Throughout the year, the Centre is pleased to welcome and host visiting scholars, community members and professionals to present as part of our ongoing Colloquia Series on Inclusion. This series of free events is open to people with intellectual disabilities and their families, students, academics, professionals, and community members.
Dr. Stephan Greenspan
Wednesday April 18, 2012
UBC School of Social Work, 2080 West Mall, UBC
New knowledge about the cognitive and other functional deficits of people with neuro-developmental disorders, such as Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders, provides additional evidence for the need to redeuce the role of IQ cut-offs in determining eligibility for services, supports and protections. Unfortunately, the same "scientistic" (quasi-scientific reliance on numbers) that underlay the reliance on IQ score has been responsible for a similar overemphasis on adaptive behavior cutting scores.
In this talk, Professor Greenspan reviewed the history of ID definitions, the need for a rethinking of the relationship between IQ and adaptive behavior, and the efforts that need to be made to develop eligibilty criteria that capture the support needs of children and adults who have brain-based "common sense deficit disorders" characterized by an inability to recognize and avoid social and physical risk.
Stephan Greenspan, PhD, is emiritus professor of educational psychology at the University of Connecticut and clinical professor of psychiatry at the Unversity of Colorado. In recognition of his path-breaking work on social intelligence, gullibility and adaptive behavior, he was the most-cited scholar in both the 2002 and 2010 classification manuals of the American Association on Intellectual Disabilities. He received the Jacobson Award for Critical Thinking from the ID division of the American Psychological Association. In recognition of his work on behalf of people with disabilities facing the death penalty, he received the Dybwad Award for Humanitarianism from AAIDD.
