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What Can the Academy Learn From Temple Grandin and Her Cattle Chute Designs?

Who is Temple Grandin? She is the author of Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism, the subject of the HBO film “Temple Grandin”, and the designer of one-third of the livestock-handling facilities used in the United States today. According to the flyleaf of her book, Thinking in Pictures:
Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who…also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. In this unprecedented book, Grandin delivers a report from the country of autism. Writing from the dual perspectives of a scientist and an autistic person, she tells us how that country is experienced by its inhabitants and how she managed to breach its boundaries to function in the outside world. What emerges in Thinking in Pictures is the document of an extraordinary human being, one who, in gracefully and lucidly bridging the gulf between her condition and our own, sheds light on the riddle of our common identity.

So what? My question remains: “What can the academy learn from Temple Grandin and her cattle chute designs?” I am persuaded that we can learn much. However, I don’t believe I will be suggesting what you’re probably thinking right now. I am convinced that many people reading this are saying to themselves: “The obvious purpose of cattle chutes is to herd cattle in an inexpensive and efficient way into or out of holding pens, with the last set of chutes leading to the slaughter house.” The above analogy would suggest that students are cattle and that institutions of higher learning are either holding pens or slaughter houses. Although I have heard people seriously make those comparisons, I am not going there.
I want to focus on several ethical values, design principles and practices that Temple Grandin employed in her work that were highlighted in the book and movie. I originally picked up the book because of neurological changes in my life. Due to several traumatic brain episodes, I have found myself living in the land of metaphors instead of the land of words and analytic, quantitative and sequential thinking in which I grew up and resided for more than 40 years of work in the academy. As I read the book and watched the video, a number of images jumped out of the book and off the screen, and caught my attention. If we were to use Grandin’s values, principles and practices as we design and operate our institutions of higher learning, I believe that they would be more humane, inexpensive, efficient and more effective in producing the learning in our students that we all desire.

The principle that drove Temple’s designs was that form was to follow function. First we define what we want to do. Then we design our processes and instruments to achieve the desired end.
The first value to be emphasized was respect for life. Temple respected cattle and pushed cattle ranchers and meat packers to respect the cattle. By force of her will, she was able to demonstrate that respecting cattle produced better and more efficient results in moving cattle from one place to another, right up and through the point of slaughter. Our students are alive. Shouldn’t we respect them?
The first of Temple’s practices I want to emphasize is the practice of looking at the product or process through the eyes of the intended user. In designing her cattle chutes, she got down on her hands and knees and crawled through the operating chutes to see what the cattle saw and encountered. In this way, she was able to find the places where the cattle stumbled, where they were confused, where they balked, and where things went smoothly. How many of us have crawled through the obstacle courses that we run our students through? Do we know where the path is too dark to see the potholes? Do we know where outside light confuses our students?

The second of Temple’s practices involved changes that Temple made to the then prevalent chute design. Temple changed the design of her chutes from straight lines with right-angle turns to curved lines. How did she figure this out? She studied how cattle behaved. She noticed that they were calmer and more responsive when moving in arcs rather than straight lines. How many of us have studied our students’ behavior and changed our pedagogy to get more responses from our students?
A second change Temple made in chute design was to replace slatted sidewalls with solid side walls. Why? Because she noticed that the cattle were distracted by outside interference like uneven sunshine producing glares and shadows that the cattle didn’t understand or recognize. Temple was challenged on this change by the cattlemen because of costs (solid walls were more expensive to build) and the fact that the slatted walls gave the handlers the opportunity to prod the cattle along when they got all tangled up. Her response was measured. She pointed out that since the cattle liked the arc movement and solid walls, there would be far fewer roadblocks, meaning less work for the handlers and more contented cows which meant more and better beef.
So what can the academy learn from Temple Grandin’s design of cattle chutes? We can learn: 1) Respect for our students, 2) Define our desired outcome and design our forms to achieve the desired functions, 3) Study our students, and look at learning through their eyes. 4) Remove unnecessary obstacles to make not only their life easier, but ours also. 5) Contented students will produce more and better learning.

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Reading through the Week–Part I: Introduction

In the January 2012 issue of Christianity Today Alan Jacobs, Professor of English at Wheaton College and author of the recently released Oxford University Press book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, is interviewed by John Wilson, the Books and Culture editor for CT. The title of the interview “Don’t Worry, Read Happy” is a light hearted attempt to encourage CT readers to expand their horizons for reading beyond work related assignments and to read for enjoyment. The subtitle of the interview, “Stop Fretting Over What You Need to Know, and Enjoy Those Books that Bring Delight,” is a quote from Jacobs that interviewer Wilson culled from the interview.

As I read the interview, I was reminded of two of my previous blog postings that I entitled, “Relief through Reading.” I went back to look at them. I was extremely surprised that it has been almost a year since I published those posts. As far as my reading for the past year, it has definitely been up and down. I have been able to read a few books for what one could the sheer enjoyment of it. However, most of my reading has been focused on my writing projects.

The title of one book, The Curious Incident of the Upside Down Dog, might suggest light reading. It was anything but light reading. It was a bio-novel, written from the perspective of a young adolescent boy suffering with Asperger Syndrome who discovers his neighbor’s pet dog killed in her backyard. Since the neighbor finds him with the dog and “she considers him strange,” she accuses him of killing her pet. Since the boy loved the dog and wanted to prove his innocence and find the real culprit, he begins an involved search for the real perpetrator. As the boy delves deeper and deeper into this mystery, we are drawn into the mind of an autistic youth, the inner workings of two dysfunctional families, the awful truths from which both parents and neighbors tried to insulate this innocent autistic boy, and the boy’s herculean efforts to find that truth, no matter what it meant for him and his family.

I selected this book because I knew from the advertisements it dealt with Asperger Syndrome supposedly written from the inside. Since much of my writing has attempted to write about difficulties from the inside of those difficulties, the first reason I selected this book was to get another example of how this type of writing might be done, definitely not reading for the pleasure of entertainment.

The second reason for selecting this book was because of an essay that I wrote more than two years ago, but have not yet published. In that essay, I suggest the behavior of many college and university faculty members was consistent with the behavior of autistic adults. I was hoping I could glean some guidance from this book on how to write about abnormal behaviors without criticizing those individuals for behaviors that were beyond their control.

I must admit that I didn’t get everything that I wanted from the book. It was a polemic about how adults treated this boy. The best message that I could take away from the book was that college administrators have a great responsibility to monitor, hold themselves and faculty members accountable for their behavior, and assist faculty members when they seem to be straying from acceptable behavioral norms.

I started this posting with the idea of writing another light encouragement to read. However I started to approach this in a manner that went against the advice of Professor Jacobs. My first idea was to suggest a reading plan that hit each day of the week. I was working on this idea even before I saw the Jacobs interview in CT.

In “Reading Through the Week, Part II, I will outline the reading plan that I developed for me. It is a plan that includes 7 books that contain the names of the days of the week. This book list is not for everyone. It was a plan and a book list to which I was attracted. I learned something from each of the books. I found some of the books to be a challenging read. Each of the books brought me enjoyment at some point during the reading. I found this exercise has helped me to return to an activity that I enjoyed during my childhood, reading for reading’s sake and not just to complete an assignment.

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Adult Autism in the Academy, Living with Epilepsy and Aphasia

For 40 years as a college instructor and then administrator, I dealt with students that had been diagnosed as autistic as young children. For 40 years, I had sympathy for autistic individuals. Today I believe I have empathy. Except for one student, the autistic students were  all hard-working individuals who did succeed in the normal collegiate definition of success. They all graduated with good to superior grades. The one exception dropped out of college and I lost track of that individual. I remember him because I spent hour after hour with his mother who was arguing for our college to give him a chance even though he almost failed out of high school.

Fifteen months ago I spent four weeks in a hospital due to the removal of a benign brain tumor that was discovered when a blood vessel in it burst creating many stroke like symptoms. While in the hospital, the TV had few daytime options other than soaps or health related features. Many of these features related to autism. As I watched these features daily, I noticed the similarities between the behavioral characteristics of autistic children and a number of the faculty members and administrators with whom I had dealt daily over the years. I began thinking, “Is there an adult form of autism besides the severe forms that are portrayed in movies and books?”

After my release from the hospital I was left with two problems, one much more serious than the other. With the help of physical therapy, I worked very hard to overcome the motor deficits that were a result of the stroke-like symptoms. I got to the point where I could walk unaided. I took the driver’s training for stroke victims and was given permission to drive. Nine months after the surgery, there were almost  no motor deficits left to indicate that I had experienced such a serious condition. However, the more serious problem remaining was that I was left with a mild case of aphasia, a condition that neurologists characterize as a defect or deficiency. Literally it means loss of words. The National Aphasia Association describes it as an acquired communication disorder that impairs a person’s ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence. Aphasia impairs the ability to speak and may impair the ability to understand others. My aphasia manifests itself as an inability on occasion to follow conversations and either written or verbal directions. It also manifests itself in the inability or difficulty in finding the right word to use in a conversation or in my writing. I describe it by saying that “Words act more like cats than dogs. Dogs come to you when you call them; while cats come to you when they want to come.”

As months past, I kept coming back to that question, “Is there an adult form of autism?” In searching for more on autism within the academy, I found Tyler Cowen’s article, Autism as an Academic Paradigm in Chronicle of Higher Education. My first reaction to Cowen’s premise that autism has helped the academy was significant disagreement. Having spent 40 years fighting and cleaning up messes left by faculty and other administrators who demonstrated the behavioral characteristics used to define autism, I didn’t think the consequences were positive.  These behavioral patterns included a lack of communication, marked impairment in the ability to initiate or sustain a conversation with others without relying on stereotyped and repetitive use of language or idiosyncratic language fixation on the minutia, and the inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals. How often have I dealt with faculty or administrators who had what seemed to be an unhealthy preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that seemed to be abnormal either in intensity or focus? How often have I seen within the academy an apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals?” When the faculty members or administrators are questioned about these routines or policies, the typical answer is “We’ve always done it this way.” However, there were two lines in the article that made me think maybe he does get it. The lines were “It’s not just ‘special needs’ students but also our valedictorian, our faculty members, and yes—sometimes—our administrators. That last sentence is not some kind of cheap laugh line about the many dysfunctional features of higher education.” It may not be a cheap laugh line. But there are many dysfunctional aspects of higher education engendered by the behavioral characteristics that are used to define autism.

So how can I now have empathy for the autistic? Nine months after my brain surgery, I had four grand mal seizures, which put me back in the hospital for a week.  The seizures were most likely the result of scar tissue remaining in my brain as a result of the surgery. The four seizures have left me classified as an epileptic. As much as I would like to get out from under this classification, I will always remain classified as an epileptic and most likely I will have to take anti-seizure medication for the remainder of my life. I am thankful that there are such things as anti-seizure medications. While I am taking these medications faithfully I can live an almost regular life. However, I must carry the stigma of being an epileptic and I must be under constant observation; hence the source of my empathy. Since not enough time has elapsed since my most recent grand mal seizure, I am not allowed to drive or operate heavy or complicated machinery. Should that prohibition related to complicated machinery include computers and blackberries? I have had to give up my blackberry because I couldn’t respond fast enough to the prompts, more likely a result of the aphasia rather than a result of epilepsy.  But if you take away my computer, you have taken away my best avenue of communication. Without the medications, I would be living in constant fear of another seizure. Even with the seizure medication, one EEG’s showed lots of spurious activity in my brain. The neurologist said that this could be a sign of the ongoing occurrence of many mini-seizures, or the prelude to another big seizure.

Because of my epilepsy and aphasia, I have had to retire from the academy. The aphasia has made it almost impossible for me to respond immediately and fully to complicated communications from others. I must study the communications preferably in written form so that I can slowly formulate a proper answer to them. Many times in academic circles you are not afforded the luxury of time to compose a response. In academic meetings and in testing situations in classrooms people and instructors want answers immediately. I have also found that my epilepsy scares many people and they don’t want to be around me, because they don’t understand the disease and they are afraid because they don’t know if they would know what to do if I had another seizure. I still have my intelligence and knowledge based on 40 years in higher education, but I have few avenues within the academy to use them. If we can integrate the individuals with autism into the academy as effectively as Cowen suggest we have, can we integrate individuals with epilepsy or aphasia? I have confidence that American higher education can do so if it will try. I only hope that I will see it.