Beyond Management: Classroom Ecology, Alexithymia, and the Autistic Need for Flow
Understanding how classroom energy states affect autistic student behaviour
A critique of classroom management models through an autistic and alexithymic lens, proposing ecological, student-centred design over behavioural control to foster inclusion, regulation, and authentic belonging.
Abstract
This article reframes classroom management through an ecological lens, centring autistic and alexithymic experience as valid and evolutionarily grounded rather than disordered. Drawing on Reser’s Solitary Forager Hypothesis and the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability, it challenges dominant behaviourist paradigms and deficit-based assumptions within educational practice. The conflation of autism with alexithymia—particularly in relation to empathy, emotion recognition, and affective expression—is explored to illuminate how misdiagnosis and misunderstanding can lead to harmful interventions, especially within rigid classroom management schemes.
Rather than pathologising autistic traits, the article proposes a shift towards differentiated instruction and flow-based learning ecologies—classroom environments attuned to students’ energy states, sensory needs, and intrinsic motivation. By treating the classroom as a relational ecosystem rather than a site of control, educators can foster inclusion not as placement but as participation. This reframing calls for pedagogical reflexivity, environmental design, and a renewed ethical commitment to supporting neurodivergent learners on their own terms. In doing so, it offers a practical model for constructing inclusive educational spaces where all students—not just autistic or alexithymic ones—can thrive.
Introduction: Introduction: Reframing the Premise
Prevailing approaches to classroom management are still underpinned by behaviourist logics and deficit-oriented framings of disability. Within these paradigms, autistic students are viewed not in terms of their relational and ecological needs, but as individuals requiring behavioural correction or containment. Such approaches often assume that deviations from neurotypical norms must be “managed” or “intervened upon” rather than understood, accommodated, or valued. Nowhere is this more evident than in the widespread reliance on rigid, compliance-driven management schemes that fail to consider the lived realities of autistic and alexithymic students—particularly those with hyper-empathic sensitivities and non-normative emotional processing.
This article challenges these foundational assumptions. It does not seek to pathologise autistic experience or to endorse models that aim to remediate it. Rather, it begins from the premise that the autistic system, as it exists, is functional and evolutionarily coherent. Drawing on Reser’s Solitary Forager Hypothesis, we situate autism as an adaptive human variation—one that has persisted across millennia not despite its traits, but because of them. We then employ the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability to reframe so-called “challenging behaviour” as an interactional phenomenon—an emergent property of the dynamic between embodied minds and their environments.
Central to this discussion is the need to disentangle autism from alexithymia. Whilst the two frequently co-occur, they are distinct constructs, each with unique implications for empathy, affect regulation, and communication. Misconflation between them has led to widespread misunderstanding in both diagnostic practice and educational response—often resulting in interventions that are not merely ineffective but actively harmful.
In what follows, we explore how classroom environments—physical, relational, and emotional—can be reconceptualised as ecologies. By shifting our attention from the control of individual behaviour to the cultivation of co-regulated, responsive learning spaces, we open the door to a more inclusive, humane pedagogy—one that supports all students, but especially those whose ways of being have historically been marginalised, misread, or erased.
Theoretical Frameworks
Autism as Evolutionary Variation: The Solitary Forager Hypothesis
To challenge the deficit-based assumptions embedded in most educational and clinical approaches to autism, it is essential to first reconsider the evolutionary and adaptive roots of autistic traits. The Solitary Forager Hypothesis, proposed by Jared Reser (2011), offers a compelling alternative to the dominant pathological framing. Rather than viewing autism as a disorder or a failed iteration of neurotypical development, Reser positions it as a naturally selected cognitive profile—an adaptive configuration of traits that once served specific survival functions in ancestral environments.
Reser argues that many characteristics now associated with autism—pattern recognition, sustained attention, independence, reduced susceptibility to social distraction, and heightened sensory awareness—would have been advantageous for solitary foraging and survival in resource-scarce or uncertain conditions. These traits, far from being vestiges of dysfunction, are reframed as evolutionarily coherent responses to particular ecological demands. Autism, in this model, is not a developmental error but a distinct neurotype, shaped and sustained by natural selection.
This framing stands in stark contrast to the deficit model that has dominated autism research since the mid-twentieth century—a model which continues to exert influence over diagnostic manuals, educational policy, and therapeutic practice. Under this prevailing view, autism is conceptualised as a set of impairments relative to a neurotypical ideal, with intervention aimed at ‘normalising’ behaviour and minimising perceived deviance. Such frameworks fail to account for the possibility that autistic minds may function optimally under different environmental conditions—ones that modern educational systems neither recognise nor provide.
By grounding the discussion in Reser’s hypothesis, we begin with a paradigm that affirms the autistic system as inherently purposeful. This evolutionary lens does not negate the challenges autistic people face in contemporary society, but it reframes those challenges as arising not from internal deficit, but from misalignment with socially constructed norms and environments.
The Ecological-Enactive (EE) Model of Disability
Building on this evolutionary framing, the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability provides a conceptual bridge between autistic embodiment and educational practice. Developed by Toro, Kiverstein, and Rietveld (2020), the EE model synthesises insights from enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology to offer a nuanced account of disability—not as a property of the individual, but as a dynamic relation between organism and environment.
Unlike the medical model, which locates disability in bodily pathology, or the social model, which attributes it solely to structural barriers, the EE model emphasises the co-constitution of experience. It considers how affordances—opportunities for action and engagement—are shaped by both the person’s embodied capacities and the qualities of their environment. Disability, then, emerges not from difference per se, but from the mismatch between a person’s way of being and the dominant design of their surroundings.
Applied to autism, the EE model resists the temptation to categorise autistic traits as symptoms in need of correction. Instead, it asks whether the environment is sufficiently flexible, responsive, and attuned to support the flourishing of diverse neurotypes. It foregrounds agency, interaction, and context, inviting educators and policymakers to shift focus from controlling behaviour to designing ecologies of participation.
In the classroom, this means attending not only to curriculum and pedagogy, but also to sensory atmospheres, relational dynamics, and energy states. The EE model legitimises autistic ways of knowing and being by situating them within a broader ecological logic—one that views difference as a resource for collective growth rather than a problem to be solved. It is precisely this logic that underpins the argument for inclusive classroom ecologies that follow in subsequent sections.
Distinguishing Autism from Alexithymia
Alexithymia, a construct originating in psychosomatic medicine, refers to difficulty in identifying, sourcing, articulating, and distinguishing between emotional states—both one’s own and those of others. Although frequently co-occurring with autism, alexithymia is a distinct phenomenon with a broader prevalence across both clinical and non-clinical populations. Contemporary psychological literature recognises alexithymia not as a uniquely neurodivergent trait but as a dimensional construct, present across the general population with varying degrees of intensity (Taylor & Bagby, 2013). It is associated with a range of mental health conditions, including mood disorders, post-traumatic stress, and somatic symptom disorders, and is not, in itself, diagnostic of autism.
Despite this distinction, considerable confusion persists—both in clinical settings and public discourse—regarding the overlap between autistic ways of being and alexithymic presentation. This is particularly evident in domains such as emotional expression, social communication, and empathy, where surface similarities can mask fundamentally different underlying mechanisms.
For example, whilst both autistic and alexithymic individuals may avoid eye contact, the motivation differs. In autistic individuals, this is often a sensory or cognitive strategy to manage overstimulation or reduce social load. In alexithymia, eye contact may trigger overwhelming or unprocessed emotional input, leading to avoidance as a protective mechanism against affective overload.
Similarly, flat or muted affect—often misinterpreted as emotional detachment—is frequently attributed to autism, yet in many cases arises from alexithymia. The reduced display of facial emotion in alexithymia can function as a defensive posture, shielding the individual from complex or painful internal states. In contrast, autistic emotional expression may be shaped more by difficulties with interoception, processing time, or divergence from neurotypical social norms, rather than emotional absence.
Empathy represents perhaps the most consequential site of conflation. Autistic individuals have often been wrongly characterised as lacking empathy—a claim most famously advanced by Baron-Cohen’s ‘zero-positive’ framing. However, empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that autistic people frequently exhibit high levels of affective empathy and can score above average on instruments like the Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Spreng et al., 2009; Engelbrecht, 2022). The difficulty, when present, tends to lie not in emotional responsiveness but in translating that affect into recognisable verbal or behavioural cues. In alexithymia, by contrast, affective empathy itself may be dampened or ambiguous, particularly in the moment of emotional activation.
What complicates the picture is that many autistic individuals also experience alexithymia. This co-occurrence can intensify communication challenges and emotional regulation difficulties, contributing to the misperception that empathy is absent. In reality, it may be present—indeed, overwhelming—but inexpressible. It is here that the concept of hyper-empathy becomes important. Many autistic people report a heightened sensitivity to the emotional states of others, sometimes to the point of psychic or somatic distress. This tendency, when paired with alexithymia, can result in a painful paradox: an individual who deeply feels the emotions of others, yet lacks the language or strategies to process or separate those emotions from their own.
This phenomenon has significant implications for educational and therapeutic settings. Behaviour that appears indifferent, disruptive, or avoidant may in fact reflect an internal landscape of emotional saturation and confusion. Recognising the interplay between autism and alexithymia—not merely as comorbidities but as co-shaping forces—can lead to more attuned, supportive responses from educators and clinicians alike.
Crucially, the tendency to conflate these two constructs undermines the ability to provide appropriate supports. It pathologises the wrong traits, targets the wrong interventions, and misrepresents the lived experience of those affected. A clear distinction between autism and alexithymia—whilst acknowledging their frequent intersection—is essential for developing inclusive classroom ecologies that honour emotional diversity and reject behavioural reductionism.
Hyper-Empathy and Misunderstood Behaviour
The stereotype that autistic individuals lack empathy remains one of the most persistent and damaging misconceptions in both clinical literature and educational practice. This narrative—often rooted in outdated or selectively interpreted research—has profoundly shaped public perceptions, policy responses, and the design of behavioural interventions. In particular, the influence of Simon Baron-Cohen’s ‘zero empathy’ framing has led to widespread adoption of empathy measures that do not account for the complexity of autistic emotional processing, reinforcing the false binary of presence versus absence.
Recent research, however, increasingly suggests that autistic people often experience not a deficit of empathy, but a surfeit. This hyper-empathic tendency manifests as heightened sensitivity to the emotional states of others, sometimes overwhelming in its intensity and difficult to regulate. Rather than being emotionally detached, many autistic individuals report absorbing others’ emotions so completely that they lose track of their own—a phenomenon that becomes even more complex when alexithymia is also present.
In such cases, emotional energy is taken in but not named. The individual experiences a physiological or affective response, yet cannot distinguish whether it originates from themselves or from external sources. This “where did that come from?” effect—akin to emotional whack-a-mole—can result in unpredictable or apparently contextless behaviours, which are frequently misread by neurotypical observers as oppositional, manipulative, or defiant. These behaviours are, in fact, communicative: signals of dysregulation, overwhelm, or internal distress. Yet because they do not conform to expected emotional scripts, they are often framed as problems to be managed rather than responses to be understood.
This misinterpretation is particularly evident in the widespread use of Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) and other compliance-based behavioural interventions. ABA is built on the assumption that all observable behaviours have identifiable antecedents and consequences and that these can be manipulated to shape future behaviour. But this model collapses when applied to individuals who experience alexithymia. If a person is unable to consciously identify or express the emotional drivers of their actions, behavioural conditioning is not only ineffective—it becomes coercive. The practitioner assumes intention where there is confusion, and imposes consequence where there is no conscious volition.
In these contexts, ABA often fails not because autistic individuals are resistant to learning, but because the underlying mechanisms of behaviour are not accessible to the learner themselves. This epistemic gap—between what is felt and what is nameable—renders behaviourist methods both inappropriate and, in many cases, traumatic. The more the individual fails to “comply,” the more intense the intervention becomes, creating a cycle of escalation that frequently results in emotional shutdown, burnout, or long-term psychological harm. Studies have linked such interventions to elevated rates of post-traumatic stress among autistic individuals (Kupferstein, 2018), especially when administered in early childhood or without informed consent.
Masking and camouflaging further complicate this picture. In an effort to avoid punishment or fit into neurotypical environments, many autistic people learn to suppress their natural responses and adopt scripted behaviours that conform to external expectations. This masking often comes at a high cost, depleting cognitive and emotional resources, and distancing the individual from their own embodied experience. It also reinforces a dynamic in which “successful” behaviour is measured by proximity to neurotypical norms, regardless of internal distress or disconnection.
In educational contexts, this dynamic often plays out in classrooms where autistic students are praised for being quiet, compliant, or outwardly engaged, even as they struggle internally. When these students eventually reach a breaking point—meltdown, withdrawal, or disassociation—their distress is framed as an unexpected behavioural incident rather than the culmination of sustained, invisible effort. The opportunity for authentic understanding is lost.
What is needed, then, is a fundamental reorientation of how behaviour is understood in neurodivergent students. Rather than seeking to extinguish behaviours deemed inappropriate or disruptive, educators must learn to interpret them as data—signals of environmental mismatch, sensory overload, or unprocessed emotion. This requires abandoning the illusion of behavioural objectivity and embracing a relational, context-sensitive model of support. It also demands the dismantling of practices that prioritise compliance over connection, and order over understanding.
Hyper-empathy, alexithymia, and the embodied realities of autistic experience cannot be made legible through behavioural data alone. They require a different epistemology—one grounded in curiosity, compassion, and ecological awareness. Only then can we begin to build learning environments that support regulation rather than demand performance, and nurture growth rather than enforce conformity.
From Control to Ecology: A Critique of Traditional Classroom Management
Traditional models of classroom management have long been informed by psychological frameworks that prioritise order, compliance, and behavioural regulation. These models—typically drawn from Baumrind’s typology of parenting styles and adapted for educational settings—categorise teacher authority along two axes: the degree of control exerted and the level of warmth or involvement displayed. The four dominant styles that emerge from this schema are authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and indulgent.
The authoritative style, often considered ideal in mainstream educational discourse, combines firm behavioural expectations with emotional support and open communication. Authoritarian management, by contrast, emphasises strict rules, obedience, and discipline with minimal relational warmth. The permissive and indulgent styles both involve low levels of control, with the indulgent style offering high emotional involvement without boundaries, and the permissive offering little of either.
Whilst this typology provides a helpful surface-level taxonomy, it is inadequate for understanding the needs of neurodivergent students, particularly those who are autistic, alexithymic, or both. At their core, these management styles are concerned with behavioural outcomes, not emotional attunement or sensory regulation. They ask: Is the student complying? Are they behaving appropriately?—rather than Is the environment supporting regulation? Are students emotionally safe enough to learn?
This is especially problematic in modern classrooms that adopt what might be described as a “joyful and vibrant” aesthetic. With good intentions, educators often design spaces filled with bright colours, abundant wall stimuli, dynamic seating arrangements, and constant motion—all in the name of engagement and positive energy. Yet for many neurodivergent students, such spaces are not stimulating but dysregulating. What is meant to be inviting can feel overwhelming; what is framed as joyful can register as chaotic.
These sensory environments can produce a low-level but persistent state of hyperarousal in students who struggle with filtering or modulating input. Bright overhead lights, echoing surfaces, visual clutter, and constant transitions saturate the sensory system, leaving little capacity for emotional regulation or sustained cognitive engagement. When a student withdraws, “zones out,” or becomes reactive in such conditions, their behaviour is frequently interpreted as oppositional rather than environmental—prompting further management rather than adaptation.
The fundamental issue here lies in the asymmetry of power and perception. Traditional management models place the burden of adaptation on the student. If a learner cannot sit still, attend quietly, or modulate their tone, they are viewed as failing to meet expectations—even if those expectations are misaligned with their sensory or emotional reality. This approach assumes that behaviour can be shaped independently of context, and that all students have the same regulatory capacities by default. It fails to account for the neurobiological truth that not all bodies experience the environment in the same way.
Moreover, these models often disregard the emotional energy states of both students and teachers. Emotional contagion, co-regulation, and the energetic tone of a classroom are powerful yet frequently unexamined forces. When a teacher is anxious, fatigued, or rigidly focused on control, students absorb that affective tone, consciously or not. Similarly, when students are dysregulated, the cumulative emotional load of the classroom increases—especially for hyper-empathic students who absorb and internalise the unspoken tensions of the space. In such environments, behaviour becomes less a matter of individual will and more a reflection of energetic imbalance.
The authoritative model, whilst preferable to the more extreme alternatives, still centres control and compliance. It privileges a linear understanding of cause and effect: the teacher sets clear expectations; students follow them; learning ensues. But for neurodivergent students, whose behaviours are often non-linear, context-dependent, and embodied, this model falls short. What is needed is not a style of management, but a shift in paradigm—from classroom as controlled space to classroom as relational ecology.
In such an ecology, the focus moves from behaviour to context, from discipline to design. The question becomes: What kind of space supports this student’s ability to regulate, engage, and grow? And more critically: What kind of relational dynamics are needed to make that space not only functional, but safe and affirming?
Only when educators begin to attend to these questions—sensory, emotional, energetic—can we begin to create learning environments that do more than “manage” neurodivergent students. We can begin, instead, to meet them.
Designing for Inclusion: Flow and the Autistic Nervous System
At the heart of inclusive educational design lies not simply the removal of barriers, but the intentional cultivation of environments that foster engagement, autonomy, and wellbeing. For autistic learners—particularly those who are hyper-empathic, alexithymic, or sensory-sensitive—this requires more than differentiated instruction. It necessitates a fundamental rethinking of how classroom spaces interact with the nervous system. One useful framework for this rethinking is flow theory, developed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990), which describes the state of deep, immersive focus that arises when a person’s skill level is matched to the challenge at hand, and environmental distractions are minimised.
Although flow is often discussed in the context of high performance or creativity, it has particular relevance to autistic learning. Autistic individuals frequently describe entering states of hyperfocus or absorption when conditions are conducive—when sensory input is regulated, emotional energy is steady, and the task at hand is intrinsically meaningful. These are not fleeting states of productivity; they are profound moments of regulation, embodiment, and agency. Far from being a deficit, this ability to enter flow can be one of the autistic nervous system’s most adaptive and generative traits.
However, achieving and sustaining flow requires environments that do not pull attention away through sensory overload, unpredictable interpersonal dynamics, or a constant demand for shallow transitions. It is not simply that autistic students find these conditions unpleasant—they render flow neurologically inaccessible. Where neurotypical learners may be able to compartmentalise or tune out minor distractions, autistic students often cannot. Stimuli are absorbed fully, experienced in parallel, and layered upon one another in ways that can quickly tip the system into overwhelm.
In this sense, classroom environments must function as co-regulators. That is, they must not merely house learning, but actively support the nervous systems of those within them. This includes attention to:
Light: Natural lighting, soft illumination, and the avoidance of flickering fluorescent bulbs can significantly reduce sensory strain.
Noise: Acoustic design matters. Hard surfaces and open-plan classrooms create echoic environments that amplify background noise and make auditory processing difficult.
Layout: Predictable spatial arrangements, clear visual boundaries, and options for partial enclosure (e.g., study carrels, quiet corners) offer both sensory respite and autonomy.
Comfort: Flexible seating, access to movement, and the opportunity to adjust posture or position throughout the day are not indulgences—they are prerequisites for sustained engagement.
These environmental considerations are not simply aesthetic preferences; they directly influence the emotional and physiological availability of students to learn. A classroom that appears “normal” to a neurotypical teacher may function as a site of continual micro-stressors for a neurodivergent student—each minor irritation contributing to cumulative dysregulation. Conversely, a thoughtfully designed space can act as an emotional buffer, extending the student’s window of tolerance and allowing them to remain engaged, curious, and receptive.
It is also worth noting that energy states—both individual and collective—shape the classroom’s affective tone. Autistic students often navigate a heightened attunement to the emotional atmosphere, picking up on subtle tensions, anxieties, or affective dissonance that others may not consciously register. In such contexts, co-regulation must include not just sensory calibration but relational stability. Teachers who cultivate calm, predictable, and emotionally safe presences provide anchoring points within the classroom ecology, allowing students to settle more fully into themselves.
In this sense, inclusion is not a matter of placing students in the same physical room; it is about shaping conditions under which all students, especially those with non-normative nervous systems, can access flow. When the environment aligns with the embodied needs of learners, inclusion ceases to be an accommodation and becomes an act of design justice—an affirmation that all ways of being are worthy of support.
Differentiation as Ecological Practice
Differentiated instruction is typically defined as the practice of adapting teaching content, processes, products, or learning environments to meet diverse student needs. Tomlinson and Imbeau (2010) emphasise four key elements—content, process, product, and affect—whilst Bosker (2005) and Roy, Guay, and Valois (2013) expand this to include readiness, motivation, cognitive profile, and emotional resilience. Yet even within these models, differentiation is too often framed in strictly curricular terms—focusing on what students learn and how they demonstrate mastery, rather than on the environments that shape whether they can learn at all.
For neurodivergent students, particularly those with fluctuating emotional tolerances or sensory thresholds, differentiation must extend beyond content. It must include the modulation of space, pace, and relational energy. A lesson offered at the right cognitive level but delivered in a visually chaotic, noisy, or emotionally fraught classroom will fail—not because the student lacks ability, but because the conditions for engagement have not been met.
This reframing casts the teacher not as a manager of behaviour but as a responsive guide: one who monitors emotional climate, adapts moment to moment, and co-creates learning conditions attuned to both individual and collective needs. Differentiation, then, is not a strategy but an ecological ethic—a commitment to meeting students where they are, with what they need, when they need it.
Implications for Practice
Designing inclusive learning environments grounded in ecological thinking requires more than minor adjustments to existing classroom routines. It calls for a fundamental shift in pedagogical posture—from control to co-regulation, from curriculum delivery to relational attunement. This shift has practical implications for classroom design, success metrics, and the inner work of teaching itself.
First, classrooms must be designed not as extensions of the teacher’s preferences, but as responsive environments that adapt to the needs of those who inhabit them. Too often, classrooms are configured as aesthetic reflections of the educator’s identity—what might be termed pedagogical “nesting.” Wall displays, lighting choices, room layout, and even the emotional tone are curated to meet the comfort and control needs of the teacher, rather than the regulatory needs of the students. Whilst this is understandable, it is ultimately misaligned with the purpose of inclusive education. A classroom is not a stage for the educator’s personality—it is a shared ecology that must reconfigure itself with each new cohort.
This reconfiguration must be intentional and iterative. Success cannot be measured solely through grades, task completion, or behavioural compliance. Instead, metrics should centre autonomy, regulation, and participation. Does the student have space to self-advocate? Are their sensory and emotional needs respected? Do they feel safe to show up as they are, not just as they are expected to be?
Creating such conditions requires educators to engage in ongoing self-awareness and reflective practice. It demands that teachers interrogate their own assumptions about control, productivity, and classroom “order.” What behaviours do we reward, and why? What norms are enforced, and who benefits from them? What does it mean to centre the student not as an abstraction, but as an embodied learner with specific ways of processing, expressing, and connecting?
Crucially, this is not a call to abandon structure, but to refine it—replacing rigid routines with adaptive rhythms, fixed expectations with relational responsiveness. Teachers become stewards of energy, emotion, and environment. Their role is not to “manage” behaviour, but to meet needs—in real time, with compassion, flexibility, and informed intent.
Such a shift does not only benefit autistic or alexithymic learners. It creates classrooms in which all students—regardless of label or profile—can breathe more freely, engage more fully, and learn in ways that honour their humanity.
Conclusion: Building Harmonious Learning Ecologies
This article has argued for a fundamental reorientation of how educators understand, support, and design for neurodivergent learners—particularly those who are autistic and/or alexithymic. Drawing on the Solitary Forager Hypothesis and the Ecological-Enactive model of disability, we have challenged the dominant deficit and behavioural paradigms that continue to shape classroom management and intervention. In their place, we have proposed an ecological approach—one that centres embodiment, energy regulation, sensory realities, and the relational dynamics between learners, teachers, and space.
We have shown that many behaviours often framed as non-compliant or inappropriate may in fact reflect misattuned environments, misunderstood emotional processes, or unrecognised hyper-empathic responses. In such cases, attempts to impose behavioural control not only fail to address the underlying need, but risk producing long-term harm. In contrast, classrooms designed as ecologies of support—responsive to energy states, inclusive of sensory variation, and grounded in mutual regulation—can enable genuine participation and flourishing.
To move towards this vision, we must abandon the notion that inclusion is achieved through proximity or policy alone. Inclusion must be embodied, dynamic, and relational. It must make space not only for diverse cognitive styles, but for diverse nervous systems and emotional languages. This requires teachers to step out of ego-centred design, to reframe their role from manager to facilitator, and to adapt their spaces and practices with each new group of students.
In doing so, we shift from compliance-based inclusion to something far more radical: belonging. Not the conditional belonging that depends on masking, mimicking, or meeting unspoken norms—but the kind that recognises the legitimacy of difference and builds from it. Harmonious classroom ecologies are not free of conflict or complexity. But they are capable of holding difference without collapsing into control.
This is not a universal formula. It is an ongoing practice—messy, relational, and profoundly human. And it begins, always, with the question: What does this learner need in this moment, and how can we meet them there?
Appendix
The following are the surveys mentioned in this article, a brief statement on how to interpret results, and their location on the internet. Many thanks to Embrace Autism for their work in operationalising these scales and making them available to the world for free. Given the changes to the DSM (DSM-V-TR - 3-20-2022), more people will rely upon such surveys to help them discover their true selves as the system moves to protect itself by making autism diagnoses more difficult to obtain.
TAS-20 - Toronto Alexithymia Scale (Scores above 61 are indicative of alexithymia.) https://embrace-autism.com/toronto-alexithymia-scale/#Toronto_Alexithymia_Scale_TAS-20
OAQ - Online Alexithymia Questionnaire (Scores above 113 are indicative of alexithymia.) https://embrace-autism.com/online-alexithymia-questionnaire/
TEQ - Toronto Empathy Questionnaire (Scores above 45 are indicative of above average empathy levels.) https://embrace-autism.com/toronto-empathy-questionnaire/
EQ - The Empathy Quotient (Scores below 30 are indicative of subject likely being autistic.) https://embrace-autism.com/empathy-quotient/
CAT-Q - Camouflaging Autistic Traits Questionnaire (Scores above 100 are indicative of greater camouflaging / masking.) https://embrace-autism.com/cat-q/#test
RAADS-R - Ritvo Autism Asperger Diagnostic Scale–Revised (Scores above 65 are indicative of subject likely being autistic.) https://embrace-autism.com/raads-r/
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—August 2025 Update—
When I first drafted this article, I imagined it as a peer-reviewed paper. I submitted it to multiple journals—each declined, in their own way. A few offered polite rejections. Most didn’t respond at all. I don’t have the money to pay for placement in the open-access publishing mills that now dominate so much of the academic landscape, and I no longer believe knowledge should be locked behind paywalls in the first place.
So I tried something different.
In March 2024, I registered a narrative review with the Open Science Framework: Distinguishing Alexithymia and Autism: An Ecological-Enactive Model Perspective and Its Implications for Inclusive Classroom Environments. It was a scoping study, grounded in lived experience, critical theory, and multidisciplinary review. I had hoped it might gain traction, circulate, maybe even shape a conversation. But as is often the case with work that resists the medical model, challenges behavioural paradigms, and centres marginalised voices—it was largely ignored.
Some of this research made its way into my 2023 book No Place for Autism? Much of it remains relevant, if still unacknowledged, by those who shape policy and pedagogy. And so I’m revisiting it now—on the eve of the 2025–2026 school year—because the discourse has not improved. If anything, it’s regressed.
Mainstream media is busy blaming Generation Alpha’s “iPad addictions” for classroom “behaviour problems,” whilst schools double down on control and compliance. Neurodivergent students are still misunderstood. Inclusion is still superficial. And those of us trying to offer more humane, embodied, and relational models are still being asked to prove our value in systems that cannot recognise us.
I originally published this piece in 2022—one of my first on Substack—because no one was listening elsewhere. That hasn’t changed much. But I’ve kept writing. Because some of you have been listening. And that matters.