Thank you to everyone who joined us for our week-long event, Nerdpalooza! Throughout the week, we raised awareness about nuerodiversity-related topics on our social media pages, hosted a town hall and Halloween game night, and had an air pod pros raffle. Check out our Instagram or Facebook (@uclaallbrains) to see all of our posts from Nerdpalooza and learn more about neurodiversity! |
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More workshops and online trainings to come during the end of Fall Quarter and throughout Winter Quarter! In the mean time, here are the student organizations and clubs we have trained during Fall Quarter: |
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| | SCOPE Fitness & Nutrition | | |
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| | SCOPE Youth Empowerment Program | | |
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| | SCOPE Patient Health Advocates | | |
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If you would like to become a peer mentee, email us at ucla.allbrains@gmail.com or visit our website at peer mentoring |
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Socials Thank you so much to everyone who joined us for weekly Monday virtual game nights! We hope to see you during our Week 8 and Week 9 socials! Any information regarding socials during Winter Quarter will be announced through our social media and website. | | |
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Neurodiversity: The New Frontier of Inclusivity At London Business School (LBS), students identifying as neurodiverse are provided with an extensive support network and resources to handle academic rigor. | | |
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The practices at LBS are notable strides towards increasing the visibility and awareness of the neurodiversity movement in the education system. Following in the footsteps of LBS, other British graduate institutions are actively striving to enroll and serve students who think differently. In many of these institutions, neurodiverse students have the opportunity to work with a team of specialist tutors that adapt and present class material into a more understandable format (i.e. convert between written and audio modes). As aptly stated by Sionade Robinson, the associate dean at LBS, neurodiversity is the “new frontier of inclusion.” Robinson and her coworkers are hopeful that the neurodiverse-friendly practices at British graduate institutions become commonplace at all levels of education across the United Kingdom and throughout the world. |
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Autism Behind BarsThe current American prison infrastructure fails to address the unique challenges endured by autistic inmates, consequently increasing their risk of suffering from serious mental problems and abuse. | | |
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Many autistic inmates with sensory sensitivities experience heightened anxiety amidst the crowded, noisy, and brightly-lit prison rooms. This exacerbated anxiety makes autistic inmates increasingly prone to get into fights with other inmates or prison staff who view them as gullible and reactive. Furthermore, many prisons have very few to no mental health professionals on staff that are properly trained to handle the concerns of autistic inmates. Most tend to prioritize schizophrenia and other conditions that pose a greater security risk than autism. Thus, improving the quality of life for autistic inmates ought to be on the forefront of the prison reform agenda. Prisons must be equipped with a strong support team of mental health professionals/counselors to work with autistic inmates, and furthermore, they should redesign their environments to be more sensory-sensitive. |
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Telehealth Trains Parents to Strengthen the Social Skills of Autistic Children During the coronavirus pandemic, researchers at Rutgers University successfully trained the parents of autistic children about early behavioral interventions via virtual seminars. | | |
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Child developmental researchers have consistently stressed the importance of early behavioral intervention on the part of parents of autistic children (i.e. how to make their child more comfortable interacting with other adults and peers, improving verbal communication skills, etc). Autistic children who do not receive behavioral intervention training from a young age often find it challenging to obtain stable employment and maintain independence as adults compared to their counterparts who do receive the training. Due to the current pandemic, parents of autistic children have been unable to attend the in-person instruction typical of early intervention training. Therefore, researchers at Rutgers University designed a series of virtual seminars with the hopes of successfully transitioning the training into an online format. The results of these pilot virtual seminars on early behavioral intervention training were very promising: parents who received the virtual training showed statistically significant improvements in working with their children compared to those parents who did not. Given the unknown duration of the coronavirus pandemic, these virtual early behavioral interventional seminars by Rutgers researchers ensures that autistic children will continue to receive the same quality of care and support. |
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