Axon - Neurodiversity in Military Education - Ep 2 Published Jan. 31, 2023 Air University Teaching and Learning Center This is Axon, the Air University Teaching and Learning Center podcast. At Axon, we make connections between teachers, learners, and ideas in military education. The opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed or implied in this podcast are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the view of Air University, the United States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other US Government agency. Follow us online at www.airuniversity.af.edu/TLC or on Twitter at @airteaching for more. Dr. Megan Hennessey Good morning, this is Dr. Megan J Hennessey. I am the Director of the Air University Teaching and Learning Center, here to host the Axon Podcast and our guest today is Major Dan Kiser. Hi Major Kiser. Maj Dan Kiser Hey, how are you doing today? Dr. Megan Hennessey I'm good! So, you are an AETC master instructor, which means you are in the right place to talk to us about teaching and learning. You're also an intel officer, a husband, a father, and a neurodiverse airman. So, you're going to talk to us a little bit about neurodiversity today. I understand you were diagnosed with autism and ADHD in 2020. Can you tell us more? What is neurodiversity? Maj Dan Kiser So, neurodiversity is an umbrella term taking everything from autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, Tourette's, ADHD, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, but it also has some other comorbidities. Things like anxiety and sensory processing disorder. All creating a unique neurotype that allows neurodivergent individuals to see the world a little bit differently with some strengths and some challenges associated with it on either end that I'm excited to talk about today. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, thank you. I think it's good to all be on the same page about what exactly we're diving into here, because it's not something that we hear much about in the military. Why do you think that is? Why don't we have more conversations about neurodiversity in the military? Maj Dan Kiser So, I think there are two main reasons for that. First, if we look at society as a whole, going into the Center for Disease Control, they track the metrics of diagnoses over the years and in the early 2000s, we were seeing metrics of 1 in 155 children being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Moving to some of the more recent estimates, I believe 2018 was 1 in 55, and I've heard 1 in 46 in some of the more recent ones. Is it because there's more autistic people, or is it because we are diagnosing or assessing, rather, children for autism at an increased rate? And then from there, if that's the case, there is probably a very large section of the population that is undiagnosed as a result of kind of falling into the cracks, which is my situation now, in the military. Specifically, if we look at the DoD policy that outlines disqualifying conditions. ADHD is on there, but there are some caveats for some. You can't be medicated for however long. It can't impact your ability to do your job, et cetera, et cetera. So, there are opportunities, still, with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. However, autism spectrum disorder is a blanket disqualifying condition, so if you have ever been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder and you are trying to join the military, that is an automatic no go criteria. And we've seen in the news what happens if recruiters try to bury that or if we've seen if people fail to disclose that diagnosis that they have actually received. However, there's a large portion of the population that straight up has that chronic anxiety like I've had and doesn't realize that it may be a small portion of a larger puzzle. Dr. Megan Hennessey I see. And you were diagnosed in 2020? How has that influenced your service? Maj Dan Kiser Looking at my service, any time I've been vectored, any time I've gotten feedback, I've gotten or I've heard that I'm in the bottom third of my year group, and that's not due to academic issues. I've always done very well academically. It's attributed largely to my inability to play the social game, to navigate the social part of military service. Making the right connections with the right people at the right times. That's because I struggled to interpret the social situations, the social cues, and I just thought it was because I was, you know, that weird kind of socially awkward guy that would rather go read a book or deep dive into amateur radio or something. It wasn't until I received that diagnosis, and I was able to connect with other neurodivergent individuals and do some of that research on my own that I realized that I'm not weird, I'm just different, and my strengths lie elsewhere. So if I have the ability to understand my weaknesses and understand my strengths, I can play the game a little bit more to leverage my strength. Dr. Megan Hennessey I see and thank you for being, you know, vulnerable and humble enough to share your story with us. And clearly you are very successful. You're a Deputy Director of Learning Sciences and Faculty Education at the Squadron Officer School. And I understand that you're also using your experience as the neurodiversity line of effort lead for the Department of the Air Force Disability Action Team Barriers Analysis working group. That's a mouthful. We just called it the BAWG, right? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Maj Dan Kiser Yeah, so as soon as I got my diagnosis the first thing I did was really try to understand what it was and try to “find my tribe”. In doing so, I came across an article that was published by the Air Force on neurodiversity featuring Master Sergeant Shale Norwitz. Now Sergeant Norwitz was a cyber troop down at Robins Air Force Base and in his 19th year of service, he was diagnosed and linked up with the Disability Action Team who, at the time was Miss Kendra Shock. And he established that this line of effort is really to accept, support, and empower neurodivergent individuals within the military, operating under the assumption that there probably is a prevalence of undiagnosed neurodivergent individuals within specific career fields and that their needs may not be met to the level that they need. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, just from a teaching and learning perspective, I've had so many conversations over the years that lead me to say that the military and military education is not the best at differentiated instruction. So exactly what you said, just the requirements that different individuals need, not that the system can accommodate, but what do the individual learners need in the military education context? Maj Dan Kiser So that's a great question and I actually came across an article yesterday that was talking about how different neurotypes learn differently. For me, as somebody who struggles with auditory processing disorder as well as a light sensitivity and being in a fluorescent classroom, having a conversation-only learning facilitation like we so often do in PME, a lot of times I would struggle to find the structure that I need in order to jump in and do those contributions and I wind up doing my word vomit where I just say all the things which doesn't necessarily look like a positive contribution from some of those more standard neurotypes. So, with that being said, visual learners engage differently than auditory learners. And you aren't ever exclusively in one category. It's really what you need based upon how you're feeling at the time and what the topic is, right? So, if we look at a concept like joint warfare versus a concept like leadership, one of them is much more soft skills, whereas the other one is a lot more data-driven, policy-driven. We wouldn't teach those in the same way. We can leverage a lot of graphics. We can leverage a lot of videos in the Joint Warfare space to communicate not only what some of those fundamentals of warfare are, but why we care about them. Whereas if we look at leadership, we talk a lot about case studies, about different models of leadership, different models of personality types, honing in for a second on those personality types. Even most professional military education schools do some sort of personality assessment as a means to know your team. One thing that I am very cautious of when I teach and when I participate in personality studies, is these studies were developed based upon a pseudo-random population, but there's oftentimes not a fully neurodivergent population in there, so neurodivergent people, if we're looking at the Myers Briggs type indicator, may fall very heavily in that INTJ sort of personality type, and as a result of that, we think that it’s one-size-fits-all. Oh, you're an INTJ. I know how to work with you. People fall into that heuristic, but they don't realize that there are some nuanced differences where we really need to get into the individual and understand who our people are so that we can lead them appropriately. Dr. Megan Hennessey Dan, I feel like I need to let out an Hallelujah. I agree with everything you just said. I actually just completed MBTI certified practitioner training myself, and that was one of my main critiques about the program. It was very interesting to consider from an individual coaching background, but I think, just like learning styles which have been debunked, you get into dangerous territory when you lean so heavily into typological assessments. And I think that's what you're saying. Am I on track there? Maj Dan Kiser Yes, ma'am. Dr. Megan Hennessey OK, so you know your role is very interesting at SOS. You're, again, the Deputy Director for Learning Sciences and Faculty education, so I imagine you have some influence in what SOS is doing to accommodate and to work with and to advance neurodivergent learners. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Maj Dan Kiser Yeah, so I'm an advisor for the Air University Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Accessibility Council. I am also pursuing a coaching certification through Lipscomb and a DEIA certification through Cornell's e-learning. I’m hoping to use the things that I'm learning in those places to bring neuro-inclusivity into the instructional design process. What I mean when I say that is, creating opportunities to provide multiple perspectives, leveraging people who perceive the world differently. And that's not just neurotypes, that is English as a second language, that is maybe English as a third or 4th language, people that are hard of hearing, people that don't see as well. There are things that we can do in a classroom to improve accessibility of the curriculum and it could be something as easy as leveraging an AI transcription service to either create subtitles or to create translations, so that people who may not be able to process auditory conversation as quickly as others, have the ability to participate in a way that they feel valued. Ultimately giving them that psychological safety and sense of belonging in the classroom where they are not punitively, I guess, affected for lack of contribution. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yes, or just for being different, right? Maj Dan Kiser Yeah, thank you. Dr. Megan Hennessey Does this track with Universal Design for Learning standards that we hear a lot about in instructional design communities? Maj Dan Kiser So, I believe so. I've taken the advanced principles of instructional design course here at SOS. Working with Doc Maggard from the Barnes Center, there is a lot of room to use some of those same techniques that we talk about in coaching. The same techniques that we talked about in facilitation, to give people those equal opportunities and it can be something as simple as classroom management where we are looking at “Hey, you don't need to have your laptops out right now, we're just going to have a conversation.” What are some of the potential negative impacts of that where people maybe need some of those resources available to them so that they can formulate a thought or need that transcription service, so they can go back and see what the actual question was, because my brain went a million different directions when you asked the question. And I'm never 100% sure that I answered your actual question. There's opportunities in that classroom space, to account for an inclusive environment, and I think we're doing the right things. Training our leaders, training our educators to look out for those unconscious biases. Varying questioning techniques to use those visual aids in conjunction with the learning environments that they have available to them, to optimize success with their students. That was a very roundabout way of saying yes. Dr. Megan Hennessey Thanks Dan, yeah it, I mean, what you were saying kind of reminds me of instructors that I've seen in PME and various places over the years. Taking offense if students are on their mobile devices or if they're not making consistent eye contact with the instructor. There's an assumption that the students are not listening, or you know just that they're zoned out. Which obviously based on what you just shared, that's not the case. Something else that really interested me about what you just said was, the varying types of questions that instructors might use. Can you give us a couple of examples? Maj Dan Kiser Yes, so if we look at how facilitators ask questions in a learning environment, it is a form of typically informal assessment to gauge whether or not you understand the material. Quite often it is a fairly closed-ended question, but in order to facilitate conversation, we turned them into open-ended questions. So, looking at, what are the domains of warfare, for instance, as somebody can list off space, cyberspace, land, maritime, and air. But if we're actually having a conversation about why we care about those using something to set the stage today, we're going to be talking about the air domain, and from that air-minded perspective, what we can do? And to support land maneuver? What we can do to support maritime maneuver and ultimately get after the Joint force commanders’ intent if you, if we set the stage like that and then we go into why we're talking about each domain. As a neurodivergent individual myself, well that helps put me in the right headspace to not only have to go through and check off each one of the domains, but each one of the domains in context of our overall learning objective. So again, something as simple as highlighting those objectives up front. Dr. Megan Hennessey Yeah, you are speaking my language. And all of this is obviously very much in alignment with outcomes-based military education and the conversations we're having around joint PME and standards and guidelines we've seen in the DoD instruction on military education that came out in April. So, thank you for giving us a different lens through which to view those conversations. What you've shared has been so helpful. What kind of resources would an individual PME instructor, let's say, need or what could they use to help them ensure that they're reaching those neurodivergent learners? Maj Dan Kiser Oh gosh, there are so many really great resources out there. I would say, that taking a look at what our university teammates on the civilian side are doing from an accessibility perspective is huge. Specifically, Vanderbilt Frist Center taking a look at how they study neurodiversity. And how they can create a neuro-inclusive environment in their classroom. There is a ton of resources out there from the first center, the Aussies is LaTrobe, I think have another, have a ton of really good, academically minded resources for neurodivergence in the classroom and looking even beyond that. So, once we leave this PME world and our diversity at work, there's a ton of playbooks out there for how to be an inclusive leader in a neurodivergent environment, and that's ultimately something that we are trying to also create within the Air Force. Speaking with General Brown last year at one of his Diversity Council meetings. He's very interested in what Neurodivergent talent management looks like in the Air Force. Because of that, I’m using my own kind of lens, an Intel Lens. I know the intelligence community is already working to harness some of those creative talents of neurodivergent individuals. Let's see what they're doing and in that, we looked at things like the Neurodiverse Federal Workforce Pilot Program. We looked at some other intelligence community agencies and how they effectively leverage neurodivergent and talents to get after some of those complex system problems to do some unique types of analysis that some of the more standard neurotypes aren't geared for. Dr. Megan Hennessey Well, you can't leave us hanging. Tell us more. Maj Dan Kiser Yeah, so what are we doing? I am working with the 14N intelligence officer Career field manager. I am working with ACC/A6. I am working with HAF A2/6. All of those communities. And, I am blowing up their phones. Saying hey, let's talk about neurodiversity. Let's talk about neurodiversity and what we can do to understand that we have people in our workforce whose needs aren't being met. The joke that I've heard in the community is if you go to X agency. How can you tell that a specific individual is social? While they're looking at your shoes instead of their own. There it yeah, we're looking at a lot of that. Those undiagnosed neurodiverse comorbidities in there, that anxiety, that social phobia, that adjustment disorder and those other people's needs aren't being met because they don't know that they have needs that are different than your average person, and not only that, their leaders don't know, and because their leaders don't know, they rely very heavily on some of those unconscious biases and some of those heuristics to lead in a way that would be effective for them, as opposed to leading in a way that would be effective for the people within their organizations. So, what are we doing about it? Going back to what I was talking about with Master Sergeant Norwitz in our line of effort, we basically have a 3-pronged approach. The first being accept, we want this service, all services really, to acknowledge that there are neurodivergent people in our ranks and that neurodivergent people belong in our ranks so long as they have the ability to accomplish the mission in a manner in which we need the mission accomplished. Up next, support. Are our medical professionals adequately trained to handle some of the unique challenges associated with neurodiversity? Sensory processing disorder being a huge one, right? If there are a lot of conversations going on, if I'm working in a bullpen environment, if the lights are too bright, that all affects my ability to optimize my flow. So, what can I, as a leader do to set my people up for success understanding that everybody's needs are different? What do I have within the realm of my authority to purchase, change, remove, or modify so that my people can be as successful as they can possibly be while still avoiding burnout. And that's really where we get to the empower. And empowering the people and empowering the leaders. We are working on an affinity group, a military employee resource group. Basically, where we have the opportunity to conduct training and where we have the opportunity to do some networking with neurodivergent individuals, allies, and leaders across the Air Force. Not only that, we are also working within our local communities to establish and to participate in regional neurodiversity hubs reaching out to MITRE who hosts one in Washington, DC or the “neurodiversity at work” Hub in Philadelphia. We are in the process of standing up a rocket city hub in Huntsville looking at our youth as they transition to college into the workforce and to help them gain access to some of those opportunities that they might not otherwise have access to. And then making sure that our leaders know how to lead inclusively. We do that unconscious bias training so frequently, because it's important to make sure that we check those biases in the front of our head. Because we rely so heavily on that that fast-thinking brain going into com and thinking fast and slow, we rely so heavily on that fast-thinking system one, trying to help us make decisions and to help us get the job done as efficiently as possible that we often lose sight of some of those biases and how they impact other people in that system too. So, we’ve got to pull people over to thinking deliberately about how they are promoting an inclusive environment where people feel psychologically safe and they feel like they belong within the organization, and that's something that's deliberate, frequent, and incorporated into our daily processes. That's the only way we can really bring about to that culture shift that we're looking for. Dr. Megan Hennessey Thank you, that's so well said, and I really appreciate that you spelled out a path forward and a framework for thinking about this. So here comes the “so what” question. What happens, from a national security, force development, military readiness perspective, if we don't pay attention to neurodiversity? Maj Dan Kiser That is an amazing question. I'm really glad you gave me the opportunity to jump in on this. Looking at our allies, they've recognized that we need to be agile and innovative in specifically some of those information warfare spaces. But also, across the larger organization. So, whether that is the Aussies, working in conjunction with the LaTrobe Center to develop their neurodiverse diversity program within their armed forces, whether it's the Royal Navy, who has a Rear Admiral who is open about his diagnosis and is very vulnerable sharing some of the impacts to his career and to his leadership style, or to the Israeli Defense force with the, and I may butcher the name. I apologize, Roim Rachok, their neurodiversity recruiting program. Neurodivergent people typically sit at a rate of employment of about 20%. If we look at that, that is a shame because so many neurodivergent people have shown this, how to be successful in spite of those weaknesses, leveraging some of those strengths. Looking at somebody like Elon Musk and his ability to really think outside the box to address some of those wicked complex problems. Looking at Greta Thunberg, whose inability to really understand social norms and social cues, gives her a platform to speak out about climate change and start conversations. Now, either individual and not looking at them from a political standpoint at all. Those strengths are in some of those challenges as well. Challenges with social cues, challenges with not conforming to the way we've always done things. It requires a level of risk, we, as an organization, and when I say an organization, I don't just mean Squadron Officer School. I don't mean Air University. I don't even mean the Department of the Air Force. We, as a federal government, need to look at risk to determine what level of risk we're willing to take for the sake of innovation. And what is at risk if we don't innovate at pace or ahead of our competitors, because our competitors are looking at anything that will give them the advantage we need to look within to find the strength within our community that will propel us forward into the future where we can be successful against some of those strategic competitors. Dr. Megan Hennessey I think a “hear, hear” is in order and a bang on the table. And in concurrence, yes. I mean, you shared earlier the data point that one in 46 people is potentially neurodivergent. Can our community really afford to discount the contributions of 1 in every 46 people? I don't think so. Not if we're going to achieve that intellectual edge, as you just said. So, thank you so much Dan. What's next for you in this area? Maj Dan Kiser So really our next big thing is to develop a plan of action and milestones to see what talent management looks like, focusing on neuro inclusivity within the information Warfare career fields. we are looking at what resources we would need, what training we would need. What would need to change in the realm of legislation to make sure that the military is accessible to neurodivergent individuals who have the ability to do some of those worldwide deployments and to operate in some of those stressful environments. That's really where we need to work with our partners, to determine the level of support required. What is acceptable and what is maybe not a great fit for the military, because not every neurodivergent individual will be able to thrive in the military. Some of that rigid focus on routine, or that very deontological, black and white approach to ethics or to rules. That rigidity could potentially be too much of a risk. So, we really need to take a look at what level of support is permissible, and then we need to find a way to effectively measure it consistently at all of our points of accession. And that's, I would say. Our biggest hurdles are changing the regulations, measuring what we, what level of risk we can accept, and then ultimately finding a way to cultivate that talent from recruitment all the way through separation or retirement. Dr. Megan Hennessey Sounds like a great plan. Is there anything else that you want to share with us? Maj Dan Kiser If anybody is interested in learning more, you are more than welcome to reach out to me via my e-mail or we have a presence on milsuite under NeurodiverseAF, and we also have some affinity groups that I will link you into, if you're interested. Dr. Megan Hennessey Right, well SOS and Air University is so lucky to have you Major Kiser. Thank you very much for spending some time talking with us today and good luck in all of your efforts. I know that they are hugely impactful, so thank you once again. Maj Dan Kiser Yes, ma'am, thank you for taking the time to chat. Ending Axon Thank you for listening to Axon, the Air University Teaching and Learning Center podcast. Stay current on these and other ideas in military education by following us online at www.airuniversity.af.edu/TLC or on Twitter at @airteaching. Return to Axon Podcast Return to Axon Podcast: /TLC/Podcast