Douglas Biklen is Professor of Cultural Foundations of Education, Teaching, and Leadership; and coordinates the Inclusive Education Program at Syracuse University. He is a senior faculty member in the Center on Disability Studies, Law and Human Policy. He is the author of Access to Academics and Contested Words, Contested Science. He was Educational Advisor for the Academy–Award–winning HBO documentary Educating Peter and is coproducer of the CNN documentary Autism is a World.
Jamie Burke lives in Syracuse, New York, where he attends high school. He was the subject of a research report published in 2001 and has written and narrated a video documentary, Inside the Edge, about how, as a teenager, he emerged from typing to speaking.
Alberto Frugone lives with his mother and stepfather in Zoagli, Italy, on the coast of the Mediterranean. After attending inclusive secondary school, he recently passed Italy's postsecondary qualifying exams and became the first nonspeaking Italian classified as autistic to attend a university.
Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay was born in India and learned to speak and write after much intense support from his mother, from a speech therapist, and from others. By the age of eleven, he had written a book, Beyond the Silence, and was the subject of a BBC documentary.
Sue Rubin grew up in southern California and is now a college student. Until the age of thirteen, she was diagnosed as both autistic and severely
retarded and was thought incapable of academic work. She is featured in and was the writer for an autobiographical documentary titled Autism Is
a World on CNN Presents.
