FC conference, part deux

Part 2 happens tomorrow, from 7:00 pm to 8:30. Howard Shane will discuss FC vs. augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), Elizabeth Serpentine will discuss FC, reasonable accommodations, and the IDEA, and I’ll discuss what we know about language and literacy acquisition in autism and how it relates to FC.

It’s free and virtual, with q and a at the end, and you can register here.

Here's something I just wrote in response to someone in a Facebook group who asked me to ensure that there would be no inaccuracies in Part 2, as she claimed there had been numerous inaccuracies in part 1:

There were no inaccuracies that I am aware of. There *were* inaccuracies in people's interpretations of what they heard--e.g., that Dr. Todd was comparing autistic people to horses, or that Dr. Lutz was shaming people with autism, or that evidence-based concerns about authorship are ableist. And there were inaccuracies in the various criticisms given in the feedback forms that we provided--e.g., that the primary factors interfering with communication in autism are sensory-motor rather than the autism symptomology as spelled out in the DSM; or that the fact that many of the studies invalidating FC are 30 years old somehow makes them irrelevant today. (Studies showing that smoking causes lung cancer are even older). Unfortunately, though we do our best to present our evidence clearly and respectfully, this is such a charged topic that some people will inevitably misinterpret our words. I encourage you to listen carefully to what's being presented and make sure you aren't reading things into our presentations that simply aren't there.