S10E13 Temple Grandin | Visual Thinking

Tim Villegas46min

Tim Villegas

00:00

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

01:54

It's great to be here.

Tim Villegas

01:56

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

Temple Grandin

01:59

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

Tim Villegas

02:05

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

02:20

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

Processing audio...