Teaching Andrew: My journey of discovery into the world of autism

Baland, Eileen. (2012). Teaching Andrew: My journey of discovery into the world of autism. Talking Points, 23(2), 13-16.


There is a lot of wisdom in Eileen Baland’s story of what she learned from her experiences with an autistic young man in her college literature class. This is definitely the story of teacher learning rather than student learning. Baland does not present strategies for teaching autistic learners. She instead presents guidelines to help teachers learn to appreciate ALL students for who they are, not for how they are labeled.

We hear about Andrew, a student Baland had seen on her college campus and who she had noticed was somehow “different” from other college students. Sometimes “different” seemed to me to be “better” than what Baland experienced from her other students. We read about how Andrew once stopped to help Baland pick up papers she had accidentally dropped, whereas the other students just tried not to step on them as they hurried by. In class, Andrew’s behavior seemed more engaged than that of the typical college student. While Andrew’s desire to meet with Baland promptly at exactly the same time of day, and his calling each day to confirm the appointment might seem “obsessive” or “inflexible” to some, I cannot help thinking of the many appointments my own college students have stood me up for, often with no explanation.

Baland shows us that we have to learn to know and appreciate people for who they are. Her experience with Andrew led her to do some reading on autism, and she shares some of that with us. The major theme is the ability to recognize, appreciate, and respond to others as they are, and to try to put ourselves in their places. Baland discusses the concept of “perspective-taking”, and includes a list of things we need to do to take the perspective of others (see Figure 1, Attributes of Perspective-Taking According to Michelle Garcia Winner, on page 16). The eleven attributes on this list are good reminders of what we need to do in all of our interactions with others. Indeed, we need to do these things for ourselves as well. In a nutshell, perspective-taking seems to me to be about being engaged when we interact with others—engaged enough to really try to see who they are and where they are coming from. That’s powerful for all learners and teachers, not just those with diagnosed “syndromes” like Andrew.

One irony here was not lost on me: The resources Baland cites here clearly do NOT follow a deficit view of learners like Andrew. The attributes from the work of Michelle Garcia Winner seem to take a “strength-based” position that values each learner’s individual self as it is. Even so, I notice that the titles of Michelle Garcia Winner’s works in the Works Cited list here (see page 16) contain the word “deficits”. The words we use do matter, so I wondered as I read how a writer’s views and the wording in those titles could be so seemingly contradictory? Perhaps I need to read Michelle Garcia Winner’s work myself to find out.

I conclude with a connection. This article grabbed me because I have recently encountered two college students who I think may be autistic. In one case there is actually a tentative diagnosis; in another, the student told me there was some sort of “disability” but has been reticent to tell me more. Both students display behaviors strikingly like what Baland describes in Andrew. When I first met these two, I immediately realized there was something “different” going on with them. The first temptation is to think that there is something wrong with these students, as they seem, as some people might say, just a bit “off the beat” compared with what we expect from students. Baland’s article challenged me to go beyond those perceptions and truly engage with these students as I work to improve my own perspective-taking ability.