s a little bit of both of those. And it’s really fun to read. I don’t know.

Fun. It’s rich to read and, and it’s also very helpful in normalizing and helpful as we go. Let’s just get super basic. Yeah. You’ve talked about A DHD, you’ve talked about autism. There’s lots of other things but the word that you’re using here is neurodivergence. I think many of us are familiar with that, and some of us are familiar with it and maybe have used it, but don’t know exactly what that means.

So what is Neurodivergence and what does it include?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: I define neurodiversity. Okay. As normal variations in human neurological function. With an emphasis on the word normal variations are normal. There’s all kinds of variations. Sometimes we’re, some people are taller, some people are not as tall.

Some people have black hair, some people have blonde hair. Doesn’t matter, but like certain variations in humans it is. Not a variation that is just accepted as being different. It’s penalized. Okay? So I’m sure it would not take you much time to come up with other human variations that are also penalized.

Okay? So it’s in that group of penalized normal human variations. To help people understand what neurodivergent means. So neurodiversity is the diversity, right? It includes neurotypical in that, right? It’s diversity. But for neurodivergent, neurotypical, neurodivergent, and it, believe me, it’s not that simple.

But I, for ease of understanding Yeah. I break it down into three categories. Okay. Okay. What. The medical community calls developmental disorders like a DHD and autism and dyslexia. Okay? This is something that you’re born with. And then mental illnesses, like bipolar disorder or anxiety disorders.

And then there’s acquired mental disabilities, like PTSD and post-concussion syndrome and things like that. So those three different categories developmental. Mental illnesses and acquired. And and the, but the thing is of course, is that these overlap so much post-concussion syndrome can give you depression.

Almost every kid that grew up with autism and A DHD also has anxiety in part because of our society. The pressure that we have put on them and, we have, given, we’ve give, gifted them anxiety. Isn’t that nice? And of course bipolar disorder and anxiety are very much coexisting.

This is a yes. You can look at it as a Venn diagram, but as you, the closer and closer you look, it ends up being just one circle on top.

Of neurodivergent.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Thank you. I find that breakdown as you mentioned it is more complicated than this, but I find that breakdown into those three categories super helpful just as a beginning of understanding.

And a bit of an organizer. All right, so the book is about parents. This podcast is for student affairs folks. Yes. So what would you want how would we what are the big bullets here that we wouldn’t want parents as well as college faculty and staff? And again, those many faculty and staff are also parents, right?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yes, of course.

Keith Edwards: What would you want folks to really take away?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: First I wanna say that I use the word faculty to describe any higher ed worker who is responsible for the education of students. That’s my definition of faculty. So I just say faculty. I think that we in higher ed are so obsessed with status.

As attached to titles. And it’s aggravated me to no end since the beginning of my career. And I’m like, we’re all faculty. So that’s what I’m gonna say by the way, it, when I say faculty, I mean I love anybody responsible. If your job is to educate students, whether through being a librarian or an advisor or whatever, it doesn’t matter.

You are educating students. They couldn’t be educated without you, alright, so there’s one, it seems pretty obvious to me but apparently not to the person who’s the, whatever, I’m not gonna do it. But the, there is, so there’s this one key theme that it’s laid out in the first chapter in the book, and it’s what I call the individual attention fallacy.

When I mentioned that my 6-year-old was kicked off the swim team, okay? I want you to keep that in mind. As I talk about this, because it ties in so closely with what we deal with in higher education. So for example, so the 6-year-old off the swim team. And then I want you to also think about all these kids need, professors complaining, all these kids need accommodations now.

Okay. On that side. And, it’s too much. It’s too much work. Okay. And I do not want to take anything away from faculty who have that complain. I wanna be sure I have actually spoken directly on this topic. I’m like, you are right. Okay. There are a lot more accommodations now, but also there should be.

And I, okay so both of those things are

Keith Edwards: true,

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: so they can all be true. Okay? And so here’s what I hoped that people can, people, meaning people who teach in classrooms and people who. Work in libraries. Anybody who is faculty can take away from this one idea. Okay, so the fallacy, lemme explain it first.

It starts as like a complaint from a group leader or a teacher or a coach that a neuro divergent person, say a 6-year-old on a swim team. A disabled student in a class is using more than their fair share of attention. Okay? Their fair share. And therefore depriving it from neurotypical.

People. Okay. Or non-disabled people. But the thing is, this complaint hides the reality that as leaders, teachers, coaches, whatever, okay. We choose what to spend our attention on, okay? And frequently what we’re choosing to spend our attention on is enforcing irrelevant norms. Okay? Now. What does that mean?

Okay. So I could go way to the farthest end and say, if our courses were pass fail, none of this would matter. We’d be able to educate our students without we need Josh LER on here to talk about this. We’d be able to educate our students. Without worrying about whether something was turned in a day late or an hour late or what, whether they raised their hand a certain number of times during class whether we thought they were daydreaming or not.

These sorts of things that we zero in on because as faculty were, if who teach in classrooms, we’re retired, we’re required to produce a grade. For our students of course, who is that grade for? Who is this grading for? It’s not for the students. They don’t learn anything from those grades.

They learn from us. Okay. It’s for graduate schools. In law schools, for example, it’s for law firms to know who to hire. Okay. We’re literally catering to them. Okay. It’s for medical schools to know who to let in, this forced curve on all these pre-med classes. Okay. It was brutal curve, honestly.

So if we pay attention. But with, we don’t even realize that we’re doing it. This is the problem. I think that Kate denials a pedagogy of kindness is a really good job laying this out. That letting go of so many of the things we thought are, we were important attendance or like just so many, like the these I’m thinking of in particular of the like.

Excel spreadsheet that I used when I was in early in my teaching career that had 5,000 things across the top to rate my students on, right? And and all this time I spent with this banana spreadsheet, when in reality I did, I could have just let that all go, and I did. I was just I take attendance to see if they’re okay, if they miss class.

I’m like, are you all right? Is everything all right? You know what often happens when I ask that question is. No, actually. My wife went into premature labor. My kids in the nicu, that’s why I’ve been gone. And I’m like, geez, I can help you, I can help you with that. But they’re so unaccustomed students are to having teachers who do not enforce these norms that they don’t wanna come forward and ask for help.

Okay but this like rigid conformity to these social norms is a cultural inheritance. We get it from the people who teach us. When we’re young, when we’re students we learn that this is the way teaching should be, and then we just go ahead and repeat it. Of course we should take attendance every time.

Of course, we should mark down tardies and if an assignment is five minutes late or whatever. Okay? And we shouldn’t give out extensions, all these things. And we should mark down grades for this and that, and it’s so much to keep track of, but that’s our choice. We are keeping track of all these things.

Then you add on top of that, right? That we’re already running ourselves ragged with this. We add on top of that some of our students have accommodations, and so now we have students who have permission to turn in late work, who have permission to take exams in a different room and all these things and now we are completely overwhelmed because that just blew us outta the water.

We can’t even handle that. Fair enough. Because if there’s all these social expectations to micromanage our students’ learning, and then on top of that we have something that throws a spanner in the works, who are we gonna get angry at? This is what happens. Is it? We get angry at. The disabled kids, the neurodivergent kids, frequently, neurodivergent kids who ’cause we can’t see their disability.

It sounds like bs, right? Yeah. It sounds like is anxiety real, that sort of thing. And so sometimes this. We have this idea that if we don’t enforce them, then chaos will reign. No one will come to class. All this stuff. And I can tell you in my experience, ’cause I teach this way ever since I read Kate’s essay, that’s the.

Foundation of her book, pedagogy of Kindness. There was an essay in a magazine called Hybrid Pedagogy. I read it years and years ago, and it changed my life. I have such a better relationship with students now. They come to me they know, right? They’re like, where are you? And I’m like, I’m just an adjunct.

I’m not here this semester. And they’re like, because they know I will listen without judgment. That I won’t. And and so it takes a lot of confidence to teach this way though, to know that you can let go and it’ll be okay. And and so individual attention fallacy, what are we choosing to spend our limited amount of attention on?

And is it worth it?

Keith Edwards: Yeah. And we wouldn’t, if we really thought about it, we wouldn’t want that to be equally distributed, right? Some people don’t really need much attention and others need a lot more attention and we wouldn’t want that to be equally distributed. So for me, that was a huge takeaway.

Another huge takeaway for me is this constant reminder throughout, to shift from a deficit to an asset base. So you could talk a little bit more about that.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Sure. We can go back really far and talk about the medical model and the social model of disability which views disability as a diagnosis.

And I’m gonna speak about neurodiversity in particular. So neurodivergence is as diagnoses, like I have autism versus an identity with traits. I am autistic. And so I know that sounds like a very small change in language. It isn’t. Okay. It means it’s signifies something. I am autistic.

It is who I am is okay. Define essential part. It’s essential part of my identity. It’s not au autism is not something I carry around in a backpack. Okay? It is part of me. And and then, so therefore, instead of calling, the autistic traits, my personal autistic traits diagnostic criteria or.

Whatever we use this word traits, it’s just a trait. Like I’m five foot 11, I happen to be five foot 11, and I happen to have brown eyes and I happen to get really stressed out when plans change at the last minute. I don’t love that. So the but I also happen to be super good at sitting down and writing a book from start to finish.

Because I can hyper focus and. When I’m really, when I really love something, like I really love writing books, then I am, then nothing, can, can take me away from it. It’s great. So there are these traits that are both positive and negative.

Keith Edwards: And how would you invite, I’m thinking about that faculty member who says. All these students needing extra time is really hard. It’s very difficult for me to manage, how would you invite that faculty member to see that in an asset-based kind of way?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: The first thing I would do is, again, express sympathy.

Keith Edwards: Yeah.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Okay. I don’t want any faculty member, it’s funny is that frequently these are faculty members who are in.

Contingent jobs teaching. First year students. Okay. This is where this hits hardest because if you are. If you only teach one class a semester, I’m talking about people who have to teach four. Okay. And that used to be me. So I want you to understand, I want you and all of your listeners to understand that I was, the person I taught three on one campus drove to a different city to teach a fourth.

And I did that while eight months pregnant. Okay. And so it was. Not a healthy, way to have a career. And I spent my whole career teaching these same classes over and over again, which is, to someone it’s very boring, okay? So what I did was, is I, my research life was very rich, but I did not, I or I hardly ever got to teach.

My research, right? I, it was, what I taught was just intro to this, intro to that. Okay. And because I was a non-tenure track, never to be tenured, not allowed to be tenured faculty member. And and so I cannot be more sympathetic. I just wanna make sure it’s very clear.

And then I actually wrote about this in the Chronicle and also, I mentioned it in a light in the tower about how do we manage this? It’s a tough one where our faculty need help and they, there’s not a lot of support say in a department for how to get that help. And students, of course have been, this is an interesting statistic.

One in five faculty. This is this is real. I don’t have the citation off the top of my head. It’s in a light in the tower, but one in five faculty believe that neurodivergent students don’t belong in college. So if you have anxiety or autism, whatever, okay. You don’t belong in college.

And so that means that if you are a student with accommodations. Then every time you approach a faculty member to ask for whatever it is you need, you, there’s a 20% chance this person is gonna think horribly of you. And if you don’t. Think that our students can catch that vibe. Oh my gosh. They totally can, right?

They can tell. They can tell by your facial expression. Yeah. I always invite faculty to start this process. The student comes up to you, they’re hanging in their head, they’re embarrassed. Okay. And they’re like, and they mumble. I need extra time on tests or whatever. They just, okay. And I invite you to smile.

Just start with a smile, my gosh. And then say, I am so glad you shared this with me. I want you to succeed in my class. Just saying those words and then suddenly a conversation can happen. I will also advise you do not ask what their disability is that is against federal law.

Don’t do that. And I’m sure most of our listeners know that if they’re in student affairs you’re like, whoa. Yeah. Faculty should not ever do that. But you can ask what you can do to help them. And surprisingly, it’s often very little. What they actually need. Because I also know many people who work in disability services offices.

I’ve spoken to them, I’ve interviewed them, friends with them, and. Frequently their own hands are tied. And these are also low positions. Underpaid, overworked, understaffed. These are people who are really hanging on by their fingernails often. And then they’re dealing with contingent faculty teaching four courses a semester trying to help narrative urgent students.

I’m like, no one’s gonna win here. This is a, it’s, it’s hard. This is hard. And the, and so the advice I got from. Joseph Fisher, who is a really great disability disability studies person, and also he runs the disability services I believe, at Georgetown. He he said the main thing that happens is that faculty do not reach out to disability services to ask for help.

You can do that, so reach out to DS if you’re a faculty member, and then of course. This is a, this is information I’ve gotten from many disability services people is that this conversation just needs to be a conversation. If you’re confused or if you feel like this is too much, then reach out and ask for help from the people whose expertise this is.

The student. It’s not their area of expertise, how institutions handle disabilities. That’s not their job to know that. And in fact, it shouldn’t be. It’s too much to put on it. I hope I’m not upsetting any DS people by saying this, but I think this column came out last in 2024. But basically, it was students need our, something and not our frustration.

And it was, it had to do with how is that to, to instead of to reach out to all the resources that we have and everybody, if everybody starts talking to everybody, then everything gets a lot easier.

Keith Edwards: Collaboration. That’s what we want between the student faculty member disability services, really collaborating to make this work for everybody.

That was super helpful. Very tactical. I love the very simple thing. It was just smile. I’m so glad you shared that with me. It’s just so helpful. I do wanna go back to this asset based mindset. Yeah. How do, how can we what would you suggest? What’s the possibilities?

What’s the mindset shift if we view this from a deficit to an asset? It’s not, what might students bring?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: I’m gonna bring a caveat here. It’s not all assets, right? So it’s, there’s it’s traits. Some are struggles. And some are strengths. So strength and struggles, we have to remember that.

And and the struggles are real, man. But. If we only view a neurodivergent person as a bundle of struggles, then we’re missing out. Yeah. Problem. And that’s your problem, that’s your point, yeah. Okay. Part of it is I’ll use class participation as an example. The way that an autistic person might participate in class will not look like what?

Say this cultural norm of class participation may look like or someone with anxiety or someone with a DH, ADHD or whatever. And I used to, when I remember, I’ll never forget this, I was in grad school. And I had a notebook back when we like wrote in like actual composition notebooks. I’m looking at them on the shelf up here and I always had my notebook.

I was like my, we used to call commonplace books in the 17 hundreds and I would write all my ideas in these books. And so as the teacher was talking, these ideas would just generate and generate my mind making connections between what the teacher was saying, you want me to read for class?

And I just, the pen would never stop moving. So many ideas. And the teacher. Twice tried to catch me out, not paying attention because I was writing in my notebook. And I don’t, I guess she did not realize that what I was doing was actually very much engaged in class and I was actually too. We’ll say too autistic to realize that is what she was doing.

Someone else told me that, did you feel bad that she tried to call you out or way to show her that, that you were paying attention when she tried to call you out or something like that? Because it really was aggressive and I was like, oh, is that what happened? I didn’t even, I didn’t even notice.

I thought she was honestly asking my opinion, and I honestly gave her my opinion of which, I had many, because I had been thinking really hard about what we were talking about in class, and and then what’s crazy is that she did it again two weeks later and I’m like, what does she think I’m and then at that time I knew what was going on, and I’m like, does she think I’m not paying attention?

What does she need for me to show her? I’m paying attention? And it was this very normed thing where I have to look her in the eyes. Of course. Don’t love eye contact anyway, but also all these ideas are in my head, right? Don’t you want me to write them down? Because whenever she asked me a question, I had all these great ideas.

There’s, that’s a strength, right? I was making connections. This is what a brain like mine does, is it pulls from here and here and here and like puts ’em all together and forms a complete thought. The thing is though, is that I did need to write them down because if I don’t write them down, then they fly out of my head.

That can happen. Or, they yeah, we’ll just go with fly outta my head. But also really they, the connections they need I see them. I was literally like drawing flowcharts. It’s very visual. Okay. And boxing the page out, if you saw my notebooks, you’d know what I meant, but you could imagine how that would look.

These visual connections between this thing and this thing with an arrow drawn to that. And then and then I was. After doing that, I was able to formulate a discussion comment that was useful. If I hadn’t done that, then I might be rambling like I am right now. Okay. And so the idea that that my writing in my notebook was offensive to this teacher was a perfect example of not allowing neuro divergent people to use the tools that they need.

Okay. What difference did it make? I was writing in a notebook. I’m taking notes. It’s just that my note taking didn’t look like other people’s note. Yeah. But also it, that notebook writing allowed me to use my strengths in order to participate in ways that were really great actually.

I know that what I said was interesting because she was like, wow, that’s really interesting. Even though she was expecting me to not even be able to know what was going on. And I will never forget that this happened. By the way, I just want you to know, remember we said that students catch the vibe, right?

So this, the second time, once I was made aware of it, ’cause social and unaware, not a strength. Once I was made aware of it, I felt it. The second time. The second time it did feel like a punch in the throat. Really. And I will never forget this professor did this. I will never forget it.

Okay? And as people who work with students as faculty, we need to remember that. Students remember how we make them feel. And maybe forever. And I wish I could forget it. But it made me feel bad. That, and I didn’t even know I was neurodivergent. I just knew, I knew I had bipolar disorder, but I didn’t know about a DH ADHD back then.

I just knew that this was the way that I had to do it in order to make it, and it felt so generative and alive. Yeah. So if she could have seen that, that there are various ways to participate in class, that there are other ways that students can contribute, this is what I’m finally getting at here, right?

So here’s an ex, right? So sometimes students have to be very quiet. Process. Okay. And then they’ll say one sentence that changes the whole course of the class. But if you cold call on them because you think they’re spacing out, it’s gone. Yeah. They’ll never talk again ’cause they feel attacked.

Okay. Don’t do that. And you know what sometimes students are just spacing out. Yeah. And that’s okay because we are not the center of their universe. Maybe they’re spacing out because they’re exhausted because they were on the phone with their father who has cancer, or maybe they got dumped.

It doesn’t matter. Sometimes they just need to space out and that is okay. Yeah. Alright. That is okay. We need to be a little more forgiving of our students not being perfect, and again, understand that they have, four other classes that they’re taking plus an entire life outside of our classroom.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. We’ve talked about the individual attention fallacy. Yes. We’ve talked about this asset approach. You also gave us a string of very helpful mindsets, approaches and strategies for faculty. Anything else that you wanna share? A big takeaways that you would want to share with folks from the book before we move to a little bit about your journey with the book.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: One thing I discovered that I thought was fascinating was that teachers bully neurodivergent students. When I wrote a chap, I have a whole chapter on bullying and there’s, research articles, you can pull ’em up, you can look at my references and c that teachers were quick to admit that they did it.

They’re like, yeah, I totally, I’m like, these are the people who are willing to say they did it. And they also were quick to admit to ignoring when neurodivergent kids were being bullied. And the reason why is because they thought neurodivergent kids were annoying. They thought they deserved it.

They thought that letting them be bullied would force them to stop being annoying. Okay. Yeah. Now these are the teachers, these are teacher K through 12. That we, would hope would keep our children safe. But in fact it was, it’s the opposite. And it was, at first it was shocking, and then it actually made a whole lot of sense.

And it, aligns with that story I just told you. And they might not even know the kids. Are a DH, ADHD or autistic or have other neuro divergences, they just think they’re annoying. Okay? But these are teachers who knew, okay, they knew these kids had these struggles, but they just didn’t want to.

So what I can say is that, I still, I’m sorry, I still struggle with this. I homeschool my children, we pulled them out after something exactly like this happened to both of them at the same time, at the same school. They’re in third and fifth grade, and we just never looked back.

And they’re thriving in homeschool. The, and they’re 14 and 16 now, so that’s how long ago that was Again, I’ll never forget it. The, here I just went off track. You’re welcome to bring me back I was talking about right. So you have students. Yeah. Yeah. So we have students in our classes that we know.

You can tell they’re different. It, we, you can tell sometimes, right? Masking is something that neurodivergent people do to hide their their neurodivergent traits just in order to survive in a neurotypical world. Okay. But some people are better at it than others. And. And of course, masking is horribly unhealthy, okay?

Because it requires you often it’s based in shame and self disgust at your at the way you are. And so problem number one. And then problem number two is that it’s exhausting and can lead to terrible burnout. Okay? So working so hard to act in this. Way that conforms with these very narrow social expectations like we have in higher ed.

This was me as a faculty member in higher ed. If we can just try to show caring and just caring towards people who might not be. Inside this narrow set of norms, if we can try to discover what these narrow set of norms are and how we police them as members of a higher ed community wherever you are in that community, whether it’s administration or staff, or faculty or teaching faculty, whatever it’s, there that sometimes, the that these norms.

I would say more than sometimes, frequently, actually do more harm than good. We think in higher ed that we have this oh, we can wear a t-shirt to work, or jeans or whatever, and it’s fine. And except except we actually do have our own very rigid set of norms. I’ve worked at a law firm, right?

I worked for a federal judge. Okay? There was norms there, okay? But I, what I discovered to my shock was that, when I entered my higher ed career, that the norms were just as fierce. They just were different and

Keith Edwards: and often unspoken

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: and there you go. They’re always unspoken. That’s the point.

So let’s discover what these norms are. Let’s take a step back and examine them, and then look at the, are these really important? Is this what I need to accomplish my goals of educating students or not? Or to be a good colleague or not. And frequently it’s. Or not. So I would just I would just like that.

Let’s look, let’s take a deep look.

Keith Edwards: I think another theme that maybe goes without saying is, rather than problematize the individual, let’s problematize the system and the structures around, which is I think something we’ve been getting at in this whole conversation. The first line of the book is, I never thought I’d write about my kids.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yes. And here

Keith Edwards: you go, writing about. Your kids writing about yourself, writing about the profession, writing about higher education, writing about K 12 helping other parents navigate, helping other parents understand and also navigate all of this.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: But anyone who’s written a book knows that you don’t end up in the same place you started.

What did you learn? You clearly came with a lot of life experience, a lot of expertise yeah. Been teaching and law and all of this and speaking and columns. What did you discover? What did you learn or relearn in the process of writing the book?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Oh, just, so much. I’d, I learned a lot more about masking and I learned a lot about affirming neurodiversity as a way to counteract that.

I told you what masking, we talked about masking already. But people might not know what neurodiversity affirming means. It sound, it is what? It’s just what it sounds like. And. And so you could even put on a syllabus that says this is a neurodiversity affirming classroom. One of the things I like to talk about a lot is the difference between accommodations and accessibility.

And this typically resonates with people because accommodations are special, exceptions made for an individual based on this individual’s particular situation. It requires lots of hoops. All the medical records, all of this, all of the privacy invasion, okay? And then the accommodations may or may not be anything that’s helpful.

And this is not, I will say for students, for example, disability Services Fault, they might be limited to only giving out these, this short list of accommodations. This is frequently the case. I know this because I’ve interviewed them, right? And I, and they’re like, we don’t have any other choices. We get.

They can have time and a half, they can have this and that’s it. Okay. And so they’re not at all customized to what a student might need. Okay. Okay. And that goes back to overworked, underpaid, on and on. It’s just there’s not enough. That’s a systemic problem. Disability services is not supported well enough in our higher ed culture.

Okay. And then we have accessibility. Okay. Accessibility. Is not at all the same thing as accommodations. That means that a place such as a classroom, okay, is already before a student walks in able to be used. Accessed right by any student that walks in. Okay. Now it’s almost impossible to have something be universally accessible.

Okay?

Keith Edwards: That’s a great aspiration.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: But we can aspire. Okay? And so something I’ve talked about over the years and lots of different things I’ve written, it’s in a light in the tower, for example, is what this difference means and how it can work in practice. And a lot of it again, goes back to letting go of a lot of things.

Like teachers don’t wanna give out their lecture notes because they’re afraid students won’t come to class. And I’m like. Yeah, they might not come to class, but you still should give them their lecture notes. And actually, once you do it, like it’s fear that’s driving you to not do it. But why don’t you give it a chance and see what happens?

Okay. And in my experience, my attendance never dropped. Even, even though I told ’em I wasn’t taking attendance, I was like, look guys, I’m not taking attendance. And they’re like, okay. And they all showed up. Okay. It’s amazing, sometimes they miss class when their wife went into premature labor, but it was always, there was always a reason.

So an accessible classroom is one where. Students rarely have to ask for anything special. They don’t have to out themselves as disabled. They don’t have to, they don’t have to come up to you with their head hung in shame and ask for accommodations. They don’t have to go through disability services and provide all these invasive medical records, which by the way, people don’t know.

This is not required by law. They have no idea. So what’s required? Is accommodations. And what the law imagined is a nice conversation between a disabled employer and employee. A disabled employee and the employer to come up with a way that worked. But then what happened wise is that employers and said we want proof.

That you’re. The court said it is, you are permitted to ask for proof, so it is permitted to request a release of medical records, but it is not required. Everybody thinks it’s, this is the norm, right? They have to give them over. I never asked for accommodations in my life because I was embarrassed to give over my medical records.

There was no way I was gonna tell anybody that I had bipolar disorder when I was in higher ed. Are you kidding? That is the most stigmatized thing in the world. Sort of schizophrenia. There’s no way. And so there’s just no way. Yeah. And affirming neurodiversity an accessible space. Okay.

Thinking in this affirming and accessible mindset versus the accommodations mindset, which is this individualized problem focused mindset, right? As opposed to a welcoming space.

Keith Edwards: Oh, I love that. I love that, that distinction is so helpful and you’ve made that so clear for us. We are running out of time and this podcast is called Student Affairs.

Now we always like to end by asking what is on your mind now? What do you. Thinking, troubling or pondering now I know that you are a robust thinker about many different things as things come at you. I also know that this book is just now coming out, which means you wrote it a long time ago.

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Yeah.

Keith Edwards: And you’re probably onto another thing or next thing. And so whether it’s related to our conversation today or something else, what are you thinking troubling or pondering now? And also if folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Katie Rose Guest Pryal: Sure. Quickly. My next book is with Johns Hopkins, a Grew Outta this one and it’s called Navigating Narrative versus Pregnancy.

And it is about how to self-advocate when you are an. Position that frequently feels like it is powerless. Okay. If I had to sum it up in one word one sentence. It also writing that book my hackles way up because of this is administration’s attack on autism generally and pregnant mothers and mothers generally.

For example, the current, I don’t wanna call it a debate because it’s not a debate really, but the thing about Tylenol that’s going on causing autism, i’ve written about it about this, these issues for public venues recently, and I’ll continue to do so because it’s what I do, it’s how I push back.

And then I have another book project I’m working on. It’s called an Autistic Girls Guide to Horses. I’m a equestrian along with my kid. And and this is a hybrid memoir. Again, this is this term hybrid memoir. So this one’s more of a memoir than the other books, but it it talks about.

Being an undiagnosed girl and becoming undiagnosed, getting diagnosed in my forties, which was at the same time I got back into horseback riding. I was on the equestrian team in college and it teaches readers about autism and horses and tells a great story along the way. Along with giving advice on how to understand these things, if you wanna get in touch with me, my website is easy.

It’s katie prior.com and you can also subscribe to my twice monthly or so. Letter@trialnews.com.

Keith Edwards: All right. I love that. I love the duality of troubling what is going on in news and government and approaches mixed with embracing equestrian and getting back to some of those roots for you.

Awesome. Thank you. This has been great. This has been terrific. I really appreciated the book and learning about you after seeing so many things. Some of your writing in other places. It was great to read the book and learn more about you, and it was also really helpful. So again, I love the blend of the personal storytelling with really helpful insights.

A guidance and direction for folks who are looking for that. So thanks for your leadership in this space. I also want to thank our sponsors of today’s episode, evolve in Huron edu. Higher education is facing unprecedented challenges and needs. Courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly.

A new generation of leaders with the capacity to lead forward is not. Optional. It is urgent. These challenges are also full of possibilities for courageous leaders who are able to let go and move forward, accepting the challenges we are facing as real and embracing their agency to lead with and through them.

At Evolve, we help leaders face these realities with clarity, capacity, and confidence. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders focused on executive leaders, emerging executives, emerging leaders, and those leading for equity. And Huron collaborates with colleges and universities to create sound strategies, optimize operations, and accelerate digital transformation by embracing diverse perspectives, encouraging new ideas, and challenging the status quo.

Huron promotes institutional resilience in higher education. For more information, visit them at go.hcg.com/now. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Natalie Ambrosey, who makes us all look and sound good, and we love your support for these conversations. To help us reach even more folks with these great conversations like the one Katie and I had today, you can subscribe to the podcast on YouTube and to our weekly newsletter where you get the newest episodes each Wednesday morning if you’re so inclined.

Leave us a five star review. It helps us reach more folks. I’m Keith Edwards. Thanks to our fabulous guest today, Katie Rose, guest pry, and to everyone who’s watching and listening, make it a great week. Thanks so much.

pryalnews.com

katiepryal.com

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alightinthetower.com

https://www.oupress.com/9780806193854/a-pedagogy-of-kindness

https://hybridpedagogy.org/pedagogy-of-kindness

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-p-fisher

https://www.chronicle.com/article/neurodivergent-students-need-flexibility-not-our-frustration?sra=true