Why People with Dyslexia Make Great Engineers, featuring Dr Michael Woodrow

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD (INTRO)

Hello, and welcome to series two of The Greatest Good, a UCL Press podcast. 

Jeremy Bentham, the late 18^th and early 19^th century philosopher, was the intellectual inspiration for the founding of University College London and is credited with the maxim that actions should be judged by the amount of happiness that each produces.

I’m your host, Professor Philip Schofield, Director of the Bentham Project here at UCL. Join me as I explore the ways in which Bentham’s thought is still relevant in the 21^st century.

In this series, we focus on the intersection of Bentham’s ideas with current research into how we understand the human mind, in conversation with leading UCL academics. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Okay, hello Michael, and thank you for joining us. Please would you tell us something about your research into engineering and neurodiversity?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Sure. Well, thanks very much for inviting me to be here. My name is Michael Woodrow, and I’m a lecturer in engineering education here at UCL. And my research is really education, and in line with our head of department, Professor Jose Torero, we’ve been trying to shift the narrative from research-led education, this idea that an academic lives in their ivory tower and comes up with these crazy ideas and these life-changing ideas and then walks into a room and pontificates and educates the populace or the students in most cases. We’re trying to flip that and to create education-led research where, through most of my academic studies, it’s the students who are driving the research, it’s the students who are bringing the ideas. They’re the ones teaching me in many cases and it’s learning with them. 

And I think in this particular instance with this paper on neurodiversity and inclusive workspaces, it was a student who came to me and said that she was really fascinated by this idea that we could adapt our workspaces in order to align better with our way of thinking. And how could that be done in a way that was a more sort of concerted effort and it’s in a way that we could actually gather data and use that data in order to inform better design decisions.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So, will you tell us about some of those results?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

So the first thing that we found out was that it was heavily dependent on the individual. And the thing about neurodiversity is that often people are sort of lumped together. We found out very, very quickly in our research that that was actually very counterproductive and that you really need to embrace the fact that it is a neurodiversity spectrum. Essentially everyone is an individual and everyone needs separate things, particularly when you’re trying to increase productivity.

The second thing is that was probably the most important thing that came out of it, even though we were looking at things like lighting, we were looking at furniture, we were looking at whether there was plants in the room or whether you were working in a kitchen or in a bedroom or in a study or in a living room. Above all of these things, the second most important thing that we realized was that people had to have choice. There was something that came through very strongly irrespective of whether or not someone had plants or whether or not someone had the window open or the window closed. It was the fact that they had the choice to have that plant or the choice to open or close that window that was so much more important. If you look at many work environments, including my office in UCL, I don’t have the choice to open the window. It’s for whatever reason, nailed shut. But that came through very strongly that in most cases, people are looking for that autonomy. They need that ability to have just a little bit of control over their environment. And all of a sudden, the stress dissipates, their comfort increases and their productivity increases.

With respect to the individual, it was acknowledged that many of the people who we interviewed and of the people who filled out our surveys did not just have one form of neurodivergence. They had what are called comorbidities. So that means that they might have autism and ADHD, or they might have autism and dyslexia, or some of them even had a physical impairment combined with a form of neurodiversity. And I think sometimes those actually created conflicts and created where if you were to follow a sort of a standard way of setting up a room or workspace, because people had those comorbidities and might have actually created an issue for either the way in which they think or the way in which they need to move.

And I think that what was really fascinating was seeing how there was some items that were absolutely necessary for some people and were the worst thing possible for others. And so some people didn’t want anyone to walk in on their work. They didn’t want it to be disturbed. They wanted to be alone in their own environment, in their own space, and others couldn’t concentrate if they did not have that sort of stimulation, that feeling that there was other people around. In the end, the conclusion really was that there was no standard that can be applied across all people, across all of these spectrums that we’d identified. And I think that was in itself really interesting.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

So if you were putting up a new student centre, you would then have a diverse group of spaces rather than rows and rows of desks all the same?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Probably – the the reason I’m saying probably is because even though that sounds like a fantastic idea we still don’t know the percentages of what the student body actually wants in terms of their seating, the way in which they want to work. The first thing I would do is to try to gather as much information as I could from as wide a group of students as possible to try and find out what is the ratio of, for example, open plan desk space to individual desk space – because I actually have no idea. I mean, it sounds like a great idea to have a range, but…

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

But how much of each?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Yeah, how much of each and where?

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

And what, and how, because there’s all sorts of ways.

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Yeah, and there’s no right or wrong. And to be able to gather that data, I think, is a step that we’ve never really bothered to do or never felt the need to do. We just, you know, someone makes a decision. Okay, we need X number of desks because we have X number of students. Where can we fit them in on this building footprint with the building of these dimensions? You know, this seems like a reasonable layout. We tick the box for having a cafe. We tick the box for having a reception, a security area. We have circulation space. We have the core with the toilets and the staircase. Okay, so all we have left is this space. So we divided it up and we put in the desks and we’re done.

But actually, if we took that a bit further and we incorporated, you know, any kind of survey or community engagement with the student body, I think we can gather some fantastic data on the student body that could allow us to design our buildings much more efficiently, even though when you finish the building, most people wouldn’t notice the difference. You know, they wouldn’t really realize that all of this additional research and data had gone into its design.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

Yeah, I mean, of course, you would say, well, what are the resource implications? But if you’re doing that as part of a new build or you’re reconfiguring the space anyway, then it’s not going to cost anything more, or a little more. 

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

I think there is a tacit acknowledgement that this is necessary, I think. 

We had a student last year; he was a fantastic student. He was really, really motivated – or still is really motivated; I still work with him on a weekly basis. But while he was a student, he applied for £20,000 from a UK research institute to fund a project in Nepal, where he was from. So his idea was to set up, in collaboration with the local NGO in Nepal, community-based focus groups. All he did was ask people, ‘would you want to be involved in a focus group, in a committee, in a discussion, in an interview, where you got to share your ideas about how to make your village more accessible?’ And that was it, just gathering information. 

After one year, they knew what the community wanted and what the community needed to make the area more accessible. And the things that they came up with were nothing like anything that I would have dreamed of as an engineer. I’d be sitting there thinking, maybe something to help with the ramps, or I don’t know, maybe you could create some lift somewhere. But in reality, people were saying, well, actually, what we would really love is a bus stop and a road crossing, and we need the market to be flat and accessible.  And actually, when you look at it as an engineer, all of those things are super easy. So really, if you do put in the money upfront to find out what your users want to need, actually, resulting engineering and putting into practice is often very straightforward, and often a fraction of the cost of some of the interventions that are conventionally associated with accessibility.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

I’m reminded of what Bentham said in terms of, if you want to know what gives people pleasure, you know, ask them – you know, they know better than anybody else what gives them pleasure. 

And so it’s the same sort of principle, go and ask the people: what’s bugging you? So that’s sort of what you were saying earlier about having some control over your environment. 

I mean, can I just bring you onto the research you’ve done into the qualities needed for an engineer?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

Yeah. So I went through school and university always, you know, thinking that I was just a bit weird, you know I was excelling in some things and not in others. And my older brother had been diagnosed as dyslexic when he was age six, I think. I mean, he couldn’t spell anything. I mean, he was head boy of a school he couldn’t spell the name of. So, I could see well, you know, I don’t think I’m dyslexic because I can see he’s really dyslexic, and, you know, I can spell things just fine. 

But then I got to the end of my five-year engineering degree up in Scotland and started my PhD. And I started my PhD in engineering education largely because I could see that there were significant improvements that could be made in the way which my degree had been set up and the experience that I had had as an undergraduate. And like most people, I started off looking at the content, really like focusing on the knowledge that needed to be imparted to the students, transferred, if you will, to the students. I very quickly realized, you know, within the first sort of two or three weeks of the term starting that that was a fool’s errand and that was not the point of education, and that actually we have Google, and the students have Google, and they can find most of humanity’s knowledge if they want it. Really what was necessary was for people to, for the students to, actually want to go looking for it. 

What was necessary was the motivation to learn and how, and so then the question shifted to well, how do I sort of create that drive, that motivation, to want to go and learn? So, my PhD shifted onto that, but as part of it I wanted to find out, you know, how could I create the optimal learning environment where people felt this urge to want to learn and most importantly everyone felt the same urge, like felt that same motivation and how do I incorporate everyone? I mean, everyone thinks so differently. So, then I came up with this idea of profiling the student sand trying to assess their mindset, trying to assess the way that they think, their sort of attributes if you will. So, I asked them a series of questions on a sliding scale to see, you know, how far on each end of various spectrums they were, and I started assessing this against attributes that are sort of commonly associated with being very, very desirable attributes in an engineer. Things like creativity, critical thinking, divergent thinking, you know, big-picture thinking – these attributes that most people would say, ‘oh, absolutely, you know that’s exactly what I’m looking for in a graduate. That’s what I want in my company. That’s what I want in my community. That’s definitely what I want in an engineer.’ 

And I started writing these out, and generally the way that I was working at that time in my PhD, if I wanted to find out what anyone has said about this in the academic literature, I would just take the words that I was looking for, you know ‘engineering education’, whatever, I would put it into Google and I would try to find a paper. In this case, I took all of these attributes – creativity, critical thinking, divergent thinking, etc. – and I took these attributes and I put them into Google and started looking for a paper. Only, instead of coming up with a list of academic papers, it came up with a list of websites with symptoms of dyslexia, and when, I was kind of surprised about this so I clicked on one of the links and I looked, and sure enough, all of my attributes were in there – including another couple at the bottom that I hadn’t considered that I thought would also be excellent attributes for a practicing engineer. And I thought this was really odd because I’d always associated dyslexia with a learning disability, you know, with a learning defect, you know, something that was very negative that – you know, if you go on to the NHS website, it talks about people being  challenged in school, facing difficulties in school; it’s all very, very negative. And so I had grown up with that association with dyslexia, and so now I’m staring at this list and I’m seeing, no, that on the contrary, this is exactly what we want in our graduates. 

And so I took it to my supervisor and I showed him and I said, ‘what do you think about this?’ And he read it and he looks up at me and he said, ‘so you want to turn our students into dyslexics?’ And I said ‘no, I don’t think that’s possible. I think dyslexia is a hardware issue – teaching them stuff, that’s a software issue. I don’t think we can fundamentally change who they are and how their brain works; I think we need to start with dyslexic students and teach them engineering knowledge, because I think they’re already predisposed to think a certain way that is perfectly aligned with engineering practice’. And that was the first insight that I had into the idea that the neurodivergent people not only are relevant in today’s society and can contribute, but could actually contribute in a way that significantly exceeds neurotypical individuals. Simply because of the way that they think, they’re naturally better at thinking in the way that we’re trying to get them to think in engineering education. That was really eye-opening for me. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I mean, could you just give us a little bit more background as to what dyslexia involves? Because I mean, typically we just think of it as mixing letters up in words. 

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

Yeah. So, in dyslexia, as you said, you confuse things like letters and words. And the reason that happens is because most people who are dyslexic think in images, and so they see things in images. So for example, a dyslexic person when – if you’re listening to this and you are dyslexic, you should try this. Most people who are dyslexic will struggle to read, or struggle to read quickly. But actually, if you turn a book upside down, you can read just as fast as the right way up. And the reason is because if you think in images, if I were to take an image of, say, a stick man, and I were to say, what is that? And you would say, well, that’s a stick man. And then I turn it upside down and you say, okay, what’s that image? And you say, well, it’s still a stick man. Because you’re seeing that as an image. And so when people who are dyslexic, they’re looking at these words, they’re seeing the image of the word. And actually, the letters in it don’t really matter. The order doesn’t really matter. And your brain is trying to see the big picture. But with all of the words on a page, it’s kind of weird that the letters almost seem to jump, literally move on that page. And it’s because your brain is just trying to find a pattern, trying to find an image that it can hold onto. And it’s really difficult to remember the order of letters because in your head, actually, it doesn’t matter. And so when you ask someone who’s dyslexic to instead look at images, often they significantly excel in tests that involve images. Their spatial reasoning and their spatial awareness is often significantly better than people who don’t have dyslexia.

There was a game called backwards. And you were given a backwards word, often quite long ones. And you’re told, what does this word say? And most people were staring at the word and I was able to go, bang, it’s this word. And I could read it just as easily backwards as I could forwards, because it’s just an image; it’s just the other way around. And so, yeah, I think that’s why people struggle. 

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

Bentham would have been very interested by that, because, I mean, he wasn’t this light and sick, but he argued that meaning doesn’t come in words, it comes in propositions, and so words are sort of an abstraction. So we have, I guess, you know, we’re fixated on words, but what matters is the proposition, the whole meaning.

And he suggested that for us to truly understand we need an image, and he called this “archetypation”. So one example he gave was we talk about somebody being under an obligation, and if we’re to understand that, there’s no such thing in the world as obligation. But what we do, we conjure up a mental image, and it’s of a person being weighed down with a load. So you think of somebody, you know, with, let’s say, a load in a rucksack walking along with difficulty, that’s the archetype of the notion of obligation.

I wonder whether Bentham would have made a good engineering student, given, you know, creativity, you know, he was full of new ideas. He saw the big picture, but he also saw the, and he’s often criticized for this, for seeing the minute picture as well. You know, he had this panopticon prison idea, so he has a big picture of the prison itself. But he was also designing the beds. So, you know, from the big idea right down to the detail. And divergent, yeah, he thought differently from everyone else. His all sort of utilitarian philosophy was to say, well, you know, we have a practice here, what good is it doing, can we think of something better?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

I think most revolutions tend to involve some person who thinks differently about things and isn’t afraid to shy away from putting across their alternative opinion or their alternative way of thinking. Most of the people who have really made a difference in the world, most of the people who you would say, oh, that person really led to a leap forward in our way of thinking, whether it’s Einstein or Tesla or more recently Bill Gates and Elon Musk, they’re all neurodivergent.

I think you need someone sometimes who thinks in a fundamentally different way to innovate. Ultimately, otherwise, you just end up doing the same thing as what everyone else does.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So, I mean, a neurodivergent person might ask the question, why are we doing this? 

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Yeah

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

I don’t understand. 

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

Yeah. The why question. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So, I didn’t mention that me discovering that the neurodiversity existed, that it could be a very positive thing, resulted in me going along for a screening with the University Disability Service, which at the time I didn’t really like the idea of going to the Disability Service to be screened for something when I knew that I was in no way disabled. Nevertheless, when I was doing my PhD I went along to the Disability Service and after the screening they said, yep, you’re definitely passing the screening for dyslexia. I think they said that my reading speed was about 11 words a minute, which is, you know, if you think about 60 seconds in a minute, that’s about six seconds per word. It’s very slow. So they said, I think you qualify, so we’re going to put you in with education psychologists, and you can have a chat. After whatever it was, an hour or so of assessment, he typed up his notes and a couple of weeks later I got the confirmation that I am dyslexic.

The thing is that it was in some ways a sort of a revelation and it was great to have sort of confirmation that the reason why I had never finished a university or a school exam on time, I’d always run out of time on every single one and I had these panic attacks because I knew that I was going to run out of time and subsequently I did run out of time and I ended up panicking in almost every exam.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So do you write as slowly as you read?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

I write slower than I read. I write the slowest, I read faster and I speak even faster and my brain works even faster than I speak. So you’ll probably hear me a few times, I’ll stop halfway through the sentence because my brain has already moved on to the next sentence. So I had somehow this vindication that I had this diagnosis and now it kind of made more sense and I took that as a very positive thing.

A lot of people shun the labels, and I think ultimately on a long enough timeline we shouldn’t have any labels. At some point we should just accept that people think differently, and we don’t need to label it but I think we’re not there yet. So, at the moment I think we need the labels.

To explain why people are not normal and we need to define ‘normal’ and I think that, as I said, on a long enough timeline needs to stop and needs to change. We need to accept it everywhere.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

When you start to talk about ‘normal’ or ‘natural’, that becomes very slippery.

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

Exactly, and especially given what I just said about normal is it can be boring, normal can be status quo, normal can be the opposite of innovation.

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD 

No, I’m normal. Yeah. I hear you, I’m normal.

DR MICHAEL WOODROW 

The problem is that I’d spent my entire childhood trying to be normal, desperately trying to fit in and to stop being exceptional. And actually, I’d have had a much better time of it if I’d have known that actually I am exceptional and I’m exceptionally bad in some instances and exceptionally good in others. It’s just, it’s contextual. And I think that that’s the way in which we need to start viewing disability. I think we need to move beyond the medical definition of disability where the label is carried by the individual as a unilateral label applicable in all circumstances. I think we need to move beyond that.

Even within the paper that we wrote, you can see that there’s a difference between someone who is disabled that can’t walk properly because they might be missing a leg or at a serious accident that’s meant that they have permanent damage or, or like me, I’m currently wearing a boot, but this is temporary. We’re in very different circumstances, nevertheless, at this present moment in a similar circumstance. And I think that not only is it temporary, but also it’s contextual. So if the two of us were sitting here playing wheelchair basketball, we’re not disabled, in the same way that no one else in the team is just disabled when they’re playing wheelchair basketball. 

So I think if we can move beyond the medical definition, which puts the label on the individual and puts the responsibility of being disabled on the individual, we need to move beyond that to the social model. And the way I describe that is it’s a shift of disability being a noun, a description of a person, to being a verb, it’s an action. So instead of saying the wheelchair user is disabled, you would say, so I teach in building design, you would say that the wheelchair user is disabled by a staircase. And as soon as you say that, as soon as you say that actually the word disabled is a verb, it’s something that’s being done to them. It’s a product of their environment that is disabling them. All of a sudden the locus of responsibility shifts onto the designer, it shifts onto society.

And so when I say this to architects, and in particular to architecture students: “You are not designing for people who are not in wheelchairs and then the others; the ‘normal’ people and then the people in the wheelchairs. You’re not designing like that. You’re designing for all. And if you choose to disable someone, then that’s on you. So if anyone is disabled by your building, that’s your fault, not theirs.”

And very quickly, you see they take on this responsibility and they shift their mindset and they say, “oh, okay, right, well then how do I go about doing this? How do I go about changing my design so that it’s actually accessible for all?”

PROFESSOR PHILIP SCHOFIELD

So it’s making them empathize with, you know, if I’m in that wheelchair, what do I want?

DR MICHAEL WOODROW

Absolutely. And I think that in many cases, we lack empathy in our built environment, we lack empathy in our design, we lack empathy in our education system.

And, you know, I hate the SORA concept, which is in universities, it’s an acronym, I also hate acronyms, but it’s called a ‘system of reasonable adjustments’. And on face value, a lot of people will be listening to this thinking, you know, what’s this guy on about? SORA’s, it’s a great way of leveling up. And so the concept of a SORA is that you acknowledge that your system is not accessible. And then you acknowledge that you are disabling many of the students in our system by creating inaccessible education practices, for example, forcing people to sit in under time conditions to write an exam. And you acknowledge that with a system of reasonable adjustments, which may include extra time, or may include someone reading the paper to them or may involve, you know, any kind of sort of supplementary intervention. And the reason why I hate this concept is because the fact that we’re acknowledging that the system needs to have a system of reasonable adjustments is an acknowledgement that the system is fundamentally flawed. And yet we’re still doing it. We’re acknowledging that it’s broken, we’re acknowledging that it’s inherently discriminatory. And we’re saying, “oh, but it’s fine, we’ll give you some extra time”. And while I agree that if you are going to have discriminatory practices, then of course, you need some form of compensation, of course, you can’t just be discriminatory. But I, I think we need to accept that we need to do better, we need to move beyond that, we need to start thinking about how we can design our education system, how we can design our buildings, how we can design our society, to be universally inclusive, because we have the capacity to do it – we just need to have the empathy and the interest and the motivation to do it.