Interview between Speaker 1 (Meg Ferrell) and Speaker 2 (Joyner Emerick)
Episode 108
Meg:
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Welcome to the Two Sides of the Spectrum podcast, a place where we explore research, amplify Autistic voices, and change the way we think about autism in life and in our professional therapy practices. I’m Meg Ferrell from learnplaythrive.com, broadcasting to you today from unceded Tsalagi territory.
We all know that the plans and goals that we write deeply impact what our students and clients get access to learning. Joyner Emerick has completely transformed the planning process in the best possible way. Joyner has a 12-year-old who is minimally speaking with high adaptive and communication support needs, and in this episode, you’ll hear them talk about how the planning process they created works, how you can implement it, and the 12 valued outcomes, as Joyner calls them, that they wrote for their son. This is not a process that’s for sale. We’re just sharing it with you so you can take it and use it in your work too. Don’t miss the show notes for this one where we share a lot of the documents, and details, and language at learnplaythrive.com/podcast.
I’ll tell you a bit about our guest. Joyner Emerick is a dedicated advocate and community organizer who was historically elected as Minneapolis’s first openly Autistic school board director in 2022 after a multi-year struggle to advocate for their own child’s rights in the special education system. In their field, Emerick is best known for their belief in the transformative power of inclusive education and their commitment to dismantling the school-to-prison pipeline. Emerick is guided by the principles of the disability justice movement and abolitionist teaching. Their radical commitment to cross-coalition work for liberation, including and especially the liberation of children, makes Emerick a compelling advocate for a more just educational future for all students. I cannot wait to share this interview with you.
As we move into the conversation, a couple of quick notes on acronyms. You’ll hear them say DSP, which stands for ‘direct service provider’; and you’ll hear them say PCA, which is a ‘personal care assistant’. Here is the interview with Joyner Emerick.
Hi, Joyner. Welcome to the podcast.
Joyner:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be on today.
Meg:
I’m excited to have this conversation with you. I think it’s going to be really meaningful and really impactful. And I want to start by learning a little bit about you. Can you tell us your own story of your work, your family, whatever you want to share of how you got to this point?
Joyner:
Sure. Well, I’m a relatively late diagnosed Autistic person. I was diagnosed about 13 or 14 years ago. And I have two kids who are both Autistic. One is 21-years-old and one is 10-years-old. And then, I have a neurodivergent spouse as well. So, we’re a multi-generational neurodivergent family. And then, I also have other disabilities as well. So, we are really in disability culture as a family and household unit. And then, I am also a school board director in the city of Minneapolis. I was elected in 2022. And my impetus for running really began with trying to navigate special education for my younger child in our public school district and having a lot of difficulties, both having his rights honored and agreeing on practices that felt affirming and effective to support him.
And it was through all of the learning that I had to do as a parent to advocate for and support him that I came to be doing more community organizing that spans such a greater piece of our youth population, and particularly students who are most vulnerable to the school-prison nexus. So, my work sort of evolved in that way where I really look particularly at the intersections of race and disability in our school systems, segregation, and how that contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline. So, that’s kind of a big chunk of my work outside of parenting. And so, yeah, and we have four cats, which is a lifestyle. So, that’s always worth mentioning.
Meg:
Hey, I have four cats too.
Joyner:
Do you really?
Meg:
Yeah, I do. We’ll see which ones visit us during this interview. It’s always a surprise. Such an interesting story. I would like to have a long conversation with you in addition to this one about your work on school-to-prison pipeline. I grew up in public schools in Jackson, Mississippi, like, one of the Blackest and poorest cities in the country. And I, when people said school-to-prison pipeline, I was like, I know; I’m watching it. Like, we had armed police officers making sure we didn’t talk at lunch because, quote unquote, ‘gang fights’. And I was treated so differently than my Black classmates. It was just so incredibly apparent and hasn’t gotten better. And I appreciate that that’s where you’ve chosen to focus. And we’ll have to bring you back around to talk more. Okay, so I want to talk about your planning process, but I want to ask you a quick follow up question on your personal story before we get to it. For folks who are like, “Oh, I want to do that,” like, “I want to do what they did,” what’s kind of the first step of moving from participant at the mercy of the systems, towards like a leadership role in school systems?
Joyner:
Well, I think there’s a lot of access points. I will say I don’t have a background in electoral politics. I have a background in parenting and community organizing. And so, for me, the springboard to running for school board was starting to talk with different parent organizing groups in my community who were focusing on racial equity, but who did not yet have a narrative in their work of connecting disability and special education into their work, and forming relationships with those groups to see if they were open to expanding their narrative to better encompass this sort of specific intersection. And I found great willingness and enthusiasm.
And so, that’s sort of how I started working within the communities that were advocating in my school system around the areas that were most interesting to me and that I felt most passionate about contributing my work and my service to. And so, it was actually then my community, a few years later, that asked me to run. And so, that’s how I was able to get elected, even though I’m a little bit of an unlikely candidate, because I didn’t start the work to run for school board. My leadership sort of emerged with the support of community, which feels really authentic to me. But a person wouldn’t have to run for an elected office. All of the work that I did to partner with existing organizing is, I think, a great access point.
I always say that if you want to do something, you should look for the folks in your vicinity who are already doing it and see what you can contribute. Too often, we try to start our own thing. And while that enthusiasm is great, we can often be more effective if we join up with the folks, especially who have more lived experience, subject matter expertise, right, to help bring us in to the actions and organizing that are already happening.
Meg:
It’s the same answer every time, and it’s so beautiful. And we need to hear it over and over because people get stuck. They’re like, “I need to change everything, but I don’t know how. So, now, I’m not going to do anything.” And I have asked the same question to so many people. And every single time they say: Find the people around you who also care about the things you care about. I love that everything starts and ends with community and the people around us. So, thank you for sharing that.
All right. So, here’s what I know about your story, Joyner. I know that your IEP team asked you to develop a vision statement to inform your child’s supports in school. First off, is this a prompt that’s given to every family during the IEP process? Or is this something unique that happens at your school system?
Joyner:
I would say neither. So, as wonderful as this ask was — and I want to be really clear, I have a really generative relationship with my child’s IEP team. And I almost experienced this ask with a little bit of collective exasperation. So, it was a wonderful ask of the IEP case manager. But if I can just sort of ground your question in context about my child and his IEP experience a little bit, I think it’s really, really integral to what I’m talking about today, that my 10-year-old child, his name is Foxy, is an Autistic person with significant global support needs. So, he is non-speaking, he requires full hands-on adaptive care throughout his day, and he needs a very high level of service in school and in his home and community.
And so, sometimes kids who have the kinds of needs that Foxy has get put into a ready-made program that is very much about behavior compliance, right? We know this happens sort of in the ABA industry, but it happens the same way in most of our school systems. They have a place for ‘kids like that’. I’m doing air quotes. And so, my child, who has been in the system since the age of two, receiving special ed services from my district, we’ve really never landed on total agreement about what his individualized, specially designed instruction should look like. We have really great related services, and that’s fantastic, but we have never been able to come together in agreement because there is still this idea that he has to be taught how to learn before he can be instructed.
And so, a lot of it is ‘He has to sit still, he has to follow directions, he has to look at the teacher and pay attention to what the teacher wants him to do’. And those practices might be really important for some kids, but for my child, they almost lack relevance. He’s already demonstrated to us the ways that he learns, and trying to do it differently from the way that he’s established works for him is not the direction we want to go, and it’s not going to be effective to providing him the highest quality education we can.
So, I don’t think that my child’s IEP team is resistant to that way of thinking as much as they just don’t know what to do. The things that I’m talking about in our meetings are so outside the paradigm of traditional education that they’re almost having trouble wrapping their heads around it. So, this ‘ask for the vision’ statement from the IEP case manager I think came at the end of last school year from an IEP meeting where we just couldn’t understand each other well and was an ask that hoped to bring more information to the table so that we could be more connected with each other in our thinking and be on the same page. So, I don’t think it’s typically asked for in my district, and I don’t know how frequently it’s asked for in other districts. And this is the first time in my child’s seven years in this special education system that we were asked for it, but I was very thankful for the ask because I think it’s a really — it’s a springboard and did become a springboard for the work that I did next.
Meg:
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. So, tell us about what happened next. What was your process like, and what did you come up with?
Joyner:
Sure. So, my spouse and I took a couple of weeks and went through a few drafts to create the vision statement, and we sort of chose to take a snapshot of the life that we wanted for my child when he completed transition services in special ed. So, in my state, that’s 23rd birthday, I know it varies state to state. But when he reached the end of his eligibility for special education services, where did we want him to be? And we started there because the scope of the ask was for educational services, but we found that the vision statement had application outside of education as well, and it’s like four paragraphs. And once we had this vision statement, we were so in love with it, and the process of visioning was so powerful for us as parents that it felt like I wanted to do more with it to have it better inform his services. And so, what I did next was pull 12 valued outcomes from this vision statement. And they’re single sentences, so I can read you a couple to give an example.
Meg:
Yeah, I’d love to hear them.
Joyner:
So, I created three in the realm of academics, and an example of an academic valued outcome is, “Foxy accesses and engages with texts aligned to his purposes and interests.” We had three in sensory motor, such as, “Foxy selects and uses sensory support strategies throughout the day to maintain comfort, emotional safety, and engagement.” We had three under social emotional, such as, “Foxy develops and maintains varied authentic and reciprocal relationships.” And then we had three under self-help and self-advocacy, such as, “Foxy’s own choices and decisions primarily determine the activities and routines of his daily life.” So, once we were able to pull those 12 valued outcomes from the vision statement, I could look at those outcomes and start to backward plan across 13 years to where he is now.
And so, then what I started to do was to build out trajectories, starting from now at age 10, all the way up to age 23, to sort of start to cut this path a little bit. Obviously, I can’t know exactly what my child’s life or his needs are going to be many years into the future, but I can vision this pathway and that can help guide the team, not just with how we should be supporting Foxy, but to what end, right? I think one of the pieces that was maybe missing for the IEP team — and to their credit, they feel great responsibility for Foxy’s future, right? And so, I think one of the pieces of disconnect was not quite grasping how the kinds of supports and methods for instruction that I was asking for now, where they fit into his future.
And I think one of the reasons for that is because our systems are trained to try to get all kids to a future that’s, like, the most independence, living independently if possible, working a job, being a productive member of society, needing the least amount of supports. And those are not the things that are high priority for us when we think about Foxy’s future. And so, naming what is high priority about his future for us and then being able to thread that back to the services and supports that he gets right now has been really powerful. And I’ve created documents that have the flow then, and the narrative of those paths for those 12 outcomes, so that we can all look and sort of see what are we hoping to help Foxy do, and accomplish, and be supported in in these areas.
Meg:
You just tied together so many threads that I’ve been following on the podcast for me. Back on Episode, I think it was 10, Jen Schonger, who’s a parent and an advocate and professional, when I asked her, “What do you recommend that professionals do when parents are asking for like a behavioral or deficits-based approach?” And she said, “Anytime people don’t agree on the vision for what we want, find the shared values.” Like, we all want them to feel whole, and safe, and loved, and included. And then, other folks since then have said, “And walk it back from there. What’s the next closest step we can agree on?” And I just wrote down that you said, “The process of visioning was so powerful for us as parents.”
I have been in a lot of IEP meetings that felt procedural. There was no — even though the IEP process is intended to be a process, the questions of, “What are your child’s strengths? What’s your vision for their future?” I think if I’m not wrong, I think, “What is your vision for their future?”, there is a question like that, but it’s almost like just a box to check. There’s no process of shared visioning, and dreaming, and hoping that folks are undertaking together. And there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of reasons for that.
Like, I’m not trying to throw these overworked teachers who are guiding the IEP process under the bus here at all, because their jobs are impossible, just practically speaking, all the things they demand or that are demanded of them. But when I, like, felt my way through the idea of a shared process of visioning, it was really, really different. And then, you worked backwards from the valued outcomes to find your starting place. I’m curious what the impact of this has been for your child, your school, your community.
Joyner:
Well, we’re just getting started. So, this podcast is the first place that I’ve really been able to widely share about this process, because it’s still in the beginning stages. This work has happened largely over the past four or five months that I’ve been putting this plan together. And so, the impacts are yet to be seen on the ground. However, there’s a few pieces, I think, that are really important in terms of my hoped impact. And one of those is because of Foxy’s level and kinds of needs, he has a very large team of providers. He has his school providers, but then he has private therapists, he has medical services, he has natural and community-based supports. He has DSPs (direct service providers), which are kind of like a form of PCA (personal care assistant). He utilizes a Medicaid waiver for home and community-based services.
So, one of the things that I was thinking about as I was going through this process is that for a child like Foxy, who was referred to full-time center-based ABA at the age of two when he was initially assessed — and we declined that, we decided that was not a good fit for him, or for our family, or our goals and values — theres, if you opt out of that as a parent, when a child really does need that intensity of support globally, there’s not another thing that you get. There’s not another option, right? So, for some kids, a few therapies, OT, PT, speech, maybe cognitive behavioral therapy, something like that, can sort of take the place of an ABA service or something that’s more behavior compliance-based. But for a child like mine, there’s not an alternative system. It just falls to the parents or the caregivers.
So, we’ve had to work really hard to try to sort of piece and patch together services that feel values-aligned for us, for our child, with very little guidance or support on how to create a system of services that wraps all the way around. The service design work is really left to us as parents. We don’t have professional expertise. We have been incredibly lucky over the years to find exceptional service providers. I mean, the people that we have working with my child, everything from speech, to mental health, to home and community-based PCA supports are phenomenal. And their willingness to sort of come into our world and this very hyper-neurodiversity-affirming stance that we take has been beautiful and life-changing, I think, for some people.
And it’s so difficult to maintain continuity of care when you’re piecing together this network and system of supports. So, when we created this vision plan, I thought, this is really how it should be. This is like a form of person-centered planning. It’s not a new idea. It’s not something that I invented by any means. There’s just a particular way of doing it that I’m experimenting with and exploring that’s different from anything I have seen before. And that plan then stays with Foxy and with our family, right? So, providers who need to create a treatment plan, or who need to create the IEP goal, or who need to justify something medically can all come to sort of the hub of this plan and then build out the spoke of the scope of their role and their service provision and the part that they support, but there can be some continuity.
And I think we have emerging person-centered planning, but it’s mostly done for adults, right, at transition age. And why wouldn’t we do that earlier? And when we’re talking about how we can make, you know, what I’m doing as a parent really relevant to practitioners, to therapists, right, the support to do this kind of work, the support to do this visioning work, how does visioning have the potential to become a part of a therapeutic practice when you’re working with a child and a family? And I will say, I think there’s something really liberation-based about taking something that has really been predatorily weaponized against parents and caregivers, which is their children’s futures, right? Something that parents of disabled kids don’t get to do is dream about the beautiful life their child will have because we have to dream about the scary life, right? Or we’re told that — we’re told that, “We need to do X, Y, Z now because the window is closing. And if we don’t do this, then they’re never going to have this.”
And, like, we are taught by this system and industry to be afraid of our child’s futures. But our kids have beautiful lives waiting for them. And so, to reclaim that future visioning narrative for families and for disabled people as, you know, something that can help us imagine the high-quality, good, beautiful, rich life they will have, not because they will overcome anything, but because the people that they are already are people who can live good lives, right? I think the reclaiming of that narrative is, like, very powerful and something that can be supported in practice.
[Intermission begins]
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[Intermission ends]
Meg:
I love that starting point, that they are already someone who can have a good life and deserves a good life without changing a single thing. If folks haven’t seen person-centered planning and process, that’s worth a search. It is a lovely process just in general for folks who are unfamiliar with it, but this element really, really adds something powerful. I want to ask you really quick, you mentioned that some of your providers felt really supportive of your family and your kid. Can you say a little bit about what qualities made providers feel more supportive for your family? I think we’re all always trying to figure this out, like, how do we want to show up?
Joyner:
Oh, my gosh. So, what is cool is we — I will say my child is homebound, so all his service provision happens in our house. Even his education, his teachers come here, right. He’s medically homebound, so I do want to be clear that I am not aware anywhere of a place where a family can just opt in to receiving public school services at home by choice. We have to provide medical documentation about Foxy’s homebound nature. And so, that provides me an opportunity to really interface greatly with his providers because they’re working here in our home; it gets very personal. And everyone brings something different to the table. That’s the cool thing. And a really encouraging thing is that there’s no one type of provider that can do this and that families appreciate when they’re looking for the kinds of qualities that my family’s looking for.
We have one DSP (direct service provider) who said during his job interview with us that he has a background in de-escalation training, and I was like, that’s amazing. And I have seen how this particular person stays so calm and is like a champion co-regulator, right, because he already has an embodied practice and had that coming in the door, right. We had a mental health clinician, my child has really severe anxiety. So, the access to mental health service is to help support him with that part of his neurology. You know, when she first came in, the tools that she had in her toolbox for mental health support were really behavior-based because Foxy does not have a reliable mode of communication. We introduced robust AAC at age 2, but like many kids who have a lot of complications around communication, it’s not as easy as just putting a device in their hands, right? We have to really support his communication holistically.
And so, this particular clinician didn’t necessarily know exactly what direction to go in when we declined any sort of behavior modification. And so, we ended up having several meetings with her as parents to just consult during her sessions and were able to really land on the idea that mental health support is really about meaning-making, right? And I think many of your audience can pull this through. What does meaning-making look like? Because that opens up so many different opportunities and potential methodologies and activities. If your goal is to help someone make meaning of their thoughts, of their feelings, of their past experiences, of their future, you end up just with some really magical possibilities.
We have a school music therapist. We’re so lucky that music therapy is offered by our district. So, she comes out once a week for an hour with all of her instruments. But what was really cool, what is really cool about music therapy for my child is that I’ve really declined IEP goals that are about social-emotional behavioral, because I’ve never wanted someone to try to teach neuro-normative social skills to my child. But there are real social skills that I think all kids should be supported explicitly to learn, and collaboration is one that’s really important to me. I want my child to be helped to learn how to be collaborative in the world, right? And music offers so many open-ended, child-led opportunities to work on collaboration. So, they co-write songs and arrangements and all of that just gets embedded, right? Like, her ideas, his ideas, how they can combine them, how they can give each other feedback without needing to rely on a lot of language because they have music to be the undercurrent for that work.
So, I just think everybody brings something really exceptional to the table, but I think the most compelling thing is that for people who have come in, we have had people come in who didn’t know how to do this yet, but they were — they had humility, they had openness, they were comfortable being vulnerable as practitioners and saying, “This is new to me, but I want to figure it out.” And they were willing to spend more time being observational with Foxy in the beginning and not try to immediately impose their therapeutic goals or practices.
I understand that sometimes families might want to see results quickly or, you know, have their own ideas about what therapy should look like. I think if practitioners can get really comfortable being able to be confident about the long-term benefits of that short-term investment and observation, and just help the family understand we’re going to spend time with observation but it’s going to really strengthen the longer-term trajectory, and bring parents into that, I think that’s really wonderful and powerful.
Meg:
That is. Thank you so much for sharing that. This idea of strengths-based approaches and everyone is already enough, and valuable, and important applies to practitioners too. I think it’s such a lovely message of what it means to be a positive, to have a positive impact on a family and on your client. What it means to be an affirming practitioner is not one set thing. And that’s an invitation for therapists who are listening to think deeply about their own strengths and what they bring to the table. Because I think, like you mentioned, one of the most harmful things we can bring is our imposter syndrome, our stress, our fear, our urgency, when we really already do have something to offer. And that’s why we chose these fields, because we knew we had the personal qualities to form meaningful, supportive relationships with children. Also, shout out to the music therapists.
We have a, I think, reasonably sized and incredibly impassioned group of music therapists in the Learn Play Thrive community who I know are listening. And I will also add that one of the questions I get really often after trainings is like, “Yeah, but what do I do for my multiply disabled Autistic kids?” I think people feel really stuck and confused, and I appreciate you centering meaning making. And, you know, always — I mean, I’m an occupational therapist, right? Like, the whole point is engaging in meaningful activities as a way of participating in life and bringing joy to ourselves and the people around us. But I’ve been reviewing our talks for the 2026 Summit, and I just listened to Maribel Serrano Holder’s talk. And they’re an SLP, and one of their key points was about how we make meaning through our narrative and what this means for our non-speaking clients, narrative making as a form of learning about yourself. And this is just really lovely tie-in to me. All right. What’s your, like, dream vision for how this process you’re co-creating with your family and with your team, what’s your dream vision for how that gets implemented everywhere?
Joyner:
Well, I mean, you know, I’m not, I’m never prescriptive in my work because I know what works for my family, but I don’t know what works for anyone else’s family. But one thing I will say is, so one member of Foxy’s team is a psychologist who my spouse and I meet with every other week, mostly for like parent coaching and parent support, right. And when I brought this to her in one of our sessions, she was like, “This is incredible. Can I share this idea with other families I work with?” And I said, absolutely. And she later provided me the feedback that other families had been really compelled by it. So, I think that’s one of the reasons that I want to just share this idea. It’s not a framework. There’s nothing that I’m selling that you can buy. There’s, you know, I don’t even have materials that are online. It’s really just this idea of what is it like to envision your child’s best future? Think about what outcomes support that vision, and then just think back.
What I’ve done is created a goal for every year, and those goals can be changed and edited as we see how he grows. But, you know, whatever format or framework is accessible to a family, feels good to a family, it can be simple, it could be more complex. I’m using this set of trajectories to create some materials, some training materials for my child’s team, some one-pagers. It gives a really great opportunity to sit down with providers and develop strategies. For somebody who’s trying to create really holistic support for someone, for a child or an adult, it just is a really fertile ground for the kinds of conversations that I think get us away from the behavior compliance models that are sometimes all people know how to do.
I also think it’s paradigm shifting work, right? Sometimes the most difficult piece is the mindset shift that comes with ‘What capacity do we have as those who support people with disabilities to imagine disabled futures specifically as beautiful?’ I had this revelatory experience that changed me deeply with my child’s birth-to-three ASD teacher, who is still a very good friend. And we were sitting on my living room floor when Foxy was two and I had an envelope and a pen, and I drew this developmental timeline. And I said, “This is a typical developmental timeline and we have these milestones we look for.” Then I drew a line underneath and I said, “This is an Autistic developmental timeline.” And we don’t even know yet, we haven’t even found yet what healthy developmental milestones for Autistic kids look like because all we’re concerned with is trying to get them off of their timeline and onto this typical developmental timeline as quickly as possible, and I don’t want to do that. That’s not what I want to do for my child.
And she was really thinking about this and she said to me, “I’m trying to understand what you’re saying. But if we aren’t trying to get Foxy closer to typical development so we can measure that, how are we going to know if we are successfully supporting him?” And I looked at her right in her face and said, “We’ll know that we’re successfully supporting him when he looks more Autistic.” And this was, you know, eight years ago, right, and it really just was like that moment of, like, I want to help my child live into his disability, right. And so, if we start to really think about our children’s futures lived into their disability as a culture, as an aspect of pride — and that’s not to say everything about disability is great or easy, right. I’m not trying to tell families that they should just, you know, disregard the hardships that come with raising a disabled child in a society that is not supportive of disabled people. It can be incredibly challenging, and knowing that the systems that exist do not love or care for our children is heartbreaking and traumatic as parents, right.
But we can reclaim their futures. And really, we can help them reclaim their futures because it’s about them. So, I think, yeah, we have the capacity to do this. This process could be used for anyone, even non-disabled people. We all like to think about our futures, but I really do center the Autistic kids and the disabled kids where it’s like, sometimes we get the message that neurodiversity supporting frameworks are not for them because they need something more intensive or different. We can create that more intensive, wrapped around network so they can have beautiful futures that we can dream about with them.
Meg:
It’s a big paradigm shift. It’s a really big paradigm shift, I think. Gosh, you said eight years ago. I wouldn’t have gotten it, not in 2017. It’s interesting, though, there is culture change happening that makes me really hopeful, where I think listening to you say that it’s pretty easy now — for me, at least — in 2025, and I think for most of our listeners to be like, “Yeah, like, yes. Yes, that is aligned.” What do you hope that OTs, SLPs, anybody, educators listening to this podcast take away from our conversation today?
Joyner:
I will send you my 12 valued outcomes for Foxy, and you are free to post them with your show notes if you’d like to.
Meg:
I will. Thank you.
Joyner:
Well, not every valued outcome is going to apply to every child, right? I have no problem sharing them freely as inspiration. So, some of the things that we think about, I will share that my child’s fantastic OT, who actually is our school OT, has been working with Foxy for four years. And what we’ve done is adapted Kelly Mahler’s interoception curriculum because I was like, I don’t care about holding a scissors, right? Like, that’s not a high priority for me with my child right now. What I care about is him being able to understand and communicate about his body states, right? And so, I think, right, like you said, so much is changing. There are so many tools and frameworks out there that can be utilized or adapted. And, you know, so I think if we really consider where we want to help our children and those we support get to, and then really be open-minded about the toolbox that’s out there and available to us as far as helping them on their trajectories, that’s what I would really want folks to take away. You know, get really creative.
And do the things that are already working for the kid, right? Like, the kid is going to let you know what works well for them and what doesn’t. And, like, I would almost unilaterally go with the thing that’s already working for the kid versus trying to introduce something that the kid is having a hard time picking up, right? There are obviously a few occasions where we do have to be a little bit more directive in our support for safety or some reason like that. But join the kid. Just skip the part that’s about joining the kid to co-opt their passions to then get them to do something you want, right? We have to just join the kid. That’s enough. Because the relationship, everything comes from that, right?
Meg:
I just want to tie in again for folks who are wondering more about how to do this, that again, I didn’t know this would be such a nice tie-in, but again, in our 2026 Summit, we actually have Kelly Mahler presenting with Caroline Gaddy, who’s an Autistic SLP, on how to use the interoceptive curriculum with non-speaking kids specifically, and how we can approach that from a place of curiosity and openness rather than, you know, this thing that we’ve been taught to do of labeling for people. And it’s an incredibly practical and powerful presentation. So, anything else before we wrap up that you would like to add or bring us back to, Joyner?
Joyner:
I always have to talk about the differences that we see with race and language, right? Like, all of my work touches those pieces. And so, I would say that there are so many folks who are Black, some of whom are also disabled, who are doing amazing liberation work and generously sharing what they are working on. And I gain so much from following the work of those scholars and thought leaders because I think this work is amazing for my child and it can be done for all children. And some of the greatest — I mean, when you think of Black futurism, right, some of the greatest strengths that already exist in this work exist in communities of color and Native communities, and we shouldn’t co-opt them, and that’s not what I’ve done with my work here, but it is really an incredible injustice that the children who come from racial, and ethnic, and linguistic communities where this is already such a strength often have the least access to the kind of future planning within our dominant systems.
And so, I would just say, always sort of keep that aspect in mind, right. Both that these are existing strengths in communities and not something that needs to be taught to them — in fact, we can learn a lot from these different racial, ethnic, and linguistic communities — but also, it really does become devastating when we take a practice that exists as a strength in more marginalized communities and then sort of center it within the communities that already have the most systems access. And so, as I’m doing this work, that’s something that I’m really thinking about. And as I sort of pair it with my educational leadership work, I’m always connecting these things and thinking about how the practices that I’m sort of developing for my own child, how can I advocate for those practices in my racially diverse school system so that we can help more kids have the access to this sort of beautiful future visioning that they deserve, right?
Meg:
Thank you so much for sharing that. And I want to direct folks if they missed Episode 82 on the podcast with Joshuaa Allison-Burbank on ‘Native Approaches to Supporting Disabled Folks’, that’s a really great one. And if there’s any resources that you love that you want to share with us, we’ll link those in the show notes as well. So, those are at learnplaythrive.com/podcast. Joyner, where can we find you and your work online?
Joyner:
You know, I’m here and there. I will say I do have a little blog on Facebook called ‘Neuromess’ that I think has some really good content. I’m definitely like a quality over quantity. I don’t really promote my work. I just sort of leave it for folks to access if they want it. So, it’s not a super active page, but I think the quality of resources there is high. And it really just does aim to be ‘We tried this and it worked’, right, very similar to the kinds of things I’ve discussed today, just things that we’ve tried over the years to share those out. I really love the open access component. And I think that’s a place where caregivers can sort of reclaim our role in how we can be good allies, right, is to help teach each other how to better support our kids and loved ones. So, that’s sort of the aim of that blog. But I’m searchable, folks can find me.
Meg:
I will link to everything and I can’t wait to check it out too. And I just want people listening to know that we were in fact visited by zero out of eight cats during this conversation. Is that right from your end?
Joyner:
I do have one on my bed behind me, but she’s an old lady sleeping on a heating pad. So, she’s just happy to be here.
Meg:
That’s a good life. Well, Joyner, thank you so much.
Joyner:
Thank you so much for having me on today. This was great.
[Ending note]
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