Posted by CBethM on March 6, 2025 in Author Posts |
While it is a story that explores how children relate to and see themselves in the natural world – neurodiversity and disability included – my book, Together, a Forest: Drawing Connections Between Nature’s Diversity and Our Own, is also a culmination of some of my own big life changes and shifts in perception.
Like so many people, my life has transformed since 2020, and while a lot of that has been so great – I now live on Vancouver Island with seemingly endless forest and ocean! I get to make children’s books full time! Our housing situation makes much more sense! – there are some things I miss.
One of those is working in schools as an education assistant. For over a decade, I worked in Vancouver’s public schools supporting children and youth with disabilities. Though I’m probably looking back with rose coloured glasses, there was so much I loved about this job, like the puzzle of figuring out different ways for students to engage with curricula, or making materials for social learning and communication. I was able to help the students I supported connect with their peers, often with the collaboration of passionate educators. Also, in case you didn’t already know, kids are pretty fun.
This role could also be humbling. Some students (usually the younger ones) eagerly accepted my company and help, while others (usually older) were not so enthusiastic. It was easy for kids to think that my presence was broadcasting to their classmates that they were different somehow, an idea that made older kids self conscious.
This sensitivity to being perceived as different is completely understandable. With specific resources going to students who meet corresponding criteria, our institutions have a knack for labelling, organizing and classifying people. Many end up in the realm of “typical,” and others end up outside of it.
This framing, that there are normal students and others that don’t measure up, is the deficit model at work.* An approach that focuses mainly on a person or group’s deficiency, problems and limitations, it aligns with the pathology paradigm (coined by Nick Walker), which views people who do not fit within dominant social norms as having something wrong with them.
Naturally, kids who can sense that these ways of thinking have been projected onto them might have feelings of wrongness and otherness. Their peers may treat them in ways that make them believe this too.
I witnessed this in my work in schools, and I also considered it in my own life and upbringing. My older brother has an intellectual disability and, like any protective sister, I was tuned in to the ups and downs of his experiences socially and at school.
For myself, I look back at my long list of growing up events where I felt like I just didn’t really fit in or “get it,” and am grateful I’ve found the framework of neurodiversity to better understand myself and my experiences.
You’ve probably heard of neurodiversity by now, as it’s become a bit of a buzzword, often referring to Autism and ADHD (though the term neurodiverse includes everyone, as well as neurological minorities like people with Downs Syndrome, acquired brain injuries, or mental health conditions, to name a few). Nick Walker says of the Neurodiversity Paradigm:
“ 1. Neurodiversity – the diversity among minds – is a natural, healthy, and valuable form of human diversity.
2. There is no “normal” or “right” style of human mind, any more than there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture.”
I love this! I want this, not the pathology paradigm and deficit models of old school thinking.
I think it’s important to mention that most of the actual people I worked with in schools didn’t buy into a deficit model or pathology paradigm, and instead believed in and acted from an ethos of deep care and curiosity, which I think is likely true of most educators. Still, even with everyone trying their best to celebrate and support every student, when the foundations of a system don’t fully believe in that student and aren’t designed to meet their needs, we will probably still have our work cut out for us.
With a career change, I haven’t been spending my time in schools, but I have been spending much more time in the forest. Hanging out with trees, I’ve found a more than human sense of kinship that has been deeply grounding. Big trees, beams of light through branches and over water, scurrying squirrels, and thick beds of moss have been a balm to the stressors of the world. Sadly, in recent years there has been a threat to eliminate the last remaining old growth forest in BC . I’ve always been interested in ecology and admired the majesty of big trees, but with this threat, a sense of urgency pushed me to learn about what we would be losing if old growth kept falling.
I learned that second growth forests – trees planted after logging, sometimes called “tree farms – are much more uniform. Planted close together, they block the sunlight from reaching the forest floor, resulting in less biodiversity, and their homogeneity makes them more susceptible to climate change.
Old Growth forests, on the other hand, have multilayered tree canopies with trees of different ages, allowing light to reach the forest floor so plant life can grow, in turn creating food and habitat for a greater diversity of animals and other creatures. Fallen trees remain to cycle nutrients back into the forest, providing structures for habitat and retaining water. More lichen, fungi and moss are found in old growth forests, which also store incredible amounts of carbon, and are more resilient to climate change because of their diverse structures.
There are also beautiful relationships in old growth forests, one example detailed by Dr. Suzanne Simard in her book, Finding the Mother Tree, in which she shares that her scientific work has confirmed the Indigenous knowledge that trees communicate and share resources through fungal networks. The oldest trees, or “Mother Trees” are like highly connected hubs, sharing their excess carbon and nitrogen through these networks and increasing seedling survival and forest health.
With all of the diversity and mutuality that is able to exist in old growth forests, each being’s thriving existence plays an important beneficial role for other organisms. Moss retains moisture for the other plants, animals eat and spread seeds that will eventually grow, fungi break dead matter into soil. Each being has a role, and the forest is better for it.
I think if we follow the lead of the neurodiversity paradigm and disability acceptance, we arrive at an understanding that we are like this too. Not uniform, efficient and pristine like too-dense tree farms, but like the wild kaleidoscope of messy, entangled variation that is an old growth forest .
Our quiet or noisy, slow or fast, sensitive or sturdy, disabled and divergent ways of existing, are not abnormalities or instances of “wrongness,” but how humans have always been: a mixed up group, strengthened by our connectedness, a variety of shapes people come in that make up a whole.
This is what the cast of characters in Together, a Forest, show us, each beaming in their unique natures. Sofia uses a wheelchair and has high care needs, relying on caregivers, medication and equipment – something she sees mirrored in the interdependent partnership between fungi and algae that creates lichen. Akash is full of big emotions, and he resonates with the fluid expression and bombastic changes of the rushing creek. Amir has sensory sensitivities, and he feels a connection with Frog, whose skin changes colour as it reacts to its environment. In the forest there is no deviating from a norm, no getting stuck on difference, just the truth that we all belong in, and to, the natural world.
We are in a moment that’s pressuring us to pretend that not everyone belongs, to pretend that not everyone matters. This is a time that we need to signal to all kids that not only do they have unconditional value, but so does every one of their peers. We are all needed in this forest.
* There has been much written and discussed about different models of disability, which I won’t get into here, but are worth learning about.
P.S. – Together, a Forest is printed on recycled paper!
Roz MacLean is an award-winning Canadian illustrator and children’s writer. She especially loves making art about themes that are important to her, like exploring emotions and diverse ways of being in the world. She is passionate about education, inclusion, and the arts.
English (US) · 