ADCET Podcast: Neurodiversity Paradigm 101 - Lessons from the movement for higher education

This ADCET podcast is the audio version of our webinar: Neurodiversity Paradigm 101 - Lessons from the movement for higher education. Universities have enthusiastically adopted neurodiversity language, but has practice actually shifted? Ebe Ganon explored and unpacked the neurodiversity paradigm for the higher education community. Ebe examined the difference between the clinical/pathology paradigm and neurodiversity paradigm, identified "paradigm-washing" in action, and explored strategic and practical steps towards genuine neurodiversity-affirming practice. Expect discomfort, critical reflection, and tools for institutional change - not a checklist of adjustments or Neurodevelopmental Conditions 101!

We hope you find this presentation interesting and engaging and you can find additional information and resources supporting this webinar on the ADCET website. 

(November 2025) 

Transcript

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DARREN BRITTEN: Hello everyone and welcome to this ADCET podcast. This episode is an audio recap of a recent ADCET webinar titled “Neurodiversity Paradigm 101: Lessons from the Movement for Higher Education”. Presented by Ebe Gannon, a community engagement practitioner, researcher, and advocate. This webinar explored and unpacked the neurodiversity paradigm for the higher education community. It examined the difference between the clinical pathology paradigm and neurodiversity paradigm, identified paradigm washing in action, and explored strategic and practical steps toward genuine neurodiversity affirming practice. This session-centred theory that drives practice and examines biocertification, neuronormativity, and anti-carceral approaches to student support. 

Expect discomfort, critical reflection, and tools for institutional change, not a checklist of adjustments for neurodevelopmental conditions 101. This webinar draws on the work of Sonny Jane Wise and Nick Walker, Extending Neurodiversity Paradigm Principles to the Higher Education Context. 

We hope you find this presentation interesting and engaging, and you can find additional information to support this podcast on the ADCET website. Now, over to you, Ebe.

EBE GANON: Thanks, everyone, for joining today's session on the neurodiversity paradigm. I'm Ebe Ganon and I'm a PhD student at UNSW Canberra. I'm a researcher, disability advocate, I'm also the Board Chair of Children and Young People with Disability Australia, and in all of my spare time I run a community engagement practice working at the intersection of disability, inclusion and higher education policy.

To begin, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm joining you today from Ngunnawal and Ngambri land. I have on my screen an image of the lovely country that we reside on here, in Ngunnawal and Ngambri country. I pay my respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge sovereignty was never ceded. I also want to acknowledge the deep knowledge systems that have existed here for tens of thousands of years, knowledge systems that show us ways of understanding difference, community and care that exists beyond western clinical frameworks. I think it's always important to reflect on the ways that we are amplifying Indigenous perspectives, particularly when we're talking about inclusion in higher education.

I also want to acknowledge the diversity in the virtual room today. Your lived, professional and research based expertise are all valid and valuable. They also produce assumptions and vices. I welcome all the neurodivergent people in the session today also, and if you feel comfortable, I encourage you to safely share your own experiences of neurodivergence where they diverge from my own when it becomes relevant through the session.

I want to say clearly from the start I don't have all of the answers for you on neurodiversity in higher education. What I'm going to do is present you with a theoretical framework and some principles, but I can't give you a step by step guide for how to apply this perfectly within your specific individual context. That work is yours to do.

But what I can do is give you the conceptual tools to start questioning the systems that you're working in and some examples of what this might look like in practice.

So here's what I encourage you to do through the session. I want you to keep a document or a notebook or something open while we're together. You can note down the ideas and thoughts that you might have or things that you want to look up later. If there are words or phrases that I mention that you're not sure about, note those down. When something I say doesn't sit right with you… Apologies, there's clearly a lot of emergency vehicles rolling around in the background. I hope it's not too disruptive for everyone. It is for me. When something I say doesn't sit right with you, when you think "that wouldn't work here" or "what about", just write that down. Don't dismiss it and don't let it derail you from staying present. Just note it, because I think that's where the real learning will happen for a lot of people today. Those tensions and those places where your institutional reality is bumping up against the neurodiversity paradigm, that's really valuable information. You might look at those notes later and think, "Actually, Ebe might be right. That is a problem." Or you might think, "No, there is a real legitimate reason that we do it this way that we didn't account for", and that's fine. That's all useful reflection.

Before we dive in, I also want to briefly position myself. The lenses that I bring to this work include that I'm ADHD and autistic. I also have lived experience of mental health hospitalisation and intensive care. I'm currently a PhD student and I've also worked as a sessional academic and researcher. And those experiences give me certain privileges in terms of access and legitimacy that lots of neurodivergent people don't have. I'm Jewish, I'm from a cultural minority background. I'm queer and I'm from the LGBTQIA+ community, and all of these identities shape how I understand neurodivergence, disability and the systems of oppression that we work in. And it also means some of the examples I use will be biased towards my experience of neurodivergence. That's not me trying to exclude other identities from this cohort, but more to respect the rights of other parts of the neurodivergent community to speak for themselves and to speak for my areas of expertise.

One more thing before we start, universal design for learning, inclusive practice, disability rights, these are all givens in these conversations. If you're not open to those principles, this probably isn't the right session for you. What we're exploring today is what might sit underneath those principles and the paradigm that should be guiding our practice. Remember that you will get a recording of this and a copy of the slides. A reminder to turn your captions on, your transcriptions if you need to. And I encourage you to go off in the chat, pose questions as we go. If you're anything like me, if you're trying to hold the question in your brain, you've totally disengaged from what's happening on the screen, so post them as you go. And if there are questions that are particularly relevant to content that I will cover, I might address them if I see them at the right time.

All right. Let's dig into our session today. We're going to cover the foundations and principles of the neurodiversity paradigm. We're going to talk about how the clinical or the pathology paradigm differs and what the neurodiversity and clinical paradigms produce in practice. We're going to talk about some practical ways forward for different roles in higher education and depending on what's going on in the chat, I might focus on some of these more or less depending on what I can see coming through, and then I'll give you resources for continuing this learning.

The session is about theory that drives practice, understanding paradigm shift, and moving beyond language. The session is not about autism and ADHD 101. Neurodivergence is not only more about these neurodevelopmental conditions, but also there's a lot of content on this already. I recommend you checking out recent recordings of ADCET webinars. There are a few that might be relevant there for you.

I'm also not going to give you adjustment lists or specific recommendations for program or course design. This session is also not lived experience sharing for its own sake. I've written a lot about my own experiences already. You can go over to my Substack to read about those if you like. But we're really going to be focusing on the theory, not to say that I'm not happy to answer questions at the end if you want to do a little bit of picking my brain on my experience as a neurodivergent HDR, as I suspect some of you might want to do that.

So let's start with the foundations of the neurodiversity paradigm, which is what we're here today to unpack. We're going to layer on from these foundations. So the neurodiversity paradigm was first articulated by Dr Nick Walker, building on decades of work by autistic advocates and the broader disability rights movements. And Walker in their early work identified three core principles that underpin what this paradigm is. And for those who haven't engaged with the concept of a paradigm before, a paradigm is a lens or a way to view the world, a set of assumptions.

So the first core principle, neurodiversity is natural human variation. Just as we have diversity in ethnicity, in gender, sexuality and culture, we also have diversity in how our brains are wired and how we process the world, and this diversity has always existed and always will. It's nothing new. Some of the language has changed over time and some of the ways we identify people have changed but it's always been here and it always will.

Second, there's no normal brain. The idea that there's one right or healthy way for minds to function is a cultural fiction. It's no more valid than claiming that there's one normal ethnicity or one bright culture.

Third, the social dynamics around neurodiversity mirror other forms of human diversity. So this includes power inequalities, marginalisation and also the creative potential and innovation that emerges when we embrace rather than suppress difference.

Another character in this space that I really hope you'd like to learn a little bit more about is Sonny Jane Wise. They are an advocate around lived experience and neurodivergence particularly in the mental health space. They put it brilliantly: "The neurodiversity paradigm is about understanding ourselves and others outside the DSM", or the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. That's the big book that the psychologists and psychiatrists use to characterise people's brains into categories, I guess, that's what we categorise things into. So the neurodiversity paradigm is about stepping out of that system of characterisation that's really grounded in a lot of those western clinical frameworks of helping people.

So it's a fundamental reframing of how we think about human cognitive diversity as an alternative to a collection of symptoms and diagnoses.

So we want to move beyond language but we also need to get the language right. So I did want to spend a few moments just touching on these terms. So when we talk about neurodiversity we are describing a fact of infinite variation of human functioning that's natural and expected. When we talk about a neurotype, we're talking about the sets of traits, behaviours, communication styles and preferences that make up an individual's way of functioning. And broadly speaking, we can describe neurotypes in two ways. A neurotype might be neurotypical. So that's a neurotype for whom someone is not marginalised or pathologised. In the pathology paradigm we might call that someone who is normal or who doesn't have a diagnosis.

On the other hand we have neurodivergent, and that is a neurotype or an individual who is marginalised and pathologised for their neurotype. So that's talking about folks that in the pathology paradigm we would be saying they have a diagnosis of this; they don't do things in the way that's traditional or normal. So they diverge from something there. They diverge from what we think is standard.

And if we're looking for an alternative to a diagnostic framework, we aren't using the DSM so we can't say, "Oh, they diverge from being normal because they have this diagnosis", because it's not relevant as a construct. Under the neurodiversity paradigm there's no normal brain. So when we talk about neurodivergent as an experience, we've got to ask what actually is it that neurodivergent people diverge from? And the answer to that question is neuronormativity. And neuronormativity is the belief system that suggests that there's one superior correct way to function. Neuronormativity describes the set of standards, expectations and norms that determine whose ways of being are valued and whose get pathologised. So when we say neurodivergent, that describes people and neurotypes that diverge from this standard of neuronormativity.

Let's kind of bring it into the higher education context. So think about what's expected in universities and TAFEs. We've got these linear timelines, semester structures, specific communication styles like eye contact, neurotypical body language, particular learning methods that get valued over others. For example, reading and writing as primary modes of knowledge acquisition. You've got sitting still in lectures, meeting arbitrary deadlines that don't flex for different rhythms of work.

Those aren't neutral standards as our institutions would have you believe. They are neuronormative standards that privilege certain ways of functioning while marking others as different.

And neuronormativity doesn't exist in isolation. It's deeply connected to capitalism which values productivity over humanity. It's connected to colonialism, which imposes western ways of knowing on to cultures that have alternatives. And lots of other systems of oppression like racism, heteronormativity and patriarchy. And all of those systems rely on this same logic. There's one right way to be human. There's one way to do things and everyone else who isn't functioning in that way needs fixing or we need to address that in some way.

And in universities we see this when we expect all students to work best between 9 and 5 pm; when we privilege verbal participation over other forms of engagement; and when we assume that everyone's experiences of time are the same in a linear way; when we treat accommodations as special extras rather than questioning why the system is built to exclude in the first place.

So in the neurodiversity paradigm, who are neurodivergent students? Who are we talking about when we say neurodivergent students? And this is where things may get broader than lots of people expect. Yes, it includes students with what the DSM would call neurodevelopmental conditions, autism, ADHD, learning disabilities, intellectual disability, Tourette's, but it also includes students experiencing what gets labelled as mental illness, anxiety, depression, bipolar, schizophrenia, OCD, eating distress. It also includes students with trauma responses that might get classified as personality disorders or PTSD. It includes students who are plural or systems. Students who hear voices, students experiencing altered states.

And Sonny Jane Wise offers us two useful models of understanding this breadth. The first is the umbrella model. So seeing neurodivergence as an umbrella term that encompasses anyone whose neurological functioning diverges significantly from neuronormativity, from those dominant societal standards.

And on my slide I've got a graphic of an umbrella, across which all of those different neurotypes that I just listed before are displayed. You'll find those DSM labels under this umbrella and across a whole range of different areas, whether it's neurodevelopmental conditions, whether it's mental illness or mental health conditions. But what you're noting when I'm describing the umbrella model and talking about these diagnoses is that we're still in this diagnosis language, right? We're still talking about categories that are labelled by practitioners who can classify them and assess them, and it's not particularly helpful in kind of progressing our thinking towards the neurodiversity paradigm.

So Sonny Jane Wise has also proposed more recently a newer model for understanding this that I find quite helpful. And this is the smorgasbord model, just acknowledging before I dive into this, this is a very busy slide. There's a graphic in the top left that you're not intended to be able to read but it's a zoomed out view of Sonny Jane Wise's original graphic which you can find online. And on the right I have a very crudely designed graphic of a charcuterie or a smorgasbord with a whole range of different tiles overlaid over the top to represent different traits, including communication, motor skills, plurality and system, stimming, emotions, sleep differences, empathy, attention and focus, sensory preferences, voice hearing and many more.

And what I'm communicating with this is recognising that neurodivergence isn't about a neat list of conditions. It's a collection of experiences and traits that every individual navigates uniquely, and it gives us a way to get out of this diagnostic categories model that sits in that pathology paradigm. So one student might experience executive dysfunction, sensory sensitivities and social anxiety. Another might experience time blindness, emotional intensity and communication differences. And this gives us a way to challenge the DSM conditions that we're comfortable with labelling and recognise what the full diversity of neurodivergent student experiences are on our campus.

And what you'll notice is those experiences don't nicely map neatly onto those diagnostic categories, but in this paradigm they don't need to. In this way the phrase "neurodivergent conditions" becomes inconsistent with the paradigm and doesn't exist. So if you see the phrase neurodivergent conditions around, kind of putting that in the bin, that is not consistent with the framework that we're working in here, and I'll come back to that in a moment. This is about neurotypes and ways of diverging from neuronormativity. So boxing people into these categories is a colonial and clinical fiction that is not consistent.

Some neurodivergent students will have diagnoses, but many won't, either because they can't access assessments because they're really expensive, or because they choose not to pursue a diagnosis, or because their experience doesn't fit neatly into diagnostic categories. Lots of students come from cultural backgrounds where the pathology paradigm is very strong and very stigmatising, particularly for a lot of international students that I work with. Presenting something like this and their first engagement with the neurodiversity paradigm can be really destabilising because it's so different. Equally, my own experience certainly reflects that in many ways. Some students will identify really strongly with the language of neurodivergence and others will prefer different terms or reject labels altogether.

Again, I want to get away from language, but I also want to draw your attention to a few of the ways that we misuse language which is symptomatic of not really understanding what neurodiversity is. So this person is neurodiverse. One individual cannot be diverse. You're probably looking for neurodivergent. I have the same gripe with culturally and linguistically diverse individual. Diverse from what? Grammatically it doesn't make any sense. But it also sort of reflects this misunderstanding of what the paradigm is. I also see this often used when people feel a bit nervous about using the word divergent because there's a value assessment going on there that divergent is negative. So maybe that's something to question and reflect on.

Another one, we are looking for neurodiverse people. So maybe use that in a program setting that you run. Maybe there is like a community group. We're looking for neurodiverse people is only correct if you're also including neurotypical people. Neurotypicality makes up part of neurodiversity. If you're only looking for neurodivergent people, then say that you're looking for neurodivergent people.

And finally, this program is for neurodivergent people. That statement is only correct if it is for all neurodivergent neurotypes. Be specific. If it is only for autistic and ADHD students, you do need to say that. Is it for all neurodivergent people? Then you can say this is for neurodivergent people. Are you going to accept people without a formal diagnosis? If you're not, it's not for neurodivergent people, it's for people with formally diagnosed conditions. Let's challenge the way that we're applying language in this space.

Why the neurodiversity paradigm is so different to the way that we currently operate in universities, there's a couple of concepts here I want to outline that I've learned a lot from Sonny Jane Wise on recently. Universities require students to prove their "neurodivergence" through a psychiatric diagnosis or a psychological diagnosis, or a formal assessment in order to access support. And that process is what we call biocertification, and that is the assumption that psychiatric authority is more reliable than a person's own knowledge of their body mind. So privileges that professional experience over lived experience.

So students who know they need support that can't afford assessment are excluded when we apply biocertification. Students from cultural backgrounds whose experiences that don't match white western diagnostic frameworks are excluded. Students who are really good at masking or whose presentations don't match stereotypes, excluded. Students who reject the pathologising language of the DSM, excluded. You can sense the theme.

Biocertification gives our institutions huge power. We get to decide whose needs are legitimate, whose support is reasonable and who deserves accommodation. And that is biopower. Using diagnoses as tools as social control.

So in this framing, when students don't comply with our expectations, when they push back on assignments or maybe they challenge our processes, struggle with attendance, we can pathologise their behaviour, we can call it noncompliance, we can say that they're lacking insight or we don't have evidence of their disorder, maybe we do, rather than questioning whether our systems are working for them.

So the way biocertification and biopower are working in higher education systems excludes students who actually need help and it also gives us this pathologising language that locates the problem with the student, rather than locating the barriers within the system.

So at this point I'm going to give you just a few moments to reflect, and if you want to use this time for a little stretch break, some questions to consider at this point. What and who drives our requirements for proof when we provide students with support at university? What if students didn't need to prove anything to access support? Does this make you anxious? Why? And why do we need students to perform struggle and have it validated by somebody else before we can offer help? And these questions have really big implications for how we design support services, assessments, academic policies, campus culture.

If we really want to embed neuro affirming practice, we need to challenge these assumptions. It's not optional. So I'll give you two minutes to have a little reflect, to take a break from your screen, and then I'm going to push on to the second half of my presentation.

Just a soft call back into the space before I pick up again. Thanks to Bec for popping in the chat that reference to I always forget their name Kassiane Asasumasu who coined those specific terms around neurodivergent and neurodivergence, and then from there Dr Walker built on those to coin the paradigm. I'm trying to keep the history lesson brief in the presentation for the sake of brevity, but really important to acknowledge Kassiane's work in that, so thanks for that.

So like I said, if we want to do neuro affirming practice, we need to challenge those assumptions. It's not optional. And if you're still interested we are going to play on from here. I just want to be a bit more explicit about some of the pathology paradigm assumptions before we move on. So in contrast to the neurodiversity paradigm assumptions, we've got these pathology paradigm set. So first that there's something wrong or different about an individual physically or mentally that needs diagnosing and treating. The issue and the impetus for support under this paradigm is a result of the student's characteristics, not features of our system. Second, that professionals know better than individuals about what they need. Psychiatric experience or clinical evidence and theory trumps lived experience. And third, that our success criteria is that a student learns to function within existing structures, not that we adapt the structures. And neuronormativity decides what those structures are and our goal is conformity.

And let's be honest, most people working in universities aren't consciously choosing to harm students with these assumptions. But when our whole support system is built on these, regardless if you're calling a student neurodivergent or not, you get predictable outcomes.

I'm going to move past our comparison slides because I think we have already covered those, but if you want a little bit more detail around the different ways that we can frame particular issues and challenges in higher education, please do go back to these slides.

But what I really want to highlight here today is we can do inclusion, and we can do student support, and we can provide adjustments, and we can operate in a biocertification model, and we can require evidence, and we can reject support for students who don't have the right evidence, all while using neuroaffirming language. So we can do all of those things. We can be operating this very exclusionary way. We can still call students neurodivergent. We can still feel good about what using that language means. And that is what I'm calling paradigm washing. If you've heard of green washing, pink washing, performative allyship. And what I have noticed is that over the last few years universities have enthusiastically adopted this language of neurodiversity, websites proclaim we're neurodiversity affirming. Policies refer to neurodiverse students, in sic. Staff complete training of neurodivergent friendly practices. But the actual support model hasn't changed. We still require diagnoses. We still frame adjustments as individual deficits. We still expect students to adapt to our structures rather than questioning the structures. And we still respond to crisis with risk management and exclusion. That's paradigm washing.

We're using the language of liberation while maintaining the same systems of oppression. You can't just swap the language without examining the foundations. The neurodiversity paradigm is not a rebranding exercise. It needs to be challenged with how we operate. We need to translate power from institutions to students. Trust lived experience over professional assessment. Prioritise access over gatekeeping. And we have to embrace uncertainty, rather than control. And that's uncomfortable. It should be. Because it means that admitting that a lot of what we've been doing with the best of intentions has been causing harm.

So what does it look like when we operate from a neurodiversity paradigm? We've got those assumptions on the left from the previous slide, but when we use these assumptions what we see coming into our systems is expectations, are that we have universal design for learning as a baseline.

We can offer support for diagnostic requirements. We take harm reduction approaches to managing students who might be experiencing crises. And we have academic integrity processes, systems, that consider the context.

So unpacking that a little bit more, students aren't broken. Our systems might be, but students aren't. Students are experts on their experiences. They know the barriers that they face, what support works for them and what they need to thrive. It's the systemic barriers that need change, not individual adjustments that are going to fix our problems here. And the goal is access, belonging and autonomy. So our success criteria, instead of being that students can succeed in our existing neuronormative systems, is that actually the success is building systems that work for diverse and divergent minds, not for forcing divergent minds to fit into our systems.

We design courses, assessments and environments with flexibility built in at the start. Students can access what they need based on their articulated need, not based on their ability to navigate healthcare systems. And when a student is struggling, we meet them where they're at. We design assessments and academic integrity processes that don't require masking or conformity to be successful. That's what paradigm shift actually is. It's not about being nice to students or lowering standards. I know we're very protective about our excellence in this sector. But actually what is excellent is building a system that doesn't require students to conform to neuronormative expectations to succeed. And if you don't want to do that, don't use my language.

So have a think. Pop some in the chat, if you're comfortable. Can you see any examples of paradigm washing in your university? And what do you think drives that? You can't just use the language. It's not enough. So if you feel comfortable popping any examples there in the chat. Yes, examples of programs that require diagnostic evidence to attend. Ideas that like lack of diverse perspectives and diverging perspectives and decision making. And, yeah, some comments around, yeah, adoption of language without shifting assumptions. Thanks, team. I'll come back to those. I know I'm going to go in a rabbit hole. I'm not going to spend too long in there. Theory is really important but we can get a little bit more practical about what this might mean for our work. I'd be in trouble with ADCET if I didn't get a little bit practical. And I want to leave time for questions, so this is going to be a very high level overview. Happy to expand in question time.

For disability support practitioners, the concept of epistemic justice is really important. We believe students about their needs. Your default response should be belief, not interrogation. And that doesn't mean that you never ask questions of a student. You need to understand the request. But there's a difference between asking, "Can you help me understand the barrier you're experiencing?", versus, "Can you really prove that you need this adjustment?"

Harm reduction comes from drug and alcohol work but the principles apply really nicely to disability support. Meeting people where we're at, not where you think they should be. So in our context that means not demanding students get better before we would support them, or that they should quit or take program leave before they consider re engaging with studies if they're experiencing crisis. A student experiencing depression doesn't need to be well enough to engage with services. A student in crisis doesn't need to demonstrate improvement before we continue support.

Recognise that functioning fluctuates and that some students may not see traits that we traditionally pathologise as a problem, just as a difference. Where they do experience distress, we provide support.

Finally, moving from individual accommodations to systemic change. You all know what I'm talking about here. Individual adjustments are never going to be enough. They're inefficient bandaid solutions, they locate the problem with the student. You can see the increasing rates of disclosure and support requests as well as I can, and we can't use this old way of thinking about adjustments as our only tool anymore.

For learning designers and academics, again, UDL as a baseline, not as extra. None of this makes your course less rigorous. It makes it accessible. It's okay. Assessment design that doesn't assume one way of demonstrating knowledge. Our assessment practice are really neuronormative and we privileged written, timed, individual and linear ways of demonstrating knowledge. Ask yourself what you are actually trying to assess and if you're assessing the learning outcome or the knowledge area, or if you're actually assessing the student's ability to perform knowledge in a specific neuronormative way.

Flexibility built in from the start. We don't wait for students to request extensions or alternatives. We build it in. Multiple deadlines or assessment pathways that students can choose between. Use it when you need it extensions. Multiple means of representation for our content, and lots of choice in assessment formats. So students don't have to disclose, they don't have to negotiate, not have to justify, they just do what works for them.

The last one is institutional practice. I know you can't eliminate diagnosis requirements overnight. Funding is tied to them. Policies require them. But you can reduce reliance on them and phase them out. It might mean allowing students to access some supports, so licensed assistive tech, recordings and transcripts without disclosures. Accept broader evidence of need, not just formal assessments and reports. Provide interim support while students are awaiting assessment. And, again, UDL is really important there.

Every time you provide support without requiring that disclosure and diagnosis, you are challenging biocertification. We can recognise neuronormativity in academic integrity. So those frameworks also not neutral. They assume students have been taught academic conventions in accessible ways, that everyone understands unwritten rules in the same way, that common knowledge is actually common. It doesn't mean abandoning integrity standards. It means we need to teach conventions explicitly and repeatedly and recognise that breaches can come from access barriers, not dishonesty.

And, finally, I’m not going to get on my soap box here about student voice and student engagement, but you can ask me about it or go read about it on my Substack build genuine student voice and student perspectives into policy design and program design.

As we come to a close, I want to acknowledge the real tension that we're navigating here. You are all working in institutions that require diagnoses for funding. There are risk management frameworks you have to follow. You get assessed on metrics like service utilisation, disclosure rates. We also work in universities where we have traditions about whose knowledge and whose perspectives we trust that have both produced and reinforced neuronormativity over time.

This paradigm is an ideal to work towards. You can't complete a check list on this. You're going to find yourself compromising and working within systems you know are problematic, making decisions that don't align perfectly. And that's the reality of institutional change work. It doesn't mean we give up. You can name when systems are creating barriers. You can document the impact of policies on students. Advocate for change, even when it's slow. And find creative workarounds within existing structures. But most importantly, building relationships with students based on trust, not control.

What is your role in all of this? You're not just service providers or support staff; you're advocates for paradigm shift. And I know that particularly in disability practitioner shift we are very anxious about the word "advocate". But I think that you are and you need to advocate for this paradigm in spaces where you have influence. Challenge neuronormativity when you see it. Push back on adjustments as the only solution. And build coalitions with other practitioners doing the work. You don't do this by yourself. You do it as a community. Every time you push back, every time you're building flexibility, you are shifting the paradigm. It's not just a nice theory; it's a challenge to how we organise higher education and you have more power to change it than you think.

As I see Rebecca popping up for questions, I want to take us home with a bit of hope. I think that real universities are grounded in principles and values where neurodivergence actually thrives. Universities value knowledge and curiosity which are strong elements of neurodivergent culture. Academia values hyperfocus and passion. Early iterations of universities think like old Oxford energy. They were designed for academics who lived and breathed their work and didn't have time to think about food or cleaning or life admin.

Residential universities and fellowships and ecosystems of support emerge from this. We've cooked it along the way. Marketisation of universities has cooked it, but research and learning really is about thinking differently and developing new perspectives, and that is something that neurodivergent people thrive with.

A few places that you can go to keep reading, keep learning, Nick Walker's work, Sonny Jane Wise's work. The team are going to pop in some links for these bits. A shameless plug for my podcast, the Higher Hopes podcast, and some of what I do on Substack, as well as ADCET's resources on neurodiversity and neurodivergence.

Very happy to answer some questions. Send the curly, hairy ones. One that I will address briefly, before I hand over to Rebecca, is the intention here is not to blame neurotypical people. And it's also not to assume that all of the assistance work for neurotypical work either, because they don't. But what often is confused or potentially misunderstood in this space gosh, it's really busy out here, can I say, can hear lots of sirens what often is potentially misunderstood is neurodivergence or neurodivergent is not a diagnostic category; it's a socially constructed identity, and as a neurodivergent person we are, or I am, disempowered from making the change. I don't have the positionality, necessarily, in the same way as someone who is neurotypical to effect the change. So I'm not saying that everything works perfectly for neurotypical people or that all neurotypical people are creating this issue. That is absolutely not the case. I work with lots of excellent neurotypical folk in the work that I do. But just recognising the positionality to the issue and the power to be able to effect change. So definitely not trying to isolate or, yeah, marginalise neurotypical people in this conversation, but just to recognise there is a real difference in the way that we experience these barriers.

DARREN: Thanks for listening to this ADCET podcast. We hope that you learned something new about making tertiary education more inclusive and accessible to students with disability. You can keep up to date with our future webinars and podcasts by signing up for our fortnightly newsletter at our website adcet.edu.au/newsletter. Thanks again for listening to this podcast from the Australian Disability Clearinghouse on Education and Training - supporting you supporting students.