About me: Jaime Hoerricks PhD

Hello, I’m Jaime Hoerricks (they/them)—one of Embrace Autism’s authors. I’m an autistic trans woman, a gestalt processor, and someone for whom language is not just a tool but a terrain—navigated intuitively, relationally, and often metaphorically.

Born of Scottish stock but raised in California, I’ve lived and worked across three continents. Now based in Los Angeles, I serve as a Special Education teacher in a Title 1 school. My professional path has taken me through forensic science labs, university classrooms, AmeriCorps placements, and community education projects—always returning to the same question: how do we build systems of care that honour difference, rather than pathologise it?

I write from the fault lines: between disciplines, across neurotypes, at the seams of language and belonging. My work is shaped by the Power Threat Meaning Framework (PTMF) and the quiet defiance of those who’ve had to make meaning in the margins.

Understanding, for me, is not a fixed endpoint but a shared process—relational, contextual, and often nonlinear. I hold deep respect for the ways we come to know ourselves and each other, especially when those ways don’t fit conventional scripts. My hope, always, is to offer language that helps someone feel seen. To say: I’ve been there too. Let’s start from here.

What I do

My work lives at the intersection of education, advocacy, and reflective practice. I’m a Special Education Resource Specialist Programme (RSP) teacher in Los Angeles, supporting students with Individualised Education Programmes (IEPs) in a Title 1 secondary school. I also write, consult, and speak on inclusive pedagogy and systems transformation, always beginning with the same core question: What would education look like if we truly centred those most marginalised by it?

I specialise in neurodivergent-affirming approaches to inclusive education. In the classroom, I support gestalt language processors (GLPs), emergent bilingual students (EBs), and others for whom the language of instruction often feels foreign—abstract, fragmented, and misaligned with how they actually make meaning. As someone who also processes language in gestalts, I understand just how much gets lost in translation. I view communication as fundamentally relational and contextual, and I honour the many forms it takes: echolalia, silence, metaphor, movement, protest. These are not deficits—they are acts of meaning-making, shaped by experience and adapted to systems that rarely listen.

Teaching is a relatively new chapter for me—five years in, and still deepening—following a previous career in forensic science, where I worked as both a practitioner and a lecturer. That background taught me to trace patterns through noise, to question standard narratives, and to notice what gets excluded from the official record. Those same skills now inform my classroom practice and my policy critique.

I publish resources and reflections through my Substack, The AutSide, and am the author of several books, including No Place for Autism?, Holistic Language Instruction, and Decolonising Language Education. I’m currently developing The Story of Math, a curriculum crafted for those so often left behind by traditional maths instruction—a resource that weaves narrative, historical context, and accessibility into the heart of conceptual learning. Alongside it, I’m creating Reading Between Worlds: A Reflective Practice for Neurodivergent Educators and Advisors—part journal, part workbook, part quiet companion for those navigating the in-between spaces of teaching, advising, and becoming.

At heart, I’m committed to work that makes room—for difference, for dignity, for joy. Especially the quiet kind.

The lenses I carry

I was formally diagnosed in 2012, under the DSM-IV, with Asperger’s Syndrome and Sensory Processing/Integration Disorder (SPD)—a language that never quite fit, but was the only one on offer. With the shift to the DSM-5, that diagnosis migrated into Autism Spectrum Disorder (Level 2), with significant language support needs noted. But by then, I’d already spent a lifetime living the diagnosis in ways no manual could capture: misread, mistranslated, made to feel foreign in every room I entered.

That outsider sense never left me—not in childhood, not in academia, not even now. I’ve always known I was different: not just autistic, not just trans, not just a gestalt processor, but something queer in the truest sense of the word—structurally, neurologically, perceptually. I live in metaphors. I feel in echoes. And I often understand far more than I can articulate in real time. My world is textured by hyper-empathy and alexithymia in equal measure—a constant act of translation, not from one language to another, but from sensation to word, from knowing to naming.

It’s the PTMF that’s offered me the deepest clarity—not by categorising me, but by inviting me to trace meaning through experience. Rather than reducing distress or difference to symptoms, the PTMF asks what roles these expressions have played in navigating power, in responding to threat, and in constructing identity. It doesn’t stop at “accommodation” or “access”—it recognises that behaviours, breakdowns, and breakthroughs are often layered forms of communication. Within this framework, I’ve come to see my sensory sensitivities, language patterns, and emotional processing not as deficits, but as intelligent responses to environments misattuned to my way of being. They are not problems to fix, but narratives to understand—often encrypted, often incomplete, but no less real for that.
This is the lens I bring to everything I do. Not just as a teacher, or a writer, or a systems thinker—but as someone still learning how to live gently in a world that was never designed with me in mind.

My path through study & practice

My academic path, like much of my life, has never been linear—but it’s been consistently guided by critical inquiry, lived insight, and a drive to reimagine systems from the margins inward.

I hold a PhD in Education from Trident @ AIU. My doctoral research drew on Glasser’s Choice Theory to explore a stark reality: more than 60% of autistic university students voluntarily withdraw within their first term. My study examined the role of unmet needs in that exodus—asking not only why students leave, but what might have made them stay. That question continues to shape my work across both secondary and higher education.

I’ve also earned three Master’s degrees:

• an MA in Education (Special Education) from Loyola Marymount University, where I examined the under-recognised challenge of language comprehension for gestalt processors and other neurodivergent learners;
• an MA in Education (Instructional Design) from Western Governors University, where I developed frameworks for statistical literacy among forensic analysts;
• and an MA in Organisational Leadership from Woodbury University, with a thesis on relational leadership in systems marked by ritual, history, and power.

My undergraduate degree, a BA in Organisational Leadership (also from Woodbury), included an emphasis on non-profit governance—an early grounding in the intersections of advocacy, equity, and institutional design.

I hold a Clear (lifetime) California Teaching Credential, completed in 2025, and a TEFL certificate from the University of Toronto’s OISE (2020), which informs my work with emergent bilingual students and linguistically inclusive curriculum design.

At the heart of all this study is a simple but urgent belief: that educational systems must be built to affirm, not just accommodate, those who’ve been consistently pushed to their edges.

A practice rooted in relationship

My work blends professional expertise with lived experience—not as two separate domains, but as interwoven threads. In the classroom, I lean heavily into Self-Regulation Strategy Development (SRSD), building co-regulatory practices that help students develop voice, agency, and internal scaffolds for their learning. It’s not just about academic growth; it’s about nervous system literacy—about giving students the tools to interpret and advocate for themselves in a world that often misreads them.

Whether I’m teaching, writing, or speaking, you can expect work that is intersectional, rigorous, and accessible—often metaphor-rich, and always shaped by a deep respect for complexity. I don’t simplify to be understood. I build bridges with language that honours what’s layered, relational, and real.

I write in UK English—the language of my early life, of my Scottish grandmother’s voice and bookshelves. She was, in many ways, my personal seanchaidh—a keeper of stories, of rhythms, of knowing passed down not through instruction but through presence. I’ve always been her errant apprentice: off-track, roundabout, but devoted still to the work of carrying meaning forward. My thinking is gestalt and intuitive, drawing from that early script library—full of old songs, half-told tales, and metaphors too large for a single sentence (hello, em dashes).

My methods are narrative and systemic, shaped by a lifetime of moving through spaces that weren’t built with me in mind. I don’t just analyse systems. I ask what they’re protecting, what they’re costing, and who they’ve taught us not to hear.

At heart, my approach is relational. Always. I begin with presence, listen for pattern, and trust that meaning—like story—knows how to find its way through.

Writings, wanderings, & quiet revolutions

My published work spans poetry, pedagogy, and policy critique—always grounded in lived experience and a commitment to accessible, relational scholarship.

I’m the author of several books, including:

• No Place for Autism? (Lived Places Publishing, 2023)—a critique of institutional exclusion and a call toward reimagined belonging;
• Holistic Language Instruction (Lived Places Publishing, 2024)—an exploration of inclusive, multimodal approaches to language teaching;
• Decolonising Language Education (Lived Places Publishing)—a challenge to the colonial logics embedded in curriculum, policy, and pedagogy;
• In the Stillness of Chaos: A Journey in Verse and Liminal Echoes: The Collection (Lulu Publishing, 2024)—a collection of poetry and one of flash fiction written across moments of rupture, reflection, and return.

Several more works are in development, including:

• The Story of Math—a curriculum for disabled and emergent multilingual learners that integrates historical context, narrative structure, and universal design;
• Reading Between Worlds—a reflective journal and companion workbook for neurodivergent educators and advisors, offering both structure and spaciousness for practice.

Earlier in my career, I published in peer-reviewed forensic science journals, contributing to the fields of digital and multimedia evidence. But in the realm of education and neurodivergence, I’ve found the formal publishing landscape dominated by paywalls, gatekeeping, and the monetisation of visibility. Much of what passes as ‘open access’ still comes at a cost—not just financially, but ideologically.

So I’ve chosen a different path.

Through my Substack, The AutSide, I’ve published over 1,200 free and openly accessible articles, essays, poems, and recordings. I use crowdsourced peer review, engage in dialogue with readers, and treat feedback as part of the writing process itself—iterative, relational, and accountable to community rather than institution.

Of gardens, stories, & the quiet joys

I came to reading late in life—not because I lacked intelligence or interest, but because the way I process the world simply didn’t align with how reading was taught. As a gestalt language processor with an Autism Level 2 profile, I often understood everything and nothing all at once. It wasn’t until my thirties that the pieces finally clicked, and I discovered the quiet joy of reading for myself—on my own terms, in my own time. That joy still feels hard-won, a private revolution against a literacy system that insists on phonemes before meaning, and fluency before relationship.

Poetry has long been my ritual and my refuge. I’ve published one collection (In the Stillness of Chaos), and another sits quietly in drafts—a body of work that has carried me through transition, burnout, wonder, and return. When the world becomes too much, poetry reminds me I’m still here.

So does whisky. Not in excess, but in reverence. The smell alone can bring me back to my grandmother’s living room—a space scented with memory, softness, and story. In that room, in the glow of late afternoons, she’d lead me into the garden, where the borders between the ordinary and the enchanted blurred. She was a kind of seanchaidh to me, though she’d never have used the word. I was her errant apprentice. Still am.

I hold close to the fae, to the relational, to the ancestral. The worlds we inherit are often broken, but still—there are places where the veil lifts, where possibility hums just beneath the surface. I write from that place.

For those of us who were never meant to survive the institutions we passed through—and yet, somehow, did—I offer this: You are not too much. You are not too late. The story isn’t over. You are still becoming.

How to connect

You can find my full archive of work at The AutSide, or reach out via LinkedIn.