www.peterbeddow.org
Vision / Philosophy
Every child is infinitely valuable in the eyes of God.
It is in the overwhelming trials and struggles of life that we learn to persevere and overcome in a world fraught with obstacles, whether real, imagined, or imposed.
By acknowledging, accepting, and engaging our differences, instead of trying to eliminate them, we learn that pain can be transformed into purpose, both to understand ourselves better and to help a hurting world.
Pete's challenge
As a professional special educator, educational psychologist, and behavior analyst with a lifetime of experience working with children with special needs, Pete has learned that his perspective is not one that is shared commonly by his professional colleagues. In fact, when he asserts that "I don't believe in disability" Pete understands he is challenging the primary assumption that underlies the only system that exists in the United States to help children with special needs.
To examine his perspective briefly, Pete works hard never to refer to "students with disabilities." He refers to them instead as children identified with disabilities. Likewise, he does not refer to children as having psychiatric or other medical disorders, but rather refers to them as having been diagnosed with these disorders. Thus, a child with autism is, in Dr. Pete's mode of thinking, a child who has been diagnosed with autism. A child who is "on the spectrum" rather becomes a child who has been identified as being on the autism spectrum. The label (in this case, a disability or diagnosis) is externally imposed. Where the status quo language carries the assumption the label belongs to the child and is therefore his or her burden to bear, Pete suggests the burden should remain in the hands of the ones to whom it belongs: namely, those who determined it was apropos to identify or diagnose the child in the first place.
Dr. Pete believes it is by identifying ourselves and others with our struggles, disorders, and problems that we find ourselves enslaved by them. While he acknowledges that person-first language, for example, is a positive step away from attaching a child with his or her Special Education label, the problem of identification with our problems persists. To wit, while terms such as "ADHD kid" and "LD students" may mostly be relegated to teacher's lounges and intraprofessional discussions behind closed doors, he has heard countless professionals refer to "kids with ADHD" and "kids with Dyslexia" as if these children carry their disabilities or disorders to school with them each day inside their knapsacks.
A burden they never asked to carry
Pete believes children naturally do not choose to identify themselves with any disorder or disability, no matter how severe its manifestation. Thus, neither should we. It is helpful, of course, to identify the various challenges faced by the children in our charge in order to help them overcome them. Understanding the characteristics of children most professionals refer to as "on the spectrum", for example, can help us ascertain the most effective tools and techniques for helping them.
By contrast to campaigns such as It's Your ADHD - Own It, however, Pete suggests it is rarely helpful for a person to accept these labels as though he or she owns them, because to own them is a short step away from the person identifying themselves with, and being owned by, the disability. In his experience, the embrace of a disability by a person typically emphasizes its challenges for him or her and reduces the likelihood the person will overcome it. It is when a person becomes willing to set his or her label aside and move forward simply as a human being, flawed and frail (but no more or less than any other), fearfully and wonderfully made, that he or she can pursue his or her highest potential.
The solution isn't an easy one, for it involves perching precariously on the edge between submitting wholly to scientism and the wholesale rejection of science and empirical data altogether. Having received an earned doctorate in Special Education for his research on developing accessible tests for students with special needs, Pete is no enemy of science or data. Indeed, he is himself a researcher and believes science is essential to our field for establishing an evidence-based foundation from which to make decisions about the best ways to help children, and subsequently for communicating the rationales for these decisions to others. However, Pete has observed the pendulum swing wildly in the direction of what he refers to as the religion of psychology, which subsumes the view that empirical methods are the only valuable means of understanding reality. Such a total reliance on psychology for solving emotional and behavior problems often leads to treatments that forget, or ignore, that our children are human beings who are infinitely valuable in the eyes of God, and who are therefore understood best by the One who made them.