in part because of beter diagnoses and more accurate reporting of cases. Te panel includes a Who’s Who of pre-eminent
scientists, doctors and directors of federal agencies, including Francis Collins, a world-renowned geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health. Burton-Hoyle is among the 15 “public members”— academics, individuals with autism, parents and leaders of advocacy organizations. Burton-Hoyle atends meetings and webinars and
even gets an early look at the latest peer-reviewed medical journal articles, which she then shares with her students. “We downloaded these and that was part of
class,” she says, pointing to studies referenced in the commitee’s annual report. “So (EMU students) are not geting old information on autism. Tey’re geting current, current (research) before even local (autism experts) know it.”
brother who was on the autism spectrum. She also served as executive director of the Autism Society of Michigan for 12 years and developed an extensive network of autism contacts and resources around the state and country. Burton-Hoyle was hired by EMU in 2006 to teach
B
urton-Hoyle was already bringing a lifetime of autism experiences and extensive knowledge to her students before the federal appointment: she grew up in Kansas with a
Sally Burton-Hoyle has been named to a national advisory committee on autism spectrum disorder. She created a master’s program in autism at EMU in 2008 and is now developing curriculum for undergrads.
and create the M.A. in Autism Spectrum Disorders program. Tat program started with about 10 students in 2008 and has grown rapidly to 49 this year. She is now developing the new undergraduate curriculum. Also early in her time at EMU, Burton-Hoyle worked
with Gretchen Reeves, associate professor in the College of Health and Human Services, and Pamela Lemerand, associate professor of occupational therapy at EMU’s Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Communities, to create the Autism Collaborative Center. It opened in 2009 with a relatively small staff in the former Fletcher school. Philip Smith, department head for special education,
says the ACC was started to meet many needs. “(It was) an opportunity for folks here to be able to give our students real- world experience, and then to be able to share the amazing
OPPOSITE PAGE: Alpha Xi Delta sorority members like Julia Rosenzweig work with children while the kids’ parents sit in on Wednesday Night Live programs about autism issues. The sorority also holds a campus-wide scavenger hunt to call awareness to autism.
expertise we have here at EMU about autism with folks in the community,” he says. “People recognized early on that the kinds of needs that people living with autism and their families (have) stretch across a whole bunch of disciplines. So it was designed intentionally to move across those traditional boundaries between special education and physical therapy and occupational therapy and speech language and psychology…” Studying the problems of autism in a classroom is one way
to learn, but a beter way is to meet the families who are dealing with it, Smith says. “Te extent to which there are real people living with autism and their families right here, (students) can start to make real human relationships with those people, and understand people as people rather than a set of symptoms and a set of diagnoses. Because I think what breaks down those barriers are establishing relationships, geting to know Johnny and geting to know Johnny’s family ... and the things they experience.”
Eastern | SPRING 2013 19
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