Practitioner Spotlight
The Neuroinclusion Project’s Introduction to Neurodiversity: A foundation module for creating inclusive environments for neurodivergent people.
The context
This self-paced module introduces language, strategies and inclusive mindsets of neurodiversity to educators, workplace teams, researchers and allies.
The module offers teachings of the neurodiversity movement’s impact, historical roots and core concepts, as well as practical guidance for creating more inclusive environments both within and outside of workplace and educational environments.
By offering an understanding of the intersectional, inherent nature of neurodiversity, the module aims to share knowledge on how we can foster genuine inclusion, accessibility and safety towards neurodivergence within research, practice, and our everyday interactions with the world. In equipping participants with foundational understanding of neurodiversity, the module attempts to recalibrate what is possible in terms of forming and maintaining equitable, neurodivergent-friendly environments.
This introduction to neurodiversity module bookends the Kin and Country Framework as a tool of reflection that provides a lens for participants to think about neurodiversity, and how they could act to support neurodivergent people.
By drawing on the Framework, the module offers reflexive and conversational exercises that invite participants to consider matters of neurodivergence which may lie outside of their own perspective and experience. This approach involves adopting the Entities to engage with standpoints and processes of thought that operate beyond many traditional Western modes, such as pattern thinking.
Seeing through Eagle allows for the observation of systemic patterns that enable inclusion and exclusion to operate at scale, while Ant might look to how experiences of neurodivergence manifest in one’s local community or workplace. Grandmother and Granddaughter respectively look to the historical patterns and ideas that have shaped treatment of neurodivergent people and what a genuinely neuroinclusive future would look like, while both ask what is necessary to unlearn to navigate neurodivergent matters with sensitivity, empathy and adaptability.
What we found most exciting about the Kin and Country Framework was how it functions as a set of anchor points concrete, imaginative, and fun handholds that let you step into a perspective rather than just think about abstractly.
Each Entity gives you somewhere to stand. Want to understand how neurodivergent exclusion operates at scale? Fly with the Eagle. Want to feel what it’s like to be neurodivergent within a classroom setting? Crawl with the Ant. This feature made the Framework genuinely fun to work with. It transformed reflection from an intellectual exercise into something more embodied and exploratory, and that energy translated into how we designed the module’s structure and activities.
Key Learnings
The Kin and Country Framework provided a structural counterpoint to the deficit framing that still dominates much of the neurodiversity discourse. Eagle’s macro perspective helped us trace how systemic exclusion of neurodivergent people is not incidental but patterned and systemic.
Grandmother and Granddaughter were especially generative for us as module creators as they asked us to sit with the harms done to neurodivergent people through pathologising and harmful interventions, while holding open a genuinely different future.
Our knowledge of neurodivergence is grounded in our academic expertise and lived experience of autism and ADHD, which means it is necessarily partial. Ant's orientation toward local, embodied experience helped us name this honestly rather than claim a universal view. The Framework prompted us to foreground that the module reflects our positionality, not a pre-determined truth.
Working with the Framework challenged us to hold firm that our neurodivergent ways of knowing – pattern thinking, non-linear processing, and sensory attunement – are not deficits to be resolved but an epistemological resource to be capitalised.