Education for people with special needs seems to be one of the most challenging fields. And teaching children with autism is one of the sectors. Even with numerous researches, it is still away from the goals. This might be due to some misunderstanding of autism. Autism have been considered as mental development disorder. Metal development disorder means that learning process does not advance as much as other people. This might be true for the most of people with autism. However, there is a few exceptions. One of the well-known cases is Dr. Temple Grandin (a professor in Colorado State University). Dr. Grandin’s articles and talks provide some reasons why education of people with autism is challenging. According to Dr. Grandin’s TED talk in 2010 (Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds | TED Talk), she addressed that she thinks in pictures rather than language. In the teaching tips for people with autism(Teaching Tips for Children and Adults with Autism: Articles: Indiana Resource Center for Autism: Indiana University Bloomington), she also wrote that written instructions would be better than verbal instructions. With the information, as a father of high functional autism child, I have decided to develop teaching methods for children with autism. The development began in consideration that the child is a visual thinker. However, relying on visualized materials mainly seemed to have some limitations. The child had to learn at school and the child was not interested in the visual learning materials. Thus, the strategy was changed from using visualized materials to combining both picture and language. With this approach, there was another challenge waiting. The child was not able to focus and learn with prepared learning materials. Using any known visualized educational materials were not effective simply because the child was not interested in.

Speaker: Tongpil Min

Published in: World Congress on Special Needs Education (WCSNE-2021)

• Date of Conference: 22-24 November 2021
• DOI: 10.20533/WCSNE.2021.0002
• ISBN: 978-1-913572-43-3
• Conference Location: Virtual (London, UK)