Becoming an autistic adult: exploring the transitions of young people with autism from education/care to working life

Becoming an autistic adult: exploring the transitions of young people with autism from education/care to working life

The focus of the paper is to draw on an understanding of autism as neurodiversity to document the experiences of young people with autism, their parents/carers and families and professionals involved in the processes of transitions to young adulthood. We focus on transition into worklife. We illustrate our ideas with data from our previous and ongoing research on neurodiverse spaces for children and adults with autism. A key way in which people with autism are getting their voices heard is through new technologies, particularly via the Internet and an increasing number of people with autism are using the Internet as a forum for self-advocacy (see for example Dekker 2000; Ward & Meyer 1999). The implications for refocusing an examination on transitions into work by people with autism through a lens of neurodiversity are far reaching in terms of how people with autism fashion their own positive identities and how service providers negotiate opportunities for some, and how workplaces shift in terms of accommodating difference. We argue that there is a need for inclusive and diverse workspaces, where the strengths of some adults with autism can be integrated into a shared neurodiverse and neurotypical space.

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