Digital Strategies for Supporting Strengths- and Interests-based Learning with Children with Autism

Technologies to support children with autism tend to use predefined content to enhance specific skills, such as verbal communication or emotion recognition. Few mobilise the child's own (often very specific) interests, strengths and capabilities. Digital technologies offer opportunities for children to personalise learning with their own content, following their own interests and enabling their self-expression. This project sought to engage children to record and express their own interests within their contexts of support - the home and the classroom. The vehicle for self-expression was an audio-visual calendaring app called MeCalendar. Implementation was kept open-ended to allow teachers to use it in ways that best fit with their existing embedded practices. In this paper we report on how the prototype has been appropriated in two classrooms by teachers in an autism-specific school setting with children aged 6 to 7. Our contribution is an understanding of how technologies for self-expression led to enhanced verbal communication, positive reinforcement through video modelling, engagement in class tasks and enhanced social interaction. Children appropriated the design in unimagined ways, leading them to self-scaffold and to catalyse their confidence in social interaction and self-expression. Teachers played an integral role in appropriating the design in the classroom, specifically through their in-depth knowledge of each child and their individual needs, strengths and interests.