Composing Sensory Neurodiverse Pedagogies Using Score Analysis

Introduction

Neurotypical pedagogies, designed to center “normality” in educational structures, often frame neurodivergent learners as inconvenient, nonproductive, nonautonomous, and/or incapable of being in traditional classrooms (Erevelles, 2000). Particularly, neurotypical pedagogies presume able-bodiedness and able-mindedness (in all developmental areas), which perpetuate division since they have long been distanced from creativity (Beghetto, 2013). That is, accountability measures have narrowed curricular goals under the “one-size-fits-all” assumption that encourages users of neurotypical pedagogies to treat neurodivergent learners “like everyone else instead of focusing on their individualized needs” (Townsend, 2006, p. 230), leading to shallow (rather than deep, connected) knowledge (Sawyer, 2019). This sustains neuronormativity, a system of oppression that imposes and reinforces neurotypical modes of being and knowing (Huijg, 2020) in the classroom.

Conversely, neurodiverse pedagogies center equitability and accessibility in classrooms, favoring teaching and learning styles that are dialogic, exploratory, and subversive to normality (Beghetto & Vasquez, 2023). Neurodiverse pedagogies feature equitability by building knowledge through neurodiversity, or the natural variation of human neurological differences (Silberman, 2016; Walker, n.d), and by supporting individual needs. Neurodiverse pedagogies also feature accessibility by incorporating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles, which emphasize cultural and social strengths (e.g., abilities and languages) through multiple representations, engagements, and actions that serve as bases for differentiating instruction for diverse learners (Baurhoo & Asghar, 2014; Rose, 2000; Rose & Meyer, 2006; Wells, 2022).

Neurodiverse pedagogies have historical roots in critical autism pedagogies (Walters, 2015), cripped (non)pedagogies (Bierdz, 2024; McKinney, 2016), pedagogies of the mad (Tinkle, 2022), and socially just disability pedagogies (Goodley, 2007). Users of neurodiverse pedagogies employ a critical orientation in learning spaces that prioritizes creative inclusivity to combat epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) by highlighting neurodivergent students’ voices, experiences, ways of being, and capacities as knowers. The goal is to disrupt neurotypical epistemic privilege (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020) in the classroom such as the “one-size fits-all” assumption. This invites insights into how autistic and non-autistic neurotypes socially co-construct classroom reality (Chown, 2014), how autistic sociality can emerge organically during cross-neurotype student interactions (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, 2019; Schneid & Raz, 2020), and how neurodivergent onto-epistemologies can produce new practices, knowledges, and norms for remaking society (McKinney, 2016).

In this study, we subvert neurotypical pedagogy by co-designing neurodiverse pedagogy as creative, embodied, and interdependent in ensemble (see Figure 1). We began with groups of students that are typically marginalized in school settings, autistic middle school students, and then expanded into general education and special area classrooms.OPEN IN VIEWER

Moreover, we sought to understand how co-designing neurodiverse pedagogies informs and shapes our research practices to mirror methodological designs rooted in Neurodiversity Studies (NDS; Bertilsdotter Rosqvist & Jackson-Perry, 2024). NDS scholars have called for more research designs that contest epistemic injustice against neurodivergent people and shift toward “neurodiversity in autism science” approaches (Pellicano & den Houting, 2022). Our study examines how neurodiverse pedagogical co-design demands a critically accountable, neurodivergent methodology that answers to a pluriverse of representations, embodiments, and understandings. In NDS, neurodivergent methodologies, or neurodivergent-affirmative research methods, implement participatory research processes with “cross-neuro-status” collectives in order to unlearn and reimagine deficit-based narratives (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist & Jackson-Perry, 2024, p. 11). We contribute to this work by exploring the experiences of middle-school teachers of autistic and neurodivergent students during the co-design of neurodiverse pedagogies for computational thinking (CT; Wing, 2006) within the context of a research practitioner partnership. This partnership embraced the neurodiversity paradigm as a baseline and critical framework (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist et al., 2020) to challenge the assumption that neurodivergent individuals are exceptions from meaningful, accessible curriculum for which flexibility is scaffolded into the overall space, time, and philosophy of the classroom (McKinney, 2016) to make students’ “special” needs a forethought as it should be.

In what follows, we draw on qualitative data collected during the first two years of a larger three-year mixed-methods study, which includes teacher workshop mini-interviews, embodied interviews, and online member checking meetings. Specifically, we explored teachers’ embodied experiences in the form of a critical incident analysis by constructing and unsettling a neurodivergent methodology. Or rather, we neuroqueer our co-design to challenge hidden neuronormativity in pedagogy and research, and surmise score analysis as inventive, accessible, and representational of cross-sensory neurodiversity. This leads to the following research question: How does score analysis, as a neuroqueer methodology, engage the cross-sensory, embodied experiences of middle school teachers when co-designing neurodiverse pedagogies?

Literature Review

To understand how neurodiverse pedagogical co-design catalyzes a neuroqueer methodology to represent teachers’ cross-sensory, embodied experiences, and to critically account for neuronormativity underlying pedagogical creation and research design, this section explores (1) neurodivergent methodologies, (2) autistic phenomenology, and (3) neurodiverse co-design research for integrating embodiment into an accessible research creation.

Our Neuroqueer Research Approach

In this project, we used embodied interviews for our critical, yet performative approach for understanding neurodiversity by creating a score analysis—a neuroqueer methodology that accounts for how different bodies and ideologies create silent- and voice-data (Hao, 2011) from neurodiversity in one analytic space. Score analysis was designed to support neurodivergent-affirmative approaches, performative knowledges, and embodied experiences (see also Birringer, 2013). Hence, we un/structure our research design around this unique intersection, which purposefully deviates from a traditional methodological structure, fluctuating between messiness and precision (differentiation and iteration) in the spirit of methodological neuroqueering. We invite readers to embrace a multi-sensory approach while engaging with this section. Footnotes, ellipses (…), side boxes, symbols and arrows ( → , +), and various fonts, numbering, and lettering call readers to invent, insert, and trouble their own content, words, markings, meanings, and senses to the text that is often structured by neuronormativity.

Iterative Inquiry Process

After receiving IRB approval (exempt project #14364), TFs provided written informed consent (…) to engage in this study’s iterative co-design process as co-researchers and interviewees. Data sources included audio and photographs (see Figure 2) from (1) twelve, five-to-ten-minute mini-interviews that occurred during three workshops with all TFs, which asked questions about their past, current, and planned CT experiences and neurodiverse pedagogies and (2) four, hour-long, embodied (…) semi-structured interviews (Kvale, 2015) that asked TFs to elaborate their responses while engaging in musical exploration during co-design. Reflexive memos included observations about the embodied interviews and analytic processes (see side boxes labeled Neuroqueer Process Notes [NQPN] 1–4).OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A teacher fellow using wearable music technology during an embodied interview.

Interview audio was transcribed and then critical incidents, or moments that made considerable contributions to the TFs’ lived experiences (Angelides, 2001; Flanagan, 1954; Tirri & Koro-Ljungberg, 2002), were identified (see NQPN 1 side box). Critical incidents were further described as follows: (a) unexpected/surprising events that TFs indicated caused changes in thinking, (b) moments where TFs mentioned considering new pedagogical possibilities, and (c) shifts in TF development (…) of pedagogical perspectives (see Figure 3).OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

A Miro Board snapshot of teacher fellows’ critical incidents.

Next, critical incidents were used as material elements to create scores. We used music sheets containing treble, alto, and bass clefs (…) for creating our scores of critical incident data. We began with sixty-minute member checks over Zoom, occurring once with each TF and one researcher. During these checks, we further explored the data with the teachers.

Specifically, Miro Boards were utilized as a collaborative virtual workspace during the member checks. A Miro Board for each TF was designed using a table with three rows to match the three categories of critical incidents listed above, and to represent the musical clefs. These incidents were extracted from the interviews (in order of their appearance) and categorized by title (…), brief description (…), and interview quote (…), each typed into a Miro Board sticky note. TFs were asked to review the sticky notes, revise if needed, move the notes, change their sizes, or reorganize the notes in a way that made sense to them while explaining their process (see NQPN 2 side box). Afterwards, a digital line was drawn to “capture” the movement of the notes and/or the thinking process.

Figure 4 shows the rendering of our critical incident analysis, using musical sheets as background. Surprising events comprised the top row, aligning with data harmony (the treble clef). New pedagogical possibilities comprised the second row, aligning with data melody (the alto clef). The third row consisted of shifting pedagogical perspectives, aligning with data rhythm/beats (…) (the bass clef). These three rows aligned with one of the music apps being co-designed in the study; a line drawn using a virtual pen indicated the movement in each row (see NQPN 3 side box). This approach aimed to align neurodiverse pedagogical co-design with a neuroqueer methodology that extends the idea of a critical incident and reflects neurodiverse ways of thinking and being in the classroom that counter epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007).OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

Musical rendering of critical incidents.

After drawing the lines, we followed the adopted creative processes of Meadows and Wimpenny (2017), White (2022), and Birringer (2013) to turn the lines of critical incidents into cross-sensory, embodied scores. We focused on creating a data representation of neurodiverse pedagogical development that moves beyond a neurotypical manifestation. We used experiential and narrated architecture (…) to create scores that connected to arts, music, and improvisation to work through our data, critical-incident scores, and TFs’ collective experiences of embodied CT learning. We created a polyphony of TFs’ experiences which brought our hearing of sound (and silent) fragments together with different vibrational layers of data. Specifically, we developed two scores of the TFs’ critical incidents: (1) a linear musical score and (2) a collective line score.

Linear Musical Score

OPEN IN VIEWER

TFs critical incidents combined sequentially. Transform: data points → automation lines. Lines inserted into a modular synth 2 to generate real-time “voices” and affectations. Voice 1, 2, and 3 (TF interview data) Voice 4 (Continuous bass drone) Interweaving these components to produce a complex, emergent composition to transcend individual parts.

Linear musical score and Pinnacle Studio 25 were used to create a visual overlay and audio (Sonata): https://youtu.be/BCALYhDidE8 Critical incident titles and “textures” were typed onto a black screen to coincide with the visual line score. The final video creation was used to analyze how TFs were impacted during the development and implementation of neurodiverse pedagogies.

Collective Line Score

The collective line score overlaid all TFs’ critical incidents.

Researcher #1 first identified maximal peaks and minimal valleys of the virtual-pen lines on each teacher fellows’ Miro Boards (the highest and lowest notes on each musical clef), which corresponded with EXTREME critical incidents (emphasized and foregrounded by the TFs) and a Nvmb3r3d List of key linguistic signifiers + language-based connectors (see Figure 5). These connectors were based on the researchers’ interpretations—not explicitly stated by the TFs—which were then recomposed into a collective line score to reflect the structure and movement of only the TFs’ extreme critical incidents (see Figure 6).OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Numbered list of content, language, and discourses.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Collective line score of extreme critical incidents.

Researcher #2 then Transform: content, language, and discourse → poetic cartography, or a “mapping” of overlaid line movements for analyzing the words and embodied experiences of TFs. In her neurodivergent methodology, Hume (2024) used “found poetry” as a creative analytic practice to honor different speech styles, words, rhythms, and syntax and to “permit silenced voices/stories to be heard” (Butler-Kisber, 2021, p. 22). Autistic poet Nathan Spoon notes how poetry combines visual thinking with “architectonic sound arrangements,” everyday observations, and abstract impressions into “a kind of neuroqueer language” (Spoon & Stone, 2021, para. 9) that is invaluable in the context of autism because it allows readers to feel research findings and suspend neuronormative assumptions (Hume, 2024, p. 228). The following “poems” (…) (subsections) outline the process.

Poem #1: The Keys. A starter haiku (see NQPN 4 side box):

Nvmb3r3d language-based

Connectors, shortened into

Keywords, now “lyrics.”

Poem #2 and #3: Twin Composites. Researcher #2 organized the “lyrics” by each TF’s individual line score from the Miro Boards. Then (…) using poetry analysis (Butler-Kisber, 2021; Hume, 2024), lyrics were changed typographically through:

Italics. Bold. [Punc...tu…ation]*,

    CAPITALIZATION,

    Various fonts & sizes.

Never repeating.

to show Falling off. Or [sOUnd].

Upon completing textual modifications, Researcher #2 then:

Arranged “lyrics” on treble, alto, bass clefs.

Like in Sonata, matching

location, duration, and timing of musical notes (see Figure 7).OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Keywords arranged on music sheets to fit notes played during linear musical score.

Poem #4: The Neuro-Pluriverse. Once Researcher #2 arranged and textually altered the lyrics on the music sheets, the collective line score was added in. The following techniques were implemented to finish the poetic cartography:

Mix-in “lyrics.” Add treble, alto, bass clefs.

       D. C. al fine.

Stretch keywords along lines. Cross-senses.

Result: Cantata. Now, Answer RQ.

Coda.

Like Grasseni’s (2012) notion of a “sense-scape,” this final poetic cartography composition signals a cross-sensory response to our research question. It evokes a sensorium beyond sight and sound, creating a “sense” (…) of cultural and discursive placement for neurodiversity while entangled with and pressing against neuronormativity. Specifically, it demonstrates how the embodied experiences of middle school teachers render tacit representations of their knowledges when co-designing neurodiverse pedagogies. This poetic cartography paves a pathway for epistemic justice for neurodivergent bodies and thoughts often silenced by neuronormativity in education and research.

Findings

Score analysis foregrounds a neuroqueer methodology that engages the middle school teachers’ neurodiverse pedagogical codesign experiences in several ways, including through musical noting, echoes, reverberations, and more—all to disrupt neuronormativity when co-designing pedagogy. Analysis of the two scores revealed several findings.

First, during the initial categorization of critical incidents, it became evident that interviews were themselves critical incidents. During member checks, where each TF arranged their sticky notes in different ways on the Miro Boards, one TF reshaped his notes into large, ovular-shaped boxes and placed them across various layers. A second TF arranged her incidents to flow-like sheet music, adding in blank sticky notes to create different kinds of repetitions, similar to musical phrases, to fill up space like in a composition. A third TF added in a red virtual-pen line to visualize the movement of her sticky notes, which then became a tool for interpolating a precise method for analyzing all Miro Boards. Together, the ovular reshaping, blank repetitions, and virtual-pen line constitute a dimension of texture and space, extending an affective reverberation to the sticky notes—one that continues even when the TFs’ notes stop suddenly on the Miro Boards. This act introduces a discontinuation of supposed neuronormative ways of doing, assembling, and sifting through neurodiverse data categorization.

This is apparent when the “how” and “why” of the TF’s new curriculum were represented as the heartbeat in the linear musical score’s video creation (data rhythm/beats). Fluctuation between highs and lows indicated the TFs’ uncertainties with curricular co-design, pressing them to resist scripted curricula formats such as lesson planning and tiered seating arrangements. Playing with the sticky notes encouraged TFs to embrace discomfort, technological change, and spatial situatedness while co-designing their CT mini curriculum with neurodiverse pedagogies. This coincides with the concept of productive struggle, which examines how students build their own classroom constructs (Trinter & Hughes, 2021). Analysis indicates TFs also experience productive struggle when creating neurodiverse pedagogies because it encourages them to extend their thinking beyond their comfort zones (and beyond neuronormative assumptions for “how to” think and be in the classroom), increasing their learning capacity and need for diversifying learning materials. This process generates tethering points of “double empathy,” where teachers can begin relating to neurodivergent students’ desire for inclusivity in neurotypical learning spaces (Milton, 2012). This broadens contemplation about how to structure everyday classrooms to allow for overall accessibility (Baurhoo & Asghar, 2014; Erevelles, 2000; McKinney, 2016; Rose, 2000; Rose & Meyer, 2006; Wells, 2022).

Additionally, the placement of TFs’ sticky notes, tethered by virtual-pen lines, advances an ongoing, yet asynchronous, morphology that starts in one space and builds outward, eventually transcending platforms through audio and video to form a score composition—a testament to improvisational, creative work processes. The Miro Board acted as a generative space where the co-design team could interact by using multiple modes of expression—or rather, assemble a “neurodiverse multilog” that anthologizes critical incidents via cross-sensory tools (Vasquez et al., 2022). Yet, improvisational capacities, such as contemplating how to insert creativity into pedagogical practices, are far more time-consuming than it is to default to outcome-based lesson planning and standardized testing. This tension between neurotypical systemic pressures and the desire for neuro-inclusive instruction accentuates the arduous task of disrupting neuronormativity in education.

The two scores invite multiplicative entry points for engaging the teachers’ embodied experiences. The modular synthesis system “composed” music for the linear musical score by mapping sounds and silences through critical-incident data points. The different kinds of critical incidents and voices interconnect to create temporal reverberations of the embodied experiences, reflecting how various neurotypes might assemble neurodiverse pedagogies. For example, both surprising events and pedagogical possibilities interacted synchronously (melodic echoes increased with harmony distortion). Immediately after this “musical chaos,” the heartbeat accelerated, denoting greater excitement (or anxiety) around pedagogical shifting. The pivotal incidents that changed chord quality happened at peaks and valleys, indicating extreme musical intensity. The beginning of the linear musical score had strong surprising events, which influenced the flow of other pedagogical possibilities; however, towards the end, surprising events were fewer, leading to more unpredictability in the melody and heartbeat. Quotes extracted for the video creation reflect how silence and sound collapse and expand through rhizomatic fashion across the co-development and implementation of neurodiverse pedagogies. This cross-sensory dance between how TFs experience messiness and exploration pluralizes neurodiverse representation and highlights the possibility of expanding data interpretation beyond reductionistic understandings.

Moreover, the collective line score’s poetic cartography extends the rhizomatic chaos into new territories of thought-feeling-expressions via linguistic and spatial transformations. Extracting keywords from maximal peaks and minimal valleys (and adapting them with nonrepetitive fonts and sizes) foregrounded the co-design team’s multiple relationalities with neurodiversity, which assembled a plurality of fixed and situated knowledges. For instance, the word “diversity” is stretched along its virtual-pen line, fractured by punctuation, building a curvature that unravels lingual meaning—an iterative quality often found in neurodivergent experiences. Another example, S.T.A.R* (sensational, tangled, atypical, reductive), extends beyond the musical clefs, indicting tangents and diversification in thinking, moving, and being. It is not anchored to language or space in the Miro Board, thus summoning a turbulence for representing embodied experiences. The [empty] keywords extracted from blank sticky notes teleport experience from visual to acoustic representation, resonating with the sounds and silences composed by the video creation. This beckons an affective meditation on how to experience neurodiversity across senses. The poetic cartography further re/arranges the embodied experiential data of the co-design team through pluriverse modalities, inviting speculation of what is yet discoverable about neurodiversity. Word play, here, defies neuronormativity that often prevent neurodiverse pluralities from emerging.

Discussion

Score analysis was created to align with teachers’ critical-incident experiences during neurodiverse pedagogical co-design. The two scores encourage experiencing data multiply, by multiple co-researchers, and through multiple sensibilities. During analysis, the textural elements of the sticky notes invited co-researchers to modify knowledge-creation in a way that fostered an organic, spatial temporality where embodied experiences could be re/configured and replaced along rhizomatic assemblages of a neuro-space to resist categorization, stabilization, and labeling. This compares to the notion of crip spacetime, a material-discursive, pluriverse reality that neurodivergent people experience when they intra-act with access to resources (or lack thereof), identities, relations, and time (Price, 2024). The sticky notes functioned as temporary placeholders of being and becoming, anchoring the virtual-pen lines as neurodiverse multiplicities that unraveled across the Miro Board and musical clefs to form scores. The sticky notes stretch spacetime and permit the co-researchers to manifest an iterative ecology that maps a cross-neurotype sensorium to press against epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007).

This implores evaluation of how our neuroqueer methodology is accountable to accessibility, language, and representation (Price, 2024). The video creation and poetic cartography each show lines abruptly beginning and ending, disconnecting and reconnecting, and overlapping to intensify experiences as the scores changed, which produce rhizomes that are visually and audibly accessible. Neuroqueering disrupted the categorization of critical incidents, inviting teachers to experience building neurodiverse pedagogies more holistically. The scores also disrupted language across dimensionality (e.g., the word DIS-[cover] in the poetic cartography had sound only attached to the “dis-” half of word while “-cover” remained silenced in the video creation), opening our methodology to cross-sensory experiences that refuted how language is supposed to function. This percolated into how the co-design team questioned other neuronormative components of the methodology such as intercoder reliability, which typically entails assembling a codebook built around agreed-upon interpretations of data. Yet, the co-design team took the multiplicity of data and diversified it across modalities to produce a pluriverse representation of neurodivergent onto-epistemologies.

Our analysis also deepens theorization of neurodiverse learning, communicating, and interacting in educational contexts. Neurodiversity stems from Neuro(n), or the classical Greek word νεῦρον (neuron), which refers to sinews, tendons, gut, and cords (Mehta et al., 2020), implying the term did not originally intend to describe nervous systems. Instead, Neuro(n) functions as a complex, chaotic root system that invites multiple entryways, exits, and threads that shoot out in unexpected directions, inviting embodiment, plasticity, and affect to entangle (Lenz Taguchi, 2016). This exposes how neurodiversity might manifest in practice. In her construction of the Neuro(n) as concept, Lenz Taguchi (2016) intertwines the Deleuzoguattarian concept of “becoming child” with Colebrook’s (2014) queer vitalism to reimagine a learning body as “becoming student,” where it is “never striving toward or taking on a complete or definite form or wholeness, but [is] always being in a creative process of individuation that might exceed any norm, normality or majoritarian form of existence (Colebrook, 2014)” (p. 221). Neuroqueering our co-design untethered sensibilities around connectivity to various neurotypes, asking users of neurodiverse pedagogy to become (and embody) neurodiverse learners and/or educators. By having the teachers embed CT concepts in creative ensemble activity while using co-designed technologies and techniques, they become learners ↔ educators perpetually assembling pedagogy that answers to neurodivergent student processes.

Neurodiverse pedagogical co-design includes spatial-temporal components, improvisational capacities, and rhizomatic assemblages that structure neurotypicality and neurodiversity conjointly. Particularly, it perpetuated anchorage to unconscious neuronormative processes and neurotypical classroom geometries. Meaning, to truly embrace what is yet unknown about neurodiversity in the classroom, findings indicated that teachers must undergo productive struggle (Trinter & Hughes, 2021), discomfort/uncertainty as generative (Beghetto, 2020), and tension between neurotypical systemic pressures and desires for neuro-inclusive instruction (Sawyer, 2019) when pushing for pedagogy that is embodied, plural, and representative of epistemic justice. Because neuronormative assumptions are so ingrained in our bodyminds, it requires unlearning neurotypicality in its various forms to reimagine what constitutes neurodiverse thought-feeling-expressions. We propose neuroqueering as a temporarily existent, impartial, and everchanging relationality for disrupting neuronormativity.