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Abstract This experimental paper explores a form of neurodiversity‐affirming qualitative data analysis labelled a polyphony of (analytical) scores and creative methodologies utilised in our research project. Our data examples come from a federally funded research study which co‐designed sensory pedagogies for autistic students interested in computational thinking (CT). Four middle‐school teachers, or teacher fellows (TF), from diverse disciplines were recruited to develop neurodiverse CT mini curriculum and pedagogies for middle‐school students interested in STEM. Teacher fellows worked with the research team to co‐design teaching and learning materials and technology to explore computational thinking. The research team and teacher fellows attended workshops that included creative ensemble activities using digital‐physical musical technologies and CT concepts. Data from these workshops were used to create two polyphonic score compositions as ways to interact with data. A video creation addressed how TFs were impacted during the development and implementation of neurodiverse pedagogies. Quotes and keywords extracted for the video creation reflect how silence and sound collapse and expand in a rhizomatic fashion, indicating how TFs experience messiness, exploration, atypicality and more, which fully represent neurodiversity. The score analysis enabled us to diversify participants' experiences with neurodiverse pedagogies and illustrated the affective dimensions of musical composition as a form of data analysis.
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This content will become publicly available on January 1, 2026
Towards Neurodiverse Sensemaking: Pluralizing Agency in Wearable Music and Participatory Workshopping
We, a team of teachers and researchers, share examples of collectively playable instruments that challenge normative assumptions about intention and agency in digital musical instruments. These instruments enliven neurodiverse sensemaking in participatory design and STEAM learning. Through a multiyear research-practice partnership (RPP), we collaborated with teaching fellows to co-design a curriculum for neurodiverse middle school students that activates computational thinking (CT). This collaboration led to a web-based, quasi-modular interface connected to wearable music sensors. We situate our work within the growing literature on participatory design of collaborative accessible digital musical instruments (CADMIs). We describe how our co-design methods address the complex demands of ecosystemic thinking, sensitive to the varied entanglements that complicate traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) design and evaluation methods. Our pedagogical and methodological approach diverges from deficit-focused strategies that aim to develop neurotypical communication skills in neurodivergent individuals. Instead, we promote cross-neurotype collaboration without presuming a single mode of "correct" communication. Furthermore, we surface the potential of CADMIs by linking this notion to a pluralization of agency that extends beyond one-to-one body-sensor relationships. We develop accessible instruments within neurodiversity and autism contexts, avoiding reification of mindbody relations and recognizing them as dynamic, field-like, and embedded in facilitative relations for these communities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2122924
- PAR ID:
- 10634220
- Publisher / Repository:
- Zenodo
- Date Published:
- ISSN:
- 2220-4806
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- neurodiversity accessible digital musical instrument computational thinking wearable music entanglement computer science education
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Right(s):
- Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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