Temple Grandin on Visual Thinking: Why Schools Need Hands-On Learning ~ 1013

Tim Villegas
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 in 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.

Tim Villegas
Dr. Temple Grandin, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast.

Temple Grandin
It’s great to be here.

Tim Villegas
So is it okay if I call you Temple or Dr. Grandin?

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

Tim Villegas
Yeah, fantastic. You’ve written a number of books—The Autistic Brain, 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
What triggered that was two trips I did right before COVID shut everything down. I went to two state-of-the-art pork processing plants and one poultry processing plant, brand new ones, and the Steve Jobs Theater. And I discovered there’s a lot of things that we’re not making.

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.

Temple Grandin
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. I stood in the middle of that theater screaming, “We don’t make it anymore.” That was one of the things that triggered doing this book.

Then the lockdown came, so I called up Betsy Lerner, my co-author, and said, “Let’s do the book.” We both had nothing else to do, so we did the book. But the events that motivated the theme of the book are a skill-loss issue.

Check out the people fixing escalators, the people fixing elevators, your mechanic who comes on the plane to fix your plane—they’re getting grayer and older, and they’re not getting replaced. It goes back to the educational system.

When I did The Autistic Brain, I discovered there was the object visualizer and the pattern thinker. The kind of thinker I am is the one that can’t do algebra—cannot do algebra. They’re in what I call the clever engineering department.

I went back to projects where I spent a lot of time out in big plants. It was an interesting division of engineering: the degreed engineer would do the more mathematical things—boilers, refrigeration, roof wind loads, snow load, power, and water—but the guys in the shop with no degrees were doing what I call clever engineering, mechanically clever packaging machines, for example. Those are the people who are not getting replaced—the people who invent mechanically complicated equipment used in food processing and other industries.

Tim Villegas
What was it about why these certain products or machines are being made in Holland? What about their educational system?

Temple Grandin
In Holland and in Europe, the kids around 14 can choose the university route or the technical/vocational route. They don’t look at the vocational route as a lesser form of intelligence. I think completely in pictures and can’t do higher math. I have no abstract thinking. Figuring out how mechanical things work is easy.

I went back through projects I’ve worked on and started writing down the people. I estimate 20% of the people who designed machinery—doing drawings and inventing machinery with about 20 patents each—were autistic, dyslexic, or ADHD. They were the kids whom the shop teacher turned around. That motivated me to do this book.

Tim Villegas
In the book, you talk about object visualizers and spatial visualizers.

Temple Grandin
That’s right. Spatial visualizers think more in patterns—patterns instead of photorealistic pictures. Everything I think about is a photorealistic picture.

I was just at a big corporation yesterday that works in travel. We were trying to help blind and Deaf people get to the airport. A blind person there said, “The worst thing I have at airports is I can’t find the gates.” I started thinking up a way to do a gate-finder app for his phone—maybe put little transponders on the gates, so as he walks through the terminal it will say “A60, A62,” and announce the gates as you walk by them.

I can use off-the-shelf technology to do that. It’s simple.

Tim Villegas
I would think some airports naturally do something like that, right? Or is that not common?

Temple Grandin
We want to do something that doesn’t cost a lot of money. I think very simple. The programmer wants to put more and more stuff on it.

Now, the Deaf person—I’m going to classify gates at the airport as “visible gates” and “auditory gates.” I see it. I see the exact door at our Denver airport where four or five flights are coming out of one door and you can’t see any aircraft, so you’re totally dependent on hearing the announcement. That’s an auditory gate.

A visible gate: I can see people line up and there’s one door, one aircraft. If I were Deaf, I’m not going to miss those flights.

I just see it, and I see it at specific airports. I travel a lot. I try to think: what’s the simple way to do it? We could train the gate agents to talk back and forth using a text function on the phone. If they have a Deaf person at an auditory gate, they need to tap that person on the shoulder to get them hooked up to the door. That would be easy to do.

Tim Villegas
Are you familiar with the framework of universal design?

Temple Grandin
Yes. For example, subtitles on programs—every bar is using that now. It was originally designed for people who were hearing-impaired.

Tim Villegas
There’s a definite movement in education to bring the concept of universal design into curriculum. You have a number of learners in the classroom who may or may not have different learning styles or ways of learning and different—

Temple Grandin
Brains. In the state of California, I wouldn’t have been able to graduate high school because I can’t do the math requirements.

Tim Villegas
Right. Exactly.

Temple Grandin
The people I worked with who had 20 patents each were also terrible at math—higher math. They could do arithmetic.

Tim Villegas
In the book, you talk about how we’re screening out kids—we’re screening out—

Temple Grandin
What I call the clever engineering department. They’re also super good at photography. I’ve talked to a lot of news crews—TV and movie photographers. Many are dyslexic or ADHD, and they got exposed to cameras and were able to get into that field.

Also animals—animals don’t live in a word-based world; they live in a sensory-based world. It’s sensory-based, not word-based. In the discussion about animal consciousness (I just read an article yesterday in The New York Times: “Could a computer be conscious?”), some people think you’d have to think in words to be conscious. Well then, I guess I’m not conscious.

As a designer, if I want to figure out how to help blind and Deaf people at the airport—I’ve had a lot of success in getting the livestock industry to change because I was able to fix a lot of stuff without buying tons of expensive equipment. Management, repairs, nonslip flooring, simple changes. That’s one reason I was successful.

I immediately think: what simple things can I do? At Denver Airport, I can say, “That’s an auditory gate—two doors—horrible. I’ve almost missed flights there.” The other gates: I can see the plane roll up. Even if I can’t see the plane, I can see people line up at the door. I tend to tune out announcements, so I look at the door. When I see people getting up and lining up, then I know to line up.

Tim Villegas
What you’re saying is if you make practical, simple changes to an environment to make things more accessible—whether that’s for people or for animals—

Temple Grandin
Exactly. Wheelchair ramps on new construction don’t cost hardly anything, and then you use them for everything else—food deliveries and things. I see wheelchair ramps used for that.

Tim Villegas
The things you’ve done for animal welfare seem to have changed the industry in a positive way.

Temple Grandin
It’s very simple. I’ve trained a lot of people how to do audits and cattle handling. You have to have really simple, clear guidance. A lot of stuff gets very abstract and vague.

Let’s say I’m going to train an auditor to audit animal welfare at a meat plant. I have a day-and-a-half workshop to do that. I developed a very simple scoring system where they score electric prod use, stunning efficacy—things that are easy to measure. You have to figure out what are the important things to measure.

It’s like traffic on the highway: if I can only measure five things to enforce safety, it’s drunk driving, speeding, running red lights and stop signs, texting, and seatbelts. Those are the critical control points for traffic.

Tim Villegas
That’s a good point. We talked about enforcement—you can have checklists and audits and say these things are wrong and need to be fixed. But if there’s no accountability to fix the problems, they stay the same.

Temple Grandin
You’re measuring outcomes. We measure slipping and falling during handling, measure electric prod blows, measure cattle vocalizing during handling, because if they’re vocalizing, you’re doing something nasty to them—electric prod, slamming a door on them—something bad’s happening.

In food safety, we have the concept HACCP—Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points. What are the critical outcome measures to measure?

I have a day-and-a-half workshop training an auditor. One of my students is an auditor right now. They have to have three shadow audits with an experienced auditor, and then you turn them loose. I had lunch with my student who’s now an auditor: “Let me show you some really good scoring tools for laying hens on feather condition.” We looked them up. “You need to use these websites.” But you’ve got to have simple guidance they can do. There’s a tendency to get things way too complicated.

Tim Villegas
A big concern you bring up in the book is learners on the autism spectrum who spend too much time playing video games or being lost in whatever—

Temple Grandin
Getting good jobs—there’s probably 100 students for every slot in video gaming. I’ll tell you one way to get them off video games. There have been real successes with young adults introducing car mechanics, where they’ve gotten jobs. They discover engines are more interesting than video games.

We’ve got kids growing up today who’ve never used tools. They don’t cook; they don’t sew. I had a girl in my class who had never used a ruler to measure anything last year. They’re not making and doing. You have to be introduced to different things to find out what you love and what you hate. How can you find out if you like working on cars if you’re never introduced to any of that?

People ask me what I would do for the schools: put all the hands-on classes back in—shop.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, give me—

Temple Grandin
Sewing, art, theater, music—all of these things. Some states are starting to do it.

Tim Villegas
I’m thinking about the districts here in Georgia where I live. They still have all of those. The interesting thing is those classes aren’t always accessible to people with more significant disabilities, or people with—

Temple Grandin
When you think of autism, with an autism diagnosis, you’re going from Einstein—who would definitely land in an autism class today because he didn’t talk until he was three (they don’t talk, they go to an autism class). What would happen to him today? You go from Einstein to somebody who cannot dress themselves—and it all has the same name.

Tim Villegas
When you’re talking about the kind of support a learner might need, one might need more support than the other—someone who is speaking versus non-speaking, or life skills—

Temple Grandin
Some of the ones who cannot speak actually describe problems—sensory scrambling problems, not being able to control their movements—and they can type independently without being touched. There are good books on that too, like How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move?

Tim Villegas
How can we make sure those hands-on classes are also available to people who have high support needs—who are learning how to spell to communicate or type to communicate?

Temple Grandin
I can tell when you need to do something. I’ve been on elevators with doors that weren’t working right—skipping floors, scraping in the shaft. I’m back to full travel now, and these issues have surfaced. I notice that stuff. A brand-new escalator at one of the airports is already squeaking.

Tim Villegas
In your view, one big way to handle that is to bring these more technical classes back into the schools.

Temple Grandin
That’s right. There’s a tendency to say everyone must go to university. I know a guy who took a welding class in high school—he was not autistic—started a tiny steel and concrete construction company, and now has a big construction company and a corporate jet. Very successful.

I think many verbal thinkers don’t even know visual thinking like mine exists. At a book signing for Visual Thinking in October, I did a talk at a school and spoke to the principal. He didn’t even know my kind of thinking existed. I was talking about how I think.

Tim Villegas
Is there any connection between being a visual thinker and autism or neurodiversity?

Temple Grandin
In autism, most people have different kinds of thinking: the object visualizer who thinks in photorealistic pictures (horrible at abstract math), the mathematical person who thinks in patterns, and the verbal thinker. Most people are mixtures. On the autism spectrum, you tend to get an extreme—extreme object visualizer or extreme mathematician. Autism can come in all three flavors of thinking.

A verbal thinker might know every fact about baseball or some other special interest. They can be really good at specialized retail sales if they get social coaching on interacting with customers. I worked with people who were definitely autistic and had 20 patents each.

Tim Villegas
You said the principal at the school didn’t know visual thinking was even a thing. What do you think—

Temple Grandin
—It was a thing.

Tim Villegas
What do educators need to know about visual thinkers and how to spot them?

Temple Grandin
If you have a lot of hands-on classes, visual thinkers are often very good at art. Art and mechanics go together. They’re really good at building things and understanding mechanical things—if they have access to them. Pattern thinkers—let’s teach those kids computer programming and higher math.

I talked to a family the other day—their six-year-old is bored stiff with “baby math.” Move him ahead. Bored kids turn into behavior problems. If he can do high school math at seven, let him do it. He may need help with reading.

Tim Villegas
Is it a problem in how we’ve constructed our standards—that we’re requiring too much of one kind of math?

Temple Grandin
That’s part of the problem. Someone like me should take business math, which I can do—invoice clients, cost out jobs, do payroll—the stuff you need to do. Fortunately I had a very good mentor, a contractor who saw my drawing ability. I can show you some drawings. The way I used to sell jobs: I would show my drawings.

Tim Villegas
Can you describe the drawing?

Temple Grandin
It’s a drawing for a beef packing plant ramp system. You might wonder why it’s curved. Cattle like to go back to where they came from. Also, by making it curved they don’t see commotion that might be going on at the other end. That’s another reason.

Tim Villegas
Did you write about that in Thinking in Pictures?

Temple Grandin
I wrote about that in Thinking in Pictures. At the time I didn’t know there was scientific research showing a difference between an object visualizer and visual-spatial. In Visual Thinking, I looked up that research. There’s been quite a lot.

Tim Villegas
You’re still a professor at Colorado State University?

Temple Grandin
Animal Science at Colorado State University—livestock handling and behavior. An animal lives in a sensory-based world, not a word-based world. I tell students: if you want to understand your puppy, you’ve got to get away from verbal language. What’s your puppy smelling? What’s he seeing? He has a nose that’s 100 times more sensitive than ours.

I just read new research from Cornell University with high-definition brain scanning. They found that the dog has a big “internet” circuit from the old olfactory areas of the brain to the visual cortex. Think smell-pictures.

Tim Villegas
Right—pictures.

Temple Grandin
I took one look at those brain scans from Cornell and said, “Wow, that’s trippy. Imagine that.”

Tim Villegas
You’ve mentioned that if someone says a word, you have a lot of different pictures—

Temple Grandin
In the HBO movie about me, there’s a scene where when he says “shoe,” the word “shoe,” a whole bunch of shoes come up.

Tim Villegas
Did they use images that match how you would describe it?

Temple Grandin
They used 1950s and 1960s pictures of shoes, and they came up like a series of PowerPoint slides—or, in my generation, 35mm slides.

Tim Villegas
Now PowerPoint slides—exactly. So that would be the same if a dog’s sense of smell triggers pictures as well?

Temple Grandin
What I don’t know—I just know the new research shows the dog has this gigantic circuit in the brain. This was discovered in the last year. The olfactory areas have wired up to the visual cortex. Maybe he makes a smell picture and “sees” different smells. I don’t know. All I know is that circuit is there.

Tim Villegas
In the book, you make the connection between how we undervalue animals because they’re not verbal—they don’t—

Temple Grandin
We still have a discussion going on where some people say maybe a puppy is not truly conscious. I don’t think you believe your puppy is not conscious. A lot of this gets down to people who are very verbal-based and might have a hard time imagining how you could think without words. Well, I can think without words.

I was just at a big corporate meeting discussing airport access for blind and Deaf travelers. I started getting pictures of different airports I’ve been in and imagining a blind person with an app on his phone. As he walks, the gate numbers are announced. How does it read the gate numbers without a complicated artificial intelligence program? I can take little transponders—maybe like what they use for toll roads—and stick them on the gate signs. That’s off-the-shelf technology, so it won’t cost a fortune. I’m always trying to do something simple and practical so the airport can’t give you a reason for not doing it.

Tim Villegas
Educational advocates who want to change things in schools—that’s a lesson we can learn: find practical things that don’t cost money.

Temple Grandin
That’s what I did in meatpacking plants. I trained the McDonald’s people how to inspect the plants and use my scoring system. It was simple. The plant had five numbers it had to make. Out of 75 plants—the biggest in the country, beef and pork—only three had to buy expensive stuff. All the others we did with things like nonslip flooring. That’s not a capital expense.

Animals balking—cows afraid of the dark—training. And three plant managers had to be removed.

Tim Villegas
Because it does come down to people—management—don’t you think?

Temple Grandin
Oh, yes. I’d say half the fixes are management. That’s one of the most important things you can do. And we constantly have to stay after it.

Tim Villegas
Something in the book I wanted to discuss: the “disability trap” or having a “disability mindset.” What does that mean?

Temple Grandin
I see too many parents with a kid who’s autistic, maybe doing well in high school and getting good grades, but not learning work skills or life skills—shopping, money, laundry. Parents can’t let go and get their child out doing things like going into a store and buying something themselves.

This is where parents are almost holding them back. They’re not learning how to do enough stuff.

Tim Villegas
What are families falling into?

Temple Grandin
They get locked into the label. I have another book, Navigating Autism, with Debra Moore. The premise is parents get so locked into the label they don’t see what the child can do. Okay, I can’t do algebra—that’s not going to happen. There’s a whole bunch of other stuff I can do.

Stephen Hawking, the famous scientist, shortly before he died told The New York Times: “Concentrate on those things your disability does not prevent you from doing well.” He could do math in his head super well. That’s what he did.

I’ve seen this over and over: a 16-year-old doing well in school, good grades, never has gone into a store and bought something by themselves. That’s getting locked into the label.

Tim Villegas
That seems like a problem. Regardless of any disability label, you still want—

Temple Grandin
I’ve worked with people who had 20 patents each. The industry is using their stuff. Since they’re not disclosed, I have to be vague about things they made. If you’re in the livestock industry, you’ve seen the stuff.

Tim Villegas
Also in the book, you seem critical of autistic people who want to build a business around speaking about autism or advocacy.

Temple Grandin
I’m not against advocacy, but I tell them you’re a better advocate if you can talk about how you got a job and held that job. One thing I learned was to sell my work.

I sold Cargill by showing a drawing very similar to the one your listeners won’t be able to see. I sent them a drawing and pictures of jobs. I learned to sell my work. They took one look at those things and I sold Cargill. I designed the front end of every Cargill beef plant in North America—that steel and concrete work and mechanical stuff too.

Tim Villegas
So you weren’t getting jobs because you were autistic—

Temple Grandin
In the ’70s, the biggest barrier for me was being a woman. Autism was not an issue. Being a woman—huge issue. But I recognized doors to opportunity. There’s a scene in the movie where I get the editor’s card, and I realized if I wrote for our state farm magazine, that would help my career. I got a reputation for covering industry meetings accurately.

Tim Villegas
So you used the strengths you had.

Temple Grandin
Fortunately, I learned how to write. Many students today have terrible writing skills because they never had teachers mark up their work and make them correct the grammar.

Tim Villegas
As much as you say you’re a visual thinker, you’re an excellent communicator via words. Are words also visual for you?

Temple Grandin
When I say words, right now I just saw the alphabet in my third-grade classroom posted over the green board. That picture flashed into my mind. I narrate the pictures. You must be a real verbal thinker.

Tim Villegas
I guess. When I try to fall asleep, I think about the things I need to do for the next day—

Temple Grandin
When I think about the things I’m going to do for the next day—tomorrow I have a seminar—I’m seeing the building right now, the classrooms where we’ll be meeting. I teach my course there.

Tim Villegas
I guess I am more of a verbal thinker. Audio is something I really enjoy. Because of the podcast, I enjoy producing audio and doing interviews. I consume a lot of content with audio and retain information that way rather than—

Temple Grandin
You would rather read it?

Tim Villegas
I enjoy reading, but if I have a choice, I’ll pick the audio.

Temple Grandin
I don’t retain audio. If I have to listen to audio and retain it, I have to take notes.

Tim Villegas
If I read it, I have to take notes.

Temple Grandin
I’d rather read it. If I have to listen to audio and remember important things, I need to write it down.

Tim Villegas
So I would be much more auditory—

Temple Grandin
Much more verbal.

I do a lot of talks with big corporations. The first step is realizing that different types of thinking exist and the things they can do for the company.

A tech company with a travel website: I can work on the interface; the programmers work on how it works. When I signed in at their corporate office, I managed to erase my signature five times because I kept pressing the wrong thing. I think they’re going to change their interface.

With one airline, you go to check in and they want to get you on other flights because they’re packed. They want you to click “Got it,” and I go, “Wait a minute—if I click ‘Got it,’ am I going to erase my reservation?” Now I know with that airline it will not erase my reservation, but the first time I thought it might. That’s not the best interface.

Tim Villegas
Are you good directionally—do you have a map in your head for where to go?

Temple Grandin
I despise just using GPS because it tells me too late when to turn. I prefer to get on Google Maps, warm up my whole route so I see it in my head, and then make a little checklist of each turn—“50 miles I-70 east to exit number… Next bullet: exit 316, turn right south,” something like that. I see the overall map. I’m not a sequential thinker. I want to look at the map and know where I’m going before I go.

Tim Villegas
Do you consider yourself a spokesperson for the autism community?

Temple Grandin
I’m one person who tells lived experiences. I’m in my 70s now. I want to see kids who are different get out and get great careers. The most fun stuff the autistic people I know did was designing equipment—skilled trades, designing, drafting. The most fun we had was sitting around discussing how to build things. That was really fun.

I want kids who are different to get those fun jobs, or if they’re mathematical types, to get good tech jobs where they’re really good programmers. I’ve had parents say, “Once we got the kid out working in a job they really liked, he blossomed; she blossomed.” I hear that over and over. We need the skills, especially object visualizers.

Tim Villegas
That’s the premise of the book—you want people to know these types of thinking—

Temple Grandin
—all exist. When a kid gets a label—dyslexic, ADHD, or autism—you tend to have more extremes: an extreme object visualizer, an extreme mathematician, or an extreme word thinker, whereas so-called “regular” people are more mixtures.

Tim Villegas
How can schools specifically support all learners?

Temple Grandin
A lot of it varies by state. Have all the hands-on classes in the schools. See what the kid gravitates toward. What I’m finding with careers: you’ve got to have exposure—maybe a single welding class, or a music class.

I was exposed to musical instruments. I was horrible at playing them, but I was exposed. I had a chance to use the same computer Bill Gates used—the exact same computer. He could do it; I couldn’t. But I was exposed to it. I’m a big fan of exposing students to lots of different stuff. For many people it’s exposure first, then mentoring.

Tim Villegas
What does mentoring look like? There are far too few school counselors.

Temple Grandin
I had a great science teacher. I wasn’t interested in studying. He gave me interesting projects. I got motivated to study because I wanted to become a scientist. I now had a reason to study. He was an important mentor.

Then there was Jim the contractor—starting a little steel and concrete business, former Marine Corps captain. He sought me out. He showed me how to set up my business. I didn’t know how to do that. That’s mentoring.

People ask me how to get into the cattle industry. I came from back East. I got exposed as a teenager on my aunt’s ranch. It’s exposure first, then mentoring.

A lot of people on the autism spectrum who’ve been successful in the workplace have their own businesses. The people I worked with who were definitely autistic owned their own businesses. They usually have to have someone else help with the business part—payroll, ordering materials, bidding jobs.

Another problem is many educators don’t know anything about industrial stuff. They haven’t been in factories—most of them.

Tim Villegas
That’s not their education.

Temple Grandin
No. Where we’re really losing it is with object visualizers like me. Elevator and escalator people are getting older and older. We need those skills.

Tim Villegas
Any other thoughts you want educators to understand about visual thinkers?

Temple Grandin
First, know they exist. We’re going to have to start looking at some of these math requirements. Kids who go the tech route in Europe might do business math—which is arithmetic. I have no problem with that.

I use an algebraic formula—π × radius²—to size hydraulic cylinders, because that’s a formula for a very specific thing. That I would know how to do. But math in the abstract? No—I can’t remember it. There’s nothing to visualize.

I’ve had so many people tell me, “I’m one of those kids who flunked algebra three times; I can’t become a veterinary technician.” You don’t need abstract algebra to be a veterinarian or a veterinary technician.

Tim Villegas
There’s a lesson for educators: we have different kinds of thinkers; we should be designing and supporting—

Temple Grandin
—pre-skills. In a food processing plant, the degreed engineer does the more mathematical parts—wind load, snow load, power, water, boilers, refrigeration. The people in the shop—who maybe start out with a welding class—are designing the clever, mechanically clever equipment. More and more of that’s coming from Italy and Holland.

If you look up the educational systems in those countries, kids can go the university route or tech route. In Italy they have a third thing—an art route—because isn’t that an industry?

Tim Villegas
Isn’t that an argument for project-based learning? We should be moving—

Temple Grandin
We need to look at the ultimate goal of education: where is the student 10 years after high school? I was doing the projects shown in the movie 10 years after high school. One thing that motivated me to do those projects was that I wanted to prove to people I was not stupid. That motivated me.

Tim Villegas
Working on projects together with different kinds of learners seems more like a real-world application.

Temple Grandin
In Visual Thinking I tend to be disorganized because my thinking is associational. I wrote the rough drafts for the chapters, and Betsy, my verbal co-author, rearranged and made it more linear for verbal thinkers. We deliberately had complementary skills.

I wrote Visual Thinking because I’m very concerned about skill loss. I’m seeing too many smart kids who would be very good at mechanical things, art, photography, or working with animals just playing video games in the basement rather than being in a job they’d really love. And I see mathematical thinkers—young kids getting behavior problems in school because you’re making them do baby math. They need to be moved ahead into more advanced math.

Tim Villegas
Dr. Temple Grandin, thank you so much for being on the Think Inclusive podcast. We appreciate your time.

Temple Grandin
It was great to be here.

Tim Villegas
Think Inclusive is written, edited, and sound designed by Tim Villegas and is a production of MCIE. Original music by Miles Kredich.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, here are some ways you can help our podcast grow: share it with your friends, family, and colleagues. And if you haven’t already, give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Special thanks to our patrons—Melissa H., Sonia A., Pamela P., Mark C., Kathy B., Kathleen T., Jarrett T., Gabby M., Aaron P., and Paulette W.—for their support of Think Inclusive.

For more information about inclusive education, or to learn how MCIE can partner with you and your school or district, visit MCIE.org.

One last thing: Temple wrote an op-ed in The New York Times called “Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All.” I’m going to put a link in the show notes. It should be unlocked—hopefully it’ll stay that way. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks for your time and attention. And remember, inclusion always works.