Decolonising Language Education

Jaime Hoerricks (they/them) is a queer, trans, autistic writer and educator whose work bridges the personal, the poetic, and the political. First diagnosed under DSM-IV with Asperger's Disorder and Sensory Processing Disorder, their profile later shifted-like many others-with the publication of the DSM-5, recoding as Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 2, with significant language support needs). Jaime is AuDHD and a gestalt language processor. These aren't identities they wear-they are the architecture of their thought, perception, and presence. They write from within the system, not about it. Their style-recursive, metaphor-rich, relational-is not a literary device but a way of being. Their book, No Place for Autism? (2023), interrogates the exclusion of autistic students from higher education and imagines new structures of belonging. Holistic Language Instruction (2024) offers inclusive, multimodal strategies for supporting students who communicate outside normative linguistic frameworks-especially gestalt processors and emergent bilingual learners. Decolonising Language Education (2025) takes that work deeper, confronting colonial logics embedded in curriculum, pedagogy, and educational policy. Jaime's forthcoming curriculum, The Story of Math, was written for learners who have long been marginalised by traditional mathematics instruction. It blends narrative, historical insight, and conceptual clarity to make maths accessible, meaningful, and intellectually rich-particularly for disabled and multilingual students. Their poetry collection, In the Stillness of Chaos, explores transition, grief, joy, and autistic perception, inviting the reader into metaphor as both compass and comfort. Jaime also writes The AutSide, a Substack publication featuring over 1,200 free essays, poems, and reflections. The work lives at the intersections of neurodivergence, education, queerness, and care-and it centres readers who have always lived between scripts. Across genres, Jaime's writing offers a quiet refusal: of simplicity, of compression, of easy resolution. What they offer instead is a spacious knowing. One that affirms complexity, accompanies difference, and trusts that not every story must conclude to be complete.