Document Type
Article
Abstract
Neurodivergent educators remain largely absent from scholarship on higher education, despite growing attention to neurodiversity among students. This absence has implications for pedagogy, institutional practice, and inclusion in social work education, where teaching is shaped by implicit norms of professionalism, communication, and relational labor. This collaborative autoethnography examines how neurodivergent social work educators experience and navigate these conditions within everyday teaching practice. Guided by the neurodiversity paradigm and double and triple empathy theories, we draw on iterative collaborative reflection and analytic dialogue among four neurodivergent social work educators across career stages. Through vignette-based narratives and collective sensemaking, we identify four interrelated themes: professionalism as a neurotypical standard, hidden curriculum and learning through consequences, chrononormativity, and the gap between empathy and capacity under institutional constraints. Findings illustrate how institutional norms and power relations shape not only student experiences, but also the conditions under which educators teach, respond, and sustain their work. This paper contributes to social work education by centering neurodivergent educators’ lived experiences and extending empathy-based frameworks to faculty labor, institutional design, and inclusive pedagogy.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Postprint version. Published in Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 2026.
Rights
© 2026 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Teaching in Social Work on July 28, 2026, available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2026.2706033.
APA Citation
Janse van Rensburg, M. G., W., R. P., Jameson, A. K. R., & Hock, R. (2026). Neurodivergent Social Work Educators: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Teaching, Power, and Inclusive Pedagogy. Journal of Teaching in Social Work, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2026.2706033