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Dr. Temple Grandin | Visual Thinking



Think Inclusive: Season 10 Episode 13


For this episode, I speak with Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University and the author of New York Times bestsellers Animals in Translation, Animals Make Us Human, The Autistic Brain, and Thinking in Pictures which became an HBO movie starring Claire Danes.


Temple and I discuss why she wanted to write Visual Thinking, what educational advocates can learn from how she helped improve the welfare of farm animals, and what educators can do to support visual thinkers.


Thanks for listening, and if you haven't already, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.


Otter.ai Transcript: https://otter.ai/u/SPILF2Rg8javovXe3zpyGtsDIgc


PDF Transcript: https://3bd6e695-b492-4878-afa9-f79d8b09e0c4.usrfiles.com/ugd/3bd6e6_f0c6eadc852a4b4cb0f4fe044bb354d6.pdf


Cover Art Image Description: black background; think inclusive logo in the top left; rainbow-colored waves overlayed with a headshot of Temple Grandin; text reads: Dr. Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking; MCIE logo in the bottom right


Mentioned in this episode:


Credits


Think Inclusive is written, edited, and sound designed by Tim Villegas and is produced by MCIE.


Original music by Miles Kredich.


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Audio Transcript


Tim Villegas

Okay, I'm going to address this right from the start. The mention of Temple Grandin in some circles in the disability community can induce reactions from cringe to accolades. So let me tell you the reason why I wanted to have temple on the podcast. In her new book visual thinking Dr. Grandin recognizes that our public schools are missing the mark with offering a flexible curriculum for all learners, and that for visual thinkers like her hands on classes are unfortunately, absent for many school systems. I think that is a worthy message to amplify. My name is Tim Villegas from the Maryland Coalition for inclusive education. And you're listening to think inclusive, a show where with every conversation, we try to build bridges between families, educators, and disability rights advocates to create a shared understanding of inclusive education, and what inclusion looks like in the real world. You can learn more about who we are and what we do at MCIE.org. For this episode, I speak with Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and the author of New York Times bestsellers, animals and translation. Animals make us human, the autistic brain and thinking in pictures, which became an HBO movie starring Claire Danes, temple and I discuss why she wanted to write visual thinking, what educational advocates can learn from how she helped improve the welfare of farm animals and what educators can do to support visual thinkers. Thank you so much for listening. And now my interview with Dr. Temple Grandin. Dr. Temple Grandin, welcome to the think inclusive podcast.


Temple Grandin

It's great to be here.


Tim Villegas

So is it okay, if I call you temple or is Dr. Grandin?


Temple Grandin

Call me Temple. That's absolutely fine. So we're going to be talking about my new book on visual thinking.


Tim Villegas

Yeah, fantastic. You've written a number of books. So the artistic rain thinking in pictures, which I read, I don't know how many years ago. And animals in translation, why did you want to write visual thinking?


Temple Grandin

What triggered that was two trips I did right before COVID. shut everything down. I went to two state of the art port processing plants, a one to poultry processing plant brand new one in the Steve Jobs theater. And I discovered there's a lot of things that we're not making. See, I mainly worked in the beef industry. And that equipment we actually still know how to make but that's getting close to retirement. But the pork plant and the chicken plant, the equipment's all coming in from Holland. And there's a link here with our educational system. We are now paying the price for taking out the shop classes. We are now paying the price in the food industry for shutting down in house engineering 25 years ago, we're paying for it now. I've been in this industry for 50 years. And then when I went to the Steve Jobs theater, I found out that the structural glass walls were designed in Italy, fabricated in Germany, and the carbon fiber roof came from Dubai. And I stood in the middle of that theater screaming, we don't make it anymore. And that was one of the things that triggered doing this book. And then of course the lockdown came. So I call up Betsy Lerner, my co author. And I said let's do the book. And we both had nothing else to do so did book. But the events that kind of motivated the theme of the book is a skill loss issue. Check out the people fixing escalators that people fixing elevators these days, your mechanic that comes on the plane to fix your plane. They're getting grayer and grayer and older and older. And they're not getting replaced. And it goes back to the educational system. And and then I just when I did the autistic brain, I discovered that there was object visualizer and a pattern thinker. And the kind of thinker like I am is the one that can't do algebra cannot do algebra. They're in what I call the clever engineering department. So I went back to all the projects I worked on, where I spent a lot of time out in the big plant. And it was kind of an interesting division of engineering. You had degreed engineer would do all the more mathematical things, boilers, refrigeration, roof, wind loads, snow load, power and water. But the guys in a shop with no degrees were built doing what I call clever engineering. Think mechanically clever packaging machine for example. And those are the people that are not getting replaced. The people that invent mechanically complicated equipment that you use in food processing, also in other industries


Tim Villegas

What What was it about why these certain products or materials machines are being made in Holland? Like, what about their educational system? Well,


Temple Grandin

what they do in Holland and in Europe, and I've looked it up, the kids are around 14, you can cycle University route, or technical vocational route. And they don't look at the vocational route as a lesser form of intelligence. I think completely in pictures can't do higher math, I have no abstract thinking. And, and so in figuring out how mechanical things work, that is easy. I also went back through all the projects I've worked on, I'm going to start writing down all the people I've worked with, I'm going to estimate 20% of the people that designed machinery, doing drawings, and people who are inventing machinery with about 20 patents each with autistic dyslexic or ADHD. They were the kids were the shop teacher turned them around. And that's what this is what motivated me do this book.


Tim Villegas

In the book, you talk about object visualizers and spatial visual.


Temple Grandin

That's right, and a spatial visualizers think more in patterns. It's patterns instead of photorealistic pictures. See, everything I think about is a photo realistic picture. I was just out at a big corporation yesterday, works in travel. And we were trying to like help blind people and Deaf people to get to the airport. So I got to, then this blind person there so well, the worst thing I have at airports, I can't find the gates. So then I started thinking up a way I could do gate finder app for his phone, maybe put little transponders on the gates. So as he walks through the terminal, it will say a 60, a 62. And announced the gates as you walk by them. And I NS off the shelf technology that can probably do that with. That's real simple.


Tim Villegas

I would think that there are some airports that naturally do something like that, right? Or is that is that not common? Well,


Temple Grandin

we don't want to do something that doesn't cost a lot of money. You see, I think very simple. No, the programmer wants to put more and more stuff on it. But okay, now what the deaf person? Well, I figured out I'm gonna classify gates at the airport, as visible gates, and auditory gates. And, and I see it and I see the exact door at our Denver airport where four or five flights are coming out of one door, and you can't see any the aircraft. So you're totally dependent on hearing the announcement that those gates were a visible gate, I can see the people line up and there's one door one aircraft. And so if I was deaf, I'm not gonna miss those flights. Right? So okay, see how you see I just see it, and I see it at a specific airport. And I do a lot of travel all the time. And so I tend to just think of what's the simple way I could do it. And I could train the gate agents, to just, they can talk back and forth using a text function on the phone, and they don't have to send them. And you want to train the gate agent that they got a deaf person, and they have an auditory gate, that they need to tap that person on the shoulder to get them hooked up to the door. You see, that would be easy to do.


Tim Villegas

Are you familiar with the framework, I guess of universal design?


Temple Grandin

Yes. Um, where in other words, let's take subtitles going on, on programs? Will every bars using that now? Right, right. And it was originally designed for, you know, people that were hearing impaired.


Tim Villegas

There's this definite movement in education right now, to bring the concept of your universal design into designing curriculum. So, you know, you have you have a number of learners in the classroom, and they may or may not have all of these different, you know, learning styles or types of ways of learning and different


Temple Grandin

brains. Okay, in the state of California, I wouldn't able to graduate high school because I can't do the math requirements.


Tim Villegas

Right, right. Exactly. So


Temple Grandin

if you want and the people I worked with saw that had 20 patents each, they also were terrible at math, and higher. Yeah, thank you arithmetic.


Tim Villegas

Well, that is something I wanted to talk about. Because, you know, in the book, you talk a lot about that we're screening out kids, we're screening out


Temple Grandin

what I call the clever engineering department. They also super good at photography. I've talked a lot of news crews, a lot of you know, TV and movie photographers, a lot of them are dyslexic or ADHD. And they got exposed to cameras and and were able to get into that field and then also animals because animals don't live in a word based world, they live in a sensory based world. It's sensory based, it's not word based. And I think some of the discussion about animal consciousness and I just read an article yesterday, what our computer could be conscious. And in the New York Times, and they, some people think you'd have to think in words to be conscious, well done, I guess I'm not conscious then. Right? What I have found is a designer that I want to figure out, let's go back to the blind people in the deaf people at the airport. I've had a lot of success in getting the livestock industry to change. And one of the reasons why I was able to do it is I was able to fix a lot of stuff without buying tons and tons and tons of expensive equipment. Management repairs, nonslip, flooring, simple changes. It's one of the reasons why it was successful. And so I immediately start thinking, how can I do a simple things? Like just, I can go through the Denver Airport, I can say, okay, that's an auditory gate that is two doors, they're just horrible. I've almost missed flights there, you have to really, really pay attention. What are all the other gates, I can see the plane roll up. But even if I can't see the plane roll up, I can see the people line up at the board. So I tend to turn them turn out announcements. So I like to look at the door. And then when I see the people getting up and lining up, then I would know line up.


Tim Villegas

What you're saying is out this, what you're saying is if you make small, not necessarily small, but practical, simple changes to an environment to make things more accessible, whether that's for people or for animals.


Temple Grandin

Well, exactly. And, and things like wheelchair ramps like Onyx on a new construction. They don't cost hardly anything put in a new construction. Right, right. And then you use them for everything else, bring food deliveries and things like to see wheelchair ramp used for that.


Tim Villegas

Right. So the things that you've done or advocated for, for the for animal welfare, seems to have really changed the industry in a positive way. Well,


Temple Grandin

and it's it's very simple. The thing I've learned, I've trained a lot of people how to do audits of training, a lot of people in cattle handling, you have to have really simple clear guidance. There's a lot of stuff that gets very abstract, very vague. And let's say I'm going to train an auditor to audit animal welfare to make plan. I got a day and a half workshop to do that. And I developed a very simple scoring system, where they score electric produce, they score stunning efficacy on things that are easy to measure. And you have to figure out what are the important things to measure. It's sort of like traffic on the highway. If I can only measure five things to enforce safety, it's going to be drunk driving, speeding, running red lights and stop signs, texting and seatbelts. Those are the critical control points for traffic. Those are the things you really need to enforce.


Tim Villegas

That's a good point, though. We talked about enforcement, right? So you can have all of these checklists, and you can do audits, and you can say, These things are wrong and that need to be fixed. But if there's no accountability to actually fix the problems, then they just stay the same. Well,


Temple Grandin

you're measuring outcomes. So one of the things we measure slipping and falling during handling, Metro electric prod blow us measure cattle vocalizing when you're handling because if they're vocalizing you're doing something nasty to him. poltroon electric prod slamming a door on him. Something bad's happening. And in these in you have to figure out what are the critical things to measure in food safety. We have a concept Hassam Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points, what are the critical outcome measures to measure? And I got day and a half workshop training an auditor. One of my students is an auditor right now. And then they have to have free shadow audits with an experienced auditor. And then you turn them loose. Yeah, so I've had lunch with my student that's now an auditor. All right now we got to do let me show you some really good scoring tools for laying hands on feather condition. We're looking them up. You need to use these websites. But you've got to have have on simple guidance that they can do. There's a tendency to get things way too complicated.


Tim Villegas

So a big concern of yours that you bring up in the book is learners who are on the autism spectrum that spend way too much time playing video games or being lost in whatever it is getting


Temple Grandin

good jobs is is probably you know 100 students for every slot, actual slot and video gaming. Straight, I'll tell you one way to get them off the video games, there's been some real successes with young adults introducing car mechanics, where they've actually gotten jobs and car mechanics. And they discover the engines are more interesting than video games. But we've got kids growing up today that have never used tool. They don't cook, they don't sell. I had a girl in my class who had never used a ruler to measure anything last year. They're not making stuff and doing stuff. Because the other thing is don't have to be introduced to different things to find out what they love, also find out what they hate. Right? How can you find out? What do you like working on cars if you never get introduced any of that stuff? So people ask me, what would I do if I could do something for the schools? Put all the hands on classes back in? Shaw?


Tim Villegas

Yeah, you say, Yeah, give me what you're


Temple Grandin

selling, aren't theater, music, all of these things? And some states are starting to do it. All right.


Tim Villegas

And yeah, and so yeah, like, I'm just thinking about the districts here in Georgia, where I live, that the they still have all of those. But you know that the interesting thing is, though, those classes are always accessible to people, you know, with more significant disabilities or people with you know, what,


Temple Grandin

what they think is autism, Scott's probably got with autism diagnosis, you're going from Einstein, who would definitely land an autism class today, because he didn't talk until he was three. It don't talk like gold and autism classes. What happened to him today, you go from Einstein, to somebody that cannot dress themselves. And it all has the same name.


Tim Villegas

And so, you know, when you're talking about the kind of support a learner might need, you know, one might need more support than the other like you said, you know, someone who is speaking in versus non speaking, or, you know, the life skills,


Temple Grandin

some of the ones that cannot speak, actually ascribe problems and sensory scrambling problems would not be able to control their movements, and they can type independently without being touched. And there's some good books on that to like, Tee them up ahead of hey, how can I talk with my lips don't move.


Tim Villegas

Right, right. So I mean, how can we make sure that those classes those hands on classes, like you said, are also available to you know, people who have high support needs, like what you said, you know, who are are learning how to, you know, spell to communicate or type to communicate, I


Temple Grandin

can tell when you need to do something, because I've been on some elevators with doors that weren't working right, skipping floors, scraping in the shaft. I'm back to full travel now. And they have surfaced. And I noticed that stuff. Brand new escalator at one of the airports is already squeaking.


Tim Villegas

So in your view, the one of the one of the big ways to handle that is to bring all of these more technical type classes back into the schools.


Temple Grandin

Well, that's right, you see, and the other thing is, there's a tendency or similar once we go to university, I know a guy that took a welding class in high school, he was not autistic. Start a tiny little steel and concrete construction company now has a big construction company and corporate jet. You know, very, very successful. There's a tendency to, I think that there are a lot of verbal thinkers that don't even know the visual thinking, like my kind of thinking even exists. Because when I was doing a book signing for my book, visual thinking in October, I did one of the talks in school, not talked to the principal. And he didn't even know that my kind of thinking existed. I was talking about how I think,


Tim Villegas

is there any connection between being a visual thinker and autism or neurodiversity?


Temple Grandin

What tends to happen in autism is that most people with a different kinds of thinkers the object visualizer, who thinks in photorealistic pictures, horrible at abstract math, the mathematical person who thinks and patterns most people are mixtures. When you get on the autism spectrum, you tend to get an extreme, you might get extreme object visualizer and extreme mathematician. Auti