Since learning what I kind of already suspected—that I’m autistic (176 on the RAADS-R, with a highly developed masking strategy thanks to my horrifically traumatizing childhood), I had a little debate with myself about whether it would be good or useful to let my students know. One of the fears I had, of course, is that informing them would backfire somehow—they’d all drop the class and, with 0 enrollment, I’d lose my job. Ultimately, I decided to start letting students know—taking the announcement on a test run during summer class. Since the class was an intro to poetry writing course, I think I received a soft landing. Poets, the good ones anyway, are often neurodiverse and this small class was certainly a safe place to come out.
Since that experience didn’t send me running back behind the mask, I’ve chosen to be out about my autism in my more “academic” classes. Not just for the purpose of being open about my identity, but because knowing I’m autistic helped me see which of my “manifestations” of autistic behaviors are the ones students sometimes dislike. Also, reading the research about how hostile neurotypical people get towards masked autistic people (re: uncanny valley) vs. how they respond to people who are open about their autism only makes me more interested in transparency.
So how did it go? It’s still in process, but the short answer is that it’s going well for several key reasons. First and foremost, I am not struggling as much to earn my students’ trust as I normally do. I think this is a byproduct of transparency in general, but I detect a serious difference between earlier experiences and this one. More students, in general, are talking to me and asking questions about their work. In prior terms, it’s been hard to break through the (well earned) presupposition that the student-teacher relationship is naturally confrontational in nature. With few exceptions, I already feel like I am collaborating with my students instead of merely passing judgement on the efforts of strangers.
Second, and somewhat more important to me at this point, is the fact that I’ve basically opened the door to students with similar disabilities to share this important information and, if necessary, talk to me about how I can better support them. The best part of this part of the experience is connecting with people who are neurodiverse as a wider part of a community that being masked closes me off from and hearing from students themselves that being open about my own autism helps them feel less alienated in the classroom.
So far, being open has provided nothing but gifts. The part that makes me nervous is how consistently the research suggests I may run into hardship on the employment end of this transparency. There are strong suggestions in the literature I’m reading now against visibility in the workplace—especially in academics—because there are such a range of toxic stigmas against people with any kind of cognitive disability, and autism in particular. I’m an adjunct, like most college instructors, with incredibly fragile job security. What happens when I tell the department? What if I realize I’m not as “high functioning” as I thought and need some kind of accommodation to prevent the deep burnouts I experience?