Hi. I'm Natalie. I'm a sociologist, and I got interested in ADHD when I was diagnosed a few years ago. And this set me down a bit of a rabbit hole as is often very common, but I am in the very privileged position where I could reframe this obsessive investigation as work. So as part of this, I have been looking into literature around ADHD within tertiary education and particularly interested in qualitative literature. So people expressing their own experiences and saying in their own words what has worked for them. I also tried to use ADHD to inform my own teaching for really for all of my students. And I think it was particularly important in.

Situations such as these past few years when people had a lot on their plate and anything that you can do to help people overcome small barriers and and be engaged with topics can really make quite a difference. So an important need is working towards students' strengths. So letting students know what their strengths are and and augmenting them, playing with them. This is important for so many reasons. One, you don't want your students to be aiming to be surviving. Right? Like, work really hard and you might be good enough. You want them to be thriving. This feels so much better, but it's also good for things that the university quite likes, like retention completion.

But it also means that you get to have those strengths, and those strengths are so valuable. You know, you want these strengths in in your classroom discussions. You want them in your graduate profile. You perhaps want them contributing to your your discipline later. So this is really beneficial for everybody. And as documented strength of people with ADHD is divergent thinking. So this is generating ideas or multiple solutions to a problem where it's where it's open ended. Right? So the alternative is convergent thinking where there is one solution. And if you're a student, the idea is that you either get to it or you don't.

And when I say staff students with ADHD are good at this, I mean that in a number of studies trying to measure this, people with ADHD have performed better than non ADHD control groups. And so there has been a few ways to try and incorporate this into teaching students with Overseas has been some really interesting work done with assessments, so getting people to do project based assessments rather than where they can really go deeply into a topic. And this, of course, enables people also to build on their passions and really get involved with them, which is something that also suits people with ADHD very, very well. I have not been able to.

Generate assessments yet, but I do incorporate this principle into my teaching. This includes building on students' experiences. I'm in I'm in the social sciences, so students' experiences are really rich and and valid fodder. This also involves the use of provocations. So questions, issues that are really important to the discipline or for the subject of that week that are open ended. Right? There's no eventual answer. They're unresolved. So the lecture content itself will give students pools to try and address this, but they are by no means going to encapsulate it completely. So an example of this is in a sociology lecture about going beyond the white middle class founding fathers. And the question we used was.

What shapes what you can think? And we returned to this multiple times and multiple discussions over the course of two hour lecture. We had such great discussions. I can really see students that I know have ADHD contributing really well to this and and driving the conversation forward. ADHD students can also bring a lot of enthusiasm to discussion when they are when they are engaged, and it it it becomes a joy to teach. So there are you can see in there that here, there, and then there's lots of reasons for doing that. You've got these students engaged. They're thinking.

But also everybody else is benefiting from their thoughts as well. The conversation is genuinely better than it would have been otherwise, and I think everyone wins because of that.