April is National Autism Awareness Month (also known as Autism Acceptance Month), but Lehigh University Autism Services (LUAS) works to expand awareness all year long as it provides quality, research-based therapeutic services for young children with autism and their families in the Lehigh Valley.
The program, housed in the Center for Promoting Research to Practice of Lehigh’s College of Education, was opened in 2018 by Dr. Lee Kern. Kern has been a classroom teacher, behavior specialist, consultant, and faculty member in the field of disabilities for more than 25 years. She is past editor of the Journal of Positive Behavior Interventions.
Autism affects 1 in 36 people and is diagnosed by its symptoms, which include difficulties with social interaction, communication, and repetitive behaviors. Symptoms may appear at 10-18 months of age, but often it isn’t until around age 4 that children are diagnosed, usually by a developmental pediatrician.
Dr. Stephen Shore, an autistic professor of special education, famously said, "If you've met one individual with autism, you've met one individual with autism." Do you agree?
Yes, that’s why it’s referred to as a spectrum — it’s very, very diverse. There can be children and adults who have intellectual disabilities and no language skills who are very dependent on others, all the way to people who are extremely independent and hold jobs.
What is the preferred term — autism or autism spectrum disorder?
There’s a new neurodiversity movement amongst autistic individuals and their allies that has raised concerns about how we should be working with people who have autism. They don’t like the term “autism spectrum disorder” because they prefer to view the characteristics of autism as a difference, not a disorder.
For a very long time, we’ve used people-first language — “people with autism” rather than “autistic people.” Neurodiversity advocates prefer to be called just “autistic,” because they view autism as simply a difference.
When is autism typically diagnosed?
We’re getting much better at diagnosing children, so it can be at around two years old, when you’d expect language to begin to develop. Early diagnosis is often due to success in communicating some of the early symptoms to parents.
Why is early intervention important?
Early intervention is very successful at remediating language difficulties and social challenges. It’s basically true for all children, even those without disabilities — if you can intervene early for language, children are more likely to develop vocal, verbal language that’s beneficial to communicating easily. Children who can’t communicate verbally tend to engage in more problem behaviors as a means of communication — for example, as a way of getting attention. If we can intervene early and try to teach language or provide them with an alternative system of communication, we’re less likely to see problem behaviors arise.
What interventions do you use in LUAS?
We individualize our services to meet each child’s unique needs and work with them to develop skills such as language, play, social, and functional living skills. We use a combination of applied behavior analysis, pivotal response treatment, and positive behavior support. We try to identify pivotal areas that are likely to lead to a lot of learning, and use motivational strategies such as identifying activities and objects that are of high interest to children, encouraging language through those activities.
We individualize our services to meet each child’s unique needs and work with them to develop skills such as language, play, social, and functional living skills.
How has Lehigh’s program expanded?
When we started, we had three students, and they were the children of faculty and staff. We’re still working with those children, who are now in elementary school. Currently we’re up to 12 children and are continuing to expand. It doesn’t seem like a lot of children, but we provide up to 35 hours a week for each child, so there are a lot of hours of service. Most of the services are provided in the children’s homes or schools, teaching them in the most natural environment possible and making sure they can generalize what they learn to other places.
Right now there are seven undergraduate and three graduate Lehigh students working in the clinic. There are master’s students in the behavioral analysis major and doctoral students who are in special education or school psychology. We’ve typically recruited undergraduates from the psychology program, but we’re expanding and hiring students from other colleges as well.
What is the ultimate goal of your work?
We have three goals. One is to serve the community because there’s such a great need — we have a waiting list and most of the agencies in the area do, too. A second goal is to train the next group of providers among our Lehigh students, hoping some of them will pursue careers in autism services. Our third goal is to conduct research in order to advance interventions in autism.
LUAS has a lot of plans on the horizon. We hope to start a college and career readiness program for high school students, perhaps some social skills groups, and to have programs for parents, especially those who can’t get services right away, to help them teach their children language and social interaction skills.