As a child growing up in Nain, Stacey Dawe pictured herself as a primary and elementary school teacher.
Today, Ms. Dawe is a three-time Memorial University graduate, holding bachelor’s degrees in arts and education and a master’s degree in education. She is also on the autism spectrum.
On occasion during her university years, Ms. Dawe encountered mental health challenges. She also had several encounters with police, primarily mental health checks, during that time.
While she recognizes policing can be a controversial subject, Ms. Dawe says her personal experiences show there can be positive outcomes.
“I have encountered a lot of police with good intentions who just want to resolve situations with as little force as possible,” she said. “Even the negative or mixed experiences I have had with police I believe would have gone better if the police had had more knowledge and understanding of autism.”
Her master’s thesis reflected on these experiences. As part of her research, she studied the subject of police interactions with people on the autism spectrum and analyzed the importance of training officers to understand the disability.
To help address the issue, Ms. Dawe was hired by an Ontario police service to create a video that police services anywhere can use to train officers for everyone’s benefit.
Body language and words
Dr. Jan Buley, an associate professor in Memorial’s Faculty of Education, says she learned a great deal about teaching students with autism from Ms. Dawe.
Ms. Dawe visited Dr. Buley’s graduate-level classes, sharing her lived experiences, reflecting about overcoming challenges inside a classroom, sharing teaching and learning opportunities, and creating opportunities to learn and ask questions.
“Stacey told stories about what it was like to be reprimanded in ways that weren’t helpful and then shared ideas about how to mitigate anxiety and stress with students who are autistic,” Dr. Buley said. “We all learned a lot about how to provide a calming learning space and how important body language and words are.”
Prior to joining Memorial, Dr. Buley taught at Laurentian University and was involved in the Greater Sudbury Police Service Diversity Advisory Committee.
Anna Barsanti, a former school principal and community activist, served as the committee’s civilian representative.
On a whim, Dr. Buley contacted her former committee member to see if there was any interest in training opportunities for Sudbury police officers.
After a group meeting where Ms. Dawe shared her personal story, suggestions and leadership, Ms. Barsanti says it became clear just how important it is to train officers for interactions with individuals living with autism.
She says the video will be shared with the front-line officers and uploaded to the Sudbury Police Learning Page for officers’ and police professionals’ access.
“Stacey’s video will help members to better understand and appropriately interact with people who might exhibit behaviours that could be misinterpreted as threatening or suspicious due to their diagnosis, potentially preventing unnecessary escalation and ensuring safer outcomes for both the individual and the officer involved,” Ms. Barsanti said.
The Media Services team at Memorial’s Centre for Innovation in Teaching and Learning (CITL) recorded the production.
“It felt really great being in front of a teleprompter — it felt like being a movie star,” said Ms. Dawe. “The CITL team is really good at what they do and very professional and focused.”
Rounding out the production was Dr. David Buley, Ms. Dawe’s former music education professor, who created the original music.
“I think police need a lot more than this one video. I hope it will be just the beginning.”
Since autism is a wide spectrum, where traits vary significantly from person to person, Ms. Dawe says she’s a little apprehensive about the final product.
“The advice I give in the video will work better for some than others. I am very nervous about possibly getting things wrong. This is why I emphasize that these are generalizations and the statements will not necessarily apply in every situation.”
Just getting started
Ms. Dawe says she hopes her training video will benefit not only the City of Greater Sudbury’s police force but also other police departments and people who work with people on the autism spectrum.
“I think police need a lot more than this one video. I hope it will be just the beginning and that I will be given an opportunity to create further training resources in the future.”
And while she grieves not achieving her dream of being a classroom teacher, she says she is still an educator.
“I think my real dream all along was to help people with autism be treated more fairly in school. With my video, I am helping people with autism be treated more fairly by police. I still have goals of developing curriculum and resources to help people with autism in primary and elementary school, as well as more general curriculum ideas.”
After gaining more work experience, Ms. Dawe says she hopes to complete a doctoral degree in education.
