Autism Spectrum Disorder and Social Stories Purpose and Utility
Asimina Riga *
Hellenic Open University, Greece.
Vasiliki Ioannidi
Hellenic Open University, Greece.
Nikolaos Papayiannis
American Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
This paper is a brief overview of the use of Social Stories (SS) as a strategy to support students in attaining communicative skills. More specifically, it presents the general purpose as well as the positive results after integrating story-telling methods into the learning and teaching process for children within the autism spectrum; this is so because they typically manifest serious weaknesses with respect to social and communicative skills. Additionally, this study refers to the beneficial prospects of creating SS through digital media as they arouse children’s interest in the subject matter and do reinforce their creativity in developing a variety of life skills. Finally, some enlightening examples of digitally integrated SS are presented within the Greek educational setting especially nowadays in connection with the Covid pandemic. Any educator can actually benefit from reading this paper and, more particularly, those educators who instruct students identified with autism spectrum disorder or any other developmental disability.
Keywords: (Digital) social stories, communicative skills, autism spectrum disorder.