Katharine Beals
@katharinebeals.bsky.social
Author of "Students with Autism" and "Cutting-Edge Language and Literacy Tools for Students on the Autism Spectrum." Designer of the SentenceWeaver: interactive grammar instruction for students with autism. Adjunct at Temple, Drexel, and Penn.
It's not a matter of "which voices": All voices should be heard www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/its-not...
It’s Not A Matter of “Which Voices”: All Voices Should Be Heard — Facilitated Communication
...but to ensure that all voices are heard, we need to find out who’s doing the talking. Jennifer Binder-le Pape, perhaps best known in these pages as one of the plaintiffs in the Lower Merion FC ...
facilitatedcommunication.org
Telepathy via Facilitated Communication in Profound Autism: A 21st-Century Delusion skepticalinquirer.org/2026/08/tele... nice one, @katharinebeals.bsky.social 💐 @fcisnotscience.bsky.social
Telepathy via Facilitated Communication in Profound Autism: A 21st-Century Delusion | Skeptical Inquirer
Belief in telepathy in autistic individuals, as promoted in The Telepathy Tapes podcast, stems from forces of modernity so inexorable that, were we to rewin ...
skepticalinquirer.org
I've been looking for this for years; my repeated queries to AI after the conviction in HK of activists Lee Cheuk-yan & Chow Hang-tung turned this up (first 2 videos AI found have already been taken down). I still remember the tune from HK TV in 1989. Trigger warning. www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Y7X...
中国大陆禁歌《為自由》 MV 悼念 六四廿一周年
YouTube video by 笑看世界工作室
youtube.com
🙃Nice to see this in print, @ashajournals.bsky.social @katharinebeals.bsky.social @carolinebowen.bsky.social @lucyebryant.bsky.social GaenorDixon @bronwynhemsley.bsky.social (2026). Upholding Children's Communication Rights by Ensuring Access to EBP Ax Tx. doi.org/10.1044/2026... 🦋 #bskySPEECHIES
Upholding Children's Communication Rights by Ensuring Access to Full and Appropriate Language Assessments and Corresponding Evidence-Based Interventions
Purpose: This commentary is motivated by Articles 23 (children with disabilities) and 28 (right to education) of the United Nations Convention on...
doi.org
Hot off the presses: Upholding Children's Communication Rights by Ensuring Access to Full and Appropriate Language Assessments and Corresponding Evidence-Based Interventions @bronwynhemsley.bsky.social @lucyebryant.bsky.social @carolinebowen.bsky.social pubs.asha.org/doi/10.1044/...
Upholding Children's Communication Rights by Ensuring Access to Full and Appropriate Language Assessments and Corresponding Evidence-Based Interventions
Purpose: This commentary is motivated by Articles 23 (children with disabilities) and 28 (right to education) of the United Nations Convention on...
pubs.asha.org
Last day for comments on IACC's FC-promoting Plan. Promulgates the most dangerous assumption abt autistic non-speakers: that they have so little control over their bodies that the only thing you should believe is what they type through FC. Email IACCPublicInquiries@mail.nih.gov
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 2mo agoPublic comments on the IACC plan close August 20th. Here's a review of the plan: A federal committee uses coded language to call for FC in autism accommodations, cognitive evaluations, school classrooms, medicaid funding and research www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/a-feder...
Public comments on the IACC plan close August 20th. Here's a review of the plan: A federal committee uses coded language to call for FC in autism accommodations, cognitive evaluations, school classrooms, medicaid funding and research www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/a-feder...
A Federal Autism Committee Calls uses coded language to call for FC in autism accommodations, cognitive evaluations, school classrooms, Medicaid funding, and research — Facilitated Communication
One of the key players in the autism world is the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC). The IACC is a federal advisory committee that advises the government on autism policies and priorit...
facilitatedcommunication.org
Congratulations @bronwynhemsley.bsky.social www.asha.org/news/2026/as... <<ping>> @ashajournals.bsky.social @jillesenner.bsky.social @lucyebryant.bsky.social (📢@tim-kittel.bsky.social) @katharinebeals.bsky.social #AUGcomm 🦋 #bskySPEECHIES
www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/autism-...
Autism Spectrum News Issue platforms FC—with tacit approval from (some of) its esteemed editorial board — Facilitated Communication
This isn’t the first time Autism Spectrum News (ASN) has platformed FC. Back in December, 2024, it published a piece about a non-speaker who “found her voice” through Spelling to Communicate (S2C) . ...
facilitatedcommunication.org
Education is full of myths. Facilitated communication may be the strangest: the belief that physical support from a facilitator could unlock hidden messages from cognitively disabled individuals. There was just one problem: it wasn’t true. educationrickshaw.com/2026/06/15/s...
S5E31: Katharine Beals on Facilitated Communication and Educational Pseudoscience
Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell. Education is filled with myths. Some are harmless. Others shape curriculum, teacher training, intervention programs, and the l…
educationrickshaw.com
Writing is thinking And so is making PowerPoint slides
Updated systematic review. STILL no evidence for Spelling to Communicate, Rapid Prompting Method, Spellers Method, etc., despite years of biased research by those with vested interests. Here is a pre-publication preprint: hdl.handle.net/1959.13/3216...
Systematic Review of Authorship in Rapid Prompting Method, Spelling to Communicate, and Variants: Outcomes, Significance and Clinical Implications
This is a systematic review of authorship in Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling2Communicate (S2C), Spellers Method and variants, techniques akin to Facilitated Communication which are increasingly promoted for use on autistic individuals or people with intellectual or developmental disabilities who are minimally- or non-speaking. In this systematic review, RPM/S2C or variants had to be evaluated as an intervention using a research design capable of empirical demonstration of authorship. The resulting empty review documents a persistent knowledge gap which, in the context of increasing popularity and similarity to Facilitated Communication, constitutes a finding with clinical significance. Controlled authorship trials of RPM, S2C, and Spellers Method are warranted. Given the instrumental similarities between RPM, S2C, Spellers Method, and traditional Facilitated Communication, these methods should be discontinued (if in use) or not adopted until independent authorship studies have shown that these methods are indeed valid. Ethical implications of the findings are also discussed.
hdl.handle.net
Catherine Johnson and I will be sharing some surprising findings about how "productive struggle" and "too much" cognitive load is often (but not always) a good idea!
The back and forth with Barry Prizant continues... www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/back-an...
Back and forth with Barry Prizant — Facilitated Communication
Barry Prizant has gotten back about having Howard Shane and me on the Uniquely Human Podcast—an overture I made on my last blog post . He won’t have us. As he explained on his Facebook page , where...
facilitatedcommunication.org
Excited to be on this panel at the Boston Higashi School on April 14th. We'll be discussing why #RPM & #S2C are non- evidence-based communication rights violating schemes that should not adopted, despite the pressures from a highly influential group of parent promoters. www.wcvb.com/article/brit...
Brittany Johnson to Moderate Community Forum on Communication Access, Ethics, & Evidence: Examining Facilitated Communication in Autism Education
Brittany Johnson to Moderate Community Forum on Communication Access, Ethics, & Evidence: Examining Facilitated Communication in Autism Education
wcvb.com
www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/barry-p... Presuming that s.o. has so little control over their body that all their behaviors are essentially meaningless (except those elicited by their facilitators) is the most extreme presumption of incompetence ever made. @davidkaufer.bsky.social
facilitatedcommunication.org
"In Cardinal’s email exchange with me, he indicated there was data left out of the final report... Sadly, he couldn’t provide that data to me when I asked... All I wanted to know was how many correct vs. incorrect responses were given in each of the conditions of their study."
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 7mo agoDoes Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 study prove authorship in FC (Part 5) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...
"Cardinal essentially sabotaged their goal of developing a protocol that “controlled for variables that could threaten the study’s validity” by giving facilitators & the people documenting the facilitated messages (called recorders) in the study access to the word list being used for test stimuli."
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 8mo agoDoes Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 Study Prove Authorship in FC - Part 4 (Facilitator Behaviors) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...
www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/fc-past...
FC Past and Present: A Now-Normalized Routine that Solves Nothing — Facilitated Communication
A few weeks ago, I encountered something that surprised me: a full-length documentary about profound autism. Even though it came out in 2023, I’d somehow never heard of it—and neither had any of my au...
facilitatedcommunication.org
🆕 Hemsley, B., Bryant, L., & Beals, K. (2026). Book Review: #GLP: Supporting Autistic and Neurodivergent Children with Natural Language Acquisition by Alison Battye. CLTT, doi.org/10.1177/0265... @bronwynhemsley.bsky.social @lucyebryant.bsky.social @katharinebeals.bsky.social 🦋 #bskySPEECHIES
Book Review: Gestalt Language Processing: Supporting Autistic and Neurodivergent Children with Natural Language Acquisition by Alison Battye - Bronwyn Hemsley, Lucy Bryant, Katharine Beals, 2026
doi.org
"Despite claiming in their study that they “blinded” facilitators from the test stimuli, Cardinal et al. gave facilitators open access to the word list used in the testing & essentially sabotaged their own stated goal of “controlling for variables” & keeping facilitators “blind.”
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 8mo agoDoes Cardinal, Hanson, and Wakeham's 1996 study prove authorship in FC? Part 3 (Competing for Words) www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/does-ca...
skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/rf...
RFK Jr. Puts Facilitated Communication Users on the HHS Autism Panel | Skeptical Inquirer
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. can now add support for discredited methods of communication to his list of anti-science accomplishments as Secretary of Health and Hu ...
skepticalinquirer.org
www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/asha-20...
ASHA 2025: The Empty Review of FC/RPM/S2C/Spellers Method and its aftermath — Facilitated Communication
My news roundup of two weeks ago captured only a subset of the FC/RPM/S2C/Spellers Method developments that were unfolding the whole time I was posting about holoboards and hololenses and letterb...
facilitatedcommunication.org
Catherine Johnson on How to teach students to write better than a robot, and why scienceofhumanwriting.substack.com/p/how-to-tea...
The Science of Human Writing | Catherine Johnson | Substack
Click to read The Science of Human Writing, by Catherine Johnson, a Substack publication.
scienceofhumanwriting.substack.com
"The HoloBoard, the HoloLens, the HoloGaze, the LetterBox: all of it rings so hollow. & it’s painful to think of how all the financial & intellectual capital that went into these projects might have been spent on to improve, rather than to diminish, the fragile lives of minimal speakers w/ autism."
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 10mo agoCan HoloLens lessons liberate S2Ced individuals from their facilitators?--Plus a recap Jaswal et al.’s 2023-2025 virtual reality oeuvre www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/can-hol...
"We can only wonder what the excluded data would have suggested to their readers about language and literacy skills in non-speaking autism"
FCisNotScience@fcisnotscience.bsky.social · 10mo agoCan the Hologaze liberate S2Ced individuals from their facilitators? www.facilitatedcommunication.org/blog/can-the...
"It’s the actions ppl take after they access scientific evidence that counts the most. Do they go deeper into their belief system or do they follow the science? Do they take facilitator claims on face value? Or do they set up authorship testing before implementing the program?"
Katharine Beals@katharinebeals.bsky.social · 11mo agoI’m not sure what this extremely slow letter selection process means, but it isn’t good news for those who wish to make claims about intact language comprehension and literacy in S2C-ed individuals.
