In a Different Key by John Donvan

Author:John Donvan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2016-01-18T16:00:00+00:00

PART VII

DREAMS AND BOUNDARIES

1980s–1990s

33

THE DREAM OF LANGUAGE

“Communication at sentence level.” Those were the words that leapt out at Doug Biklen when the letter from Australia arrived in 1987. By then, Biklen, based at Syracuse University, was well-known in academic and activist circles as a forward thinker on the civil rights of people with disabilities. The letter writer, an Australian lawyer named Chris Borthwick, had written him to share news of a stunning breakthrough achieved by the woman he lived with. Her name was Rosemary Crossley. Biklen had met the couple a few years earlier, when the Australian government invited him to give a series of lectures on his work in the United States. Since that time, Borthwick said in his letter, Crossley had achieved something previously considered impossible: two-way, “sentence level,” English-language communication in children with autism who had never before spoken. These were children whose demeanor and verbal production—grunts, squeals, screaming, or just plain silence—suggested not only a limited capacity for language but also serious cognitive deficits.

But Crossley had tested those limits by teaching the kids to type messages on a small computerized device. Borthwick said that Crossley was eliciting sentences after as few as three sessions.

“Every single one,” Borthwick emphasized. “All. The lot. One hundred percent.”

Biklen was fascinated and inspired. For twenty years, since the late 1960s, he had been at the forefront of efforts to bring recognition to people with disabilities as full members of society—and to end the prejudices that saw disability as the equivalent of deficiency. As a graduate student at Syracuse University, he began joining the legendary Burton Blatt, his mentor, in going into the back wards of New York State’s large institutions to expose the appalling warehouse conditions under which intellectually disabled people were being held. In the late 1980s, he was well-established in his own right. He was on the faculty at Syracuse as the director of its Center on Human Policy, which supported research and advocacy on disability rights, and he was the author of several well-regarded books. He was also the winner of multiple rights-related awards from organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Biklen was well-known to the local public school districts around Syracuse because of his campaign, begun in the 1970s and joined by others, to open all classrooms to all children regardless of disability. Borrowing from the argument made in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, which established the unconstitutionality of separate public schools for white and African American students, Biklen opposed the de facto segregation-by-disability practiced by most public schools in America—where “special education” meant usually separate classrooms and a separate curriculum. “Inclusion”—the idea that everyone should have access to the same spaces, services, and opportunities—became Biklen’s watchword.

The inherent merit of his argument had been established by a number of legal victories won by Syracuse-area parents, who, with his encouragement and counsel, had successfully advocated for and even sued their schools to gain access to regular classrooms for children with disabilities.

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