Three experts, one topic: neurodiversity

By chance, they found out that they were all researching neurodiversity from their own fields of study.  They now meet every month for brainstorming sessions. "Most of all, I hope someone will occasionally point out to me that I am thinking in the wrong direction. The critical eye of my colleagues keeps me on my toes," Anne Smit-van Beveren says. The Diverse Minds research group fosters interdisciplinary collaborations with neurodiversity as the common subject.

Quality of life

Together with an international team, Anne Smit-van Beveren (lecturer and researcher in Pedagogical Sciences) evaluated an online autism training for teachers during her PhD. "Often, one pupil is helped through child and adolescent psychiatry, and then each year, one teacher learns how to deal with certain behavioural problems that may arise from neurodiversity. We wanted to create a form that would allow us to give that approach to a whole team.” 

"In the course of this project, I received several emails with questions: 'Why is this not yet available for senior secondary vocational education, higher professional education or university teaching?'" Since then, Smit-van Beveren has focused more on inclusivity in higher education. "One of our expectations is that the more students feel included in the degree programme, the higher their quality of life will be. We don't want to make students less autistic. We mainly want to allow them to function properly in their studies and make them feel good about themselves, despite the challenges they face.”

An initial collaboration with her colleague Marieke de Vries (Assistant Professor in Pedagogical Sciences) started when they met on their way to an autism conference. Anne continues: "We were already teaching on the same team, but the fact that we were both researching autism was something we didn't know about each other. During this conference, the first ideas for new projects emerged.”

Autism and culture

Marieke de Vries, who has a background in clinical psychology, focuses on how culture affects autism. "That all began when I was working in Malaysia for several years. One of the characteristics of autism is struggling with social interaction. The rules around social interaction vary from culture to culture, however. All the questionnaires we use to identify autism were developed in the United States or in the United Kingdom. Does that mean you can use them in any other country?”

In addition, culture also affects the level of stigma attached to neurodiversity. "We see that in some groups there is more stigma around autism. Among people with a relatively high socio-economic status, for example, it is more accepted to seek psychological help than among those with a relatively low socio-economic status.”

Origin of Diverse Minds

The collaboration that Anne and Marieke had started was also joined by Mateusz Platos, Assistant Professor of Clinical and Developmental Psychology. "A flyer with information about a study on neurodiversity caught my eye. I thought it would be nice to join forces and work together on a larger scale.” Diverse Minds was born: a network through which researchers seek to collaborate on research into neurodiversity, each from their own perspective.

More inclusive higher education

For years, the focus of Mateusz Platos' research was on interventions, such as social skills training and buddy programmes. Today, Platos focuses more on making higher education more inclusive. "I look at what we can do to support students individually. But also at what can we do as an institute to make the university more inclusive? For example, by providing structure, presenting information in clear and concise ways, and chopping larger assignments into smaller pieces.”

Platos welcomes the launch of Diverse Minds and hopes that more researchers from different faculties will join the network.  "We met by accident, maybe there are many more people who are researching the same subject. With Diverse Minds, we want to facilitate a platform through which collaboration may emerge.”

Layered and complex

By bringing in people from different faculties, Platos hopes to create a broader range of knowledge: "The topic of neurodiversity is a highly interdisciplinary one. We are dealing with medicine, language, psychology, and development. But this also includes more philosophical or political questions: What are the implications of using diagnostic labels such as autism or ADHD? What is the (social) policy for this? It is good to bring people together from different angles, because the subject is so multi-layered and complex.”