Logic Boxes and Enabling Pedagogy for Students with Autism

Sirc advocates the logic box as something that increases the interactivity of a text, enabling students, ARTISTS!, to become aware of texts' materiality. Logic boxes are an interesting idea, not in a patronizing way, things that are a different representation of an age old idea: put things, literally, things, in a square-ish space. It's composition in another form and method, as Sirc points out (122-123): In traditional composition, words (things) are arranged in a meaningful way (sentences, paragraphs) within a limiting space (margins, the rectangular form of paper, etc.). Logic boxes are spaces with borders(are they necessarily boxes? could there be an invisible box?), performing the same function as paper for an essay, that contain things (more than words) arranged in meaningful ways. That last part, arrangement, is the element most liberated in the genre of logic box. Loosely defined, a logic box is a defined three dimensional space in which an author/artist constructs meaning through various objects, often found objects.

Last fall, I took Dr. Mara's class on the rhetoric of creativity. One set of assignments provided creative options, such as a taking a photograph or writing on 750words.com for 14 days...or make a box logic, um, box. The latter befuddled and intrigued me..."what the hell do I do with a box?' I shoveled the idea into my mental furnace but it never resurfaced. And, to be honest, after reading more about logic boxes I may understand the concept more but, for myself, I do not think they are the least bit interesting. However, logic boxes sound uniquely like enabling composition to me.

Sirc's goal, to “journey away from the linear norm of essayist prose” fits well within an inclusive, enabling pedagogy, particularly in relation to autistic students. Personal experience and scholarship suggest that many autistic people have nonlinear cognitive and writing styles, such as Temple Grandin. Anne Jurecic notes in her article “Neurodiversity,” that Grandin's writing does not consider audience because of its loosely connected, tangential structure (430-431). Comparing Grandin's writing structure to Jurecic's student Gregory's writing, this autistic structure, Jurecic suggests, is rooted in autistic students' neurological wiring, brain structures that preclude those students' ability to emulate the academic writing conventions of linear argument, coherence, and focus (429). Jurecic goes on to rally for composition teachers "expand our sense of the depth and reach of difference--not so that we can exclude, but so that we can teach" (439). She is stuck in between a rock and a hard place, trying to enable autistic students to find their own way through the labyrinthine mess of exclusionary neurotypical (neurotypicals are to people with autism what muggles are to wizards and witches) writing conventions, conventions, she implies, that may be rooted in neurotypical neurology (434).

Sirc's logic boxes work for neurotypical students. These boxes reduce the analytic loci of composition, decentering it in favor of something expressive (Sirc 124). Analysis is something many college students with autism spectrum disorders excel at--it's the structure, according to Jurecic, that confounds them. Fortunately, logic boxes allow for flexibility in process and design: citing Katherine Stiles, Sirc explains "What is it that writers do, exactly, if not 'point to things in the world and negotiate their meanings through symbolic productions?" (Sirc 125). He adds that "the new classroom activities to refine these elements let students use what they really care about and love (or hate) as the new subject matter in their work" (Ibid). Logic boxes liberate not only in that they allow for diverse forms of structure, focus, coherence, and meaning-making but also because that allows for student creators to use "what they love." One of the two biggest barriers to success in assignments, not just writing assignments but any kind of assignment, for students with autism is the motivational factor. This framework gives a student with autism the opportunity to work with her special interest, allowing her to find her own voice through the annotating and searching.