"You're Going to Love This Kid!" Teaching Students with Autism in the Inclusive Classroom by Paula Kluth, Paul H. Brookes Publishing, 2003.
Some sources
suggest that students with autism have no imagination and lack the ability to think
creatively. For this reason, some teachers may believe that students with autism or
Asperger’s syndrome will be uninterested in listening to or reading fiction.
Kenneth Hall (2001), a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, who is a huge Harry Potter
fan, reports that he and many others with Asperger’s enjoy works of fiction:
Some people say AS [Asperger
syndrome] kids prefer to read factual books. This is definitely untrue. I
would reckon about 97 per cent prefer fiction. I like adventure stories best,.
I would love to be a character out of an adventure in one of my books. Sometimes I
like to read the same book over and over many times. I have read some of my
favorite books approximately 50-55 times. (p. 35-36)
Others with autism and
Asperger’s, however, do report that non-fiction reading materials are somehow more
comforting and easier to negotiate than stories or other works of fiction. Consider
the words of Liane Holliday Willey (1999), a woman with Asperger’s syndrome:
By around eight years old, I had
become a very proficient comprehender as well as word caller. So long as the
material was of a factual nature. Fiction was more difficult for me for it forced my
thoughts to go beyond the literal. I preferred biographies and eventually made my
way through every biography we had in our library, despite the librarian’s repeated
request that I check out something new and different. I like reading about real live
people and their real life experiences. It didn’t matter if it was a
story about Babe Ruth or Harry Truman or Harriet Tubman. I wasn’t attracted to
baseball or government or social issues so much as I was attached to the reality of the
words I was reading. Even today, as I find those same biographies on the shelves of
libraries, I return to that old comfortable place in my mind where those words meant so
much to me. (p. 24)
Having a range of texts available and
investigating what types of materials students prefer increases the likelihood that every
student will engage with text during the school day. Texts of different genres,
reading levels, and even formats (e.g., newspapers, pamphlets) should be made available at
all times. While this recommendation may seem common-sense to some, one of my former
colleagues did not appreciate how vast of a range of materials she needed to make
available until she encountered a student who loved to read cereal boxes more than any
other “text” she offered him during the year.