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Not having a TV means I get some news late. You may have already seen the clip of the kid with autism who hit shot after shot in the closing minutes of a high school basketball game in Rochester, NY. This kid may have done more for kids with autism spectrum disorders than all the bloggers on the net. Don't miss it if you haven't seen this remarkable footage:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=UBYPaNc57Ik&search=autism%20basketball%20mayhem%20team%20spirit
Joan Welkowitz died peacefully, surrounded by all of her family in her home in Stockbridge, Massachussetts on February 11th, 2006. While I have made mention of her work in the field of Asperger's in previous blog entries, including an early podcast interview, these references do not do adequately describe the rich history of her contributions to the field of psychology and to social justice.
As the first woman to achieve Full Professor rank at New York University (NYU), Joan was a pioneer in fighting for women's rights in academia. She fought for equal pay at a time of great disparity between the salaries of men and women at NYU and served on the committee that brought domestic partner benefits to NYU faculty, two achievements she was particularly proud of. During her 43 years of service to NYU, she chaired Ph.D. theses committees for scores of doctoral students (a list is appended to this posting) and served as the Director of the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program for many years.
Joan's best selling textbook, "Introductory Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences," continues to be used in statistics classes worldwide and has sold several hundred thousand copies. She was working on the 7th edition right up a few weeks before her death.
In each decade, Joan made a major contribution to the field of psychology, beginning with her collaborations with well known peronality theorist Raymond Cattell in the 1950's, where they were the first to apply the "16PF" (16 Personality Factor model) to children.
In the 60's, she authored a highly cited paper on the importance of matching of therapist and patient values, showing that such "matching" was equally as important as the theoretical orientation of the therapist.
In the 70's, she worked with Stanley Feldstein to produce many papers in the area of psycholinguistics, showing that "how people talked" (i.e., their rhythms of speech) were more important than "what people said" (i.e., the content of speech) in determining how connected people felt with their conversational partners.
In the 80's, Joan was the co-investigator of NIMH research in the area of neuropsychology and facial identification which produced scores of important publications. One insight she shared from this work related to the disconnect between the expression of emotion and actual emotion experienced by stroke victims. She observed that some stroke patients "felt more" than you could read in thier "flat" manner of expression.
In the 90's, Joan collaborated with Elmer Struening at Columbia University's Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Larry Welkowitz to study the co-occurence (co-morbidity) of anxiety disorders. Drawing on data from over 20,000 individuals from an annual national survey, this work showed that, in real life, individuals tend to suffer simultaneously from numerous types of anxiety problems and depression, rather than one particular diagnosis. The implications for treatment are of course dramatic: Doctors and therapists needed to understand that individuals don't fit nicely into a particular diagnostic box.
In the 2000's, Joan served as co-investigator with Linda Baker and Larry Welkowitz on a Doug Flutie, Jr. Foundation grant study of Asperger's and Autism. As a result of this work, Joan became a strong proponent of using peer mentoring programs on college campuses to help assist students with spectrum disorders.
In recent years, Joan was also very concerned about the erosion of civil rights in the U.S. She was on a walk with her husband, Walter, to have breakfast at the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11th, 2001, and watched as the planes plunged in to the buildings, an event which plagued her for several years. In a videotaped interview two days later, she stressed that her biggest concern was that the WTC event would be used as an excuse to strip citizens of their civil rights and lead to unbridled discrimination.
Joan had a playful approach to life. She created adventure wherever she went, and was much loved by her friends, colleagues, and family. Her husband (Walter), children (David, Larry, Julie), and grandchildren (Billy, Stacy, Annika, Josh, Shayna). We are very proud of her accomplishments and will miss her very much.
http://www.legacy.com/Link.asp?Id=LS16753924X (NY Times Notice posted until 2/18/07)
http://www.legacy.com/berkshire/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonID=16726862 (Berkshire Eagle Notice)
http://207.22.26.166/movies/9-11.mov (Joan on 9-11 video)
I am eager for the day in which many or most profs and staff on college campuses are blogging, but I might have to settle for reading those of my students. Special thanks to the Keene State College technology staff for providing a forum for my thoughts on academic blogging. I am hopeful that more college profs and high school teachers will not only blog, but also serve as models for their blogging students. We need to emphasize the following points:
1. Your blog as RESUME. Jon Udell has pointed out that the resume of the future will be your blog and other google-indexed writings. So keep this in mind when you are tempted to reduce your writings to trash talk!
2. Your blog as a PERSONAL LAB NOTEBOOK. Keep track of your thoughts and ideas on particular subjects, and share them with a "tribe" of people also interested in those types of ideas.
3. Your blog as a REFLECTIVE WRITING TOOL. Use your blog to write about your thoughts about a variety of academic subjects, including materials covered in class.
4. Your blog as a PUBLISHING TOOL. This is especially useful for those of us at small teaching oriented colleges who don't always have the means or the time to publish regularly in mainstream academic journals.
I mentioned in a previous blog entry that I have been utilizing the free downloadable audio editing program, Audacity, to do errorless modeling in social skills programs for individuals with Asperger's and Autism. Since I haven't completed a screencast (using Camtasia) demonstrating the process, I've decided instead to post the media files that walk you through the program.
My social skills programs involves four steps: 1) Use audacity to record teaching a target person how to do a particular social skill, such as "how to have a conversation." Use verbal prompts at each step of teaching the skill 2) Use the audacity editing functions to delete all verbal prompts by the instructor 3) Play the final "prompt free" or "errorless" audio program to the target person 4) Follow up with a Behavioral Test (BAT) to assess the effectiveness of the errorless modeling intervention.
Here's a run through that I did with a "typical" non-Asperger's/AD child. The first audio file involves teaching the child how to have a conversation using verbal prompts. The steps for "having a conversation" were taken from Goldstein's Skillstreaming program:
Download conversation1.mp3 (1min23secs)
In step two, I remove all prompts by the instructor, thereby leaving a much shorter "errorless" audiotape:
Download conversation1-Revised.mp3 (38secs)
The final step is a videotape (using my cheap webcam) of an independent conversation or "Behavioral Test" (BAT) to assess whether or not the child is able to complete all steps of the conversational program (e.g., greeting, small talk, big point, closing) without any verbal prompts by the instructor. Using inexpensive technology in this manner for social skills training for a wide variety of children may have implications for "Individual Education Plans" or IEP's.
My friend Dave Yeiter of Keene, New Hampshire's Monadnock Developmental Services, sent me this quote by Albert Einstein:
"My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has
always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct
contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a
'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my
friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face
of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for
solitude..."
The conflict between crying out for justice and civil liberties does seem to conflict with lack of connection to fellow human beings, doesn't it? Yet many of the great civil liberterians (Franklin, Jefferson, Einstein) have been said to exhibit signs of such "disconnection." Perhaps we would all be smart to consult individuals with Asperger's about their thoughts on the War in Iraq...
In today's podcast I speak with a young man named Aaron who recently completed something called "A Path." Family and friends gathered one snowy afternoon to help Aaron articulate his short and long-term life goals and to pledge their support in helping him accomplish these goals. Path leaders were mental health specialists Julie Cashin and Tim Cuningham of Keene, New Hampshire.
Click on the MP3 file below to hear today's podcast:
Download pathMP3.mp3 (4mins53secs)
