Critical Questions the CBS LA Reporters Apparently Forgot to Ask About FC

One of our readers sent me a link to an article that was published on May 27, 2022 by CBS Los Angeles and asked “Is this Facilitated Communication?” (FC)

The article is titled “Man with autism to become first nonverbal graduate of UCLA” and is accompanied by a short video featuring a facilitator holding a letter board in the air while a young man rapidly points to it. The article claims the facilitator is translating what’s on the young man’s heart and mind. As reported in the video, the man will be attending Columbia University in the fall.

Mary Brown using Rapid Prompting Method with her son. RPM is a form of FC where the facilitator holds the board in the air and provides physical, auditory, and visual cues to assist with letter selection. Her son does not appear to be looking at the board but she is. (CBS LA, 2022)

If I did not know better, I would fall in love with this feel-good story, as the CBS LA news staff seems to have when writing it. I would probably miss that the student does not always look at the board during the typing sessions or that the pointing looks rapid—perseverative even—and centered around the same spot on the letter board, or that the miraculous origin story is the same one told over and over in pro-FC news articles, movies and books.

However, I do know better and to me this does indeed look like FC.

Contrary to what proponents may believe, I really wish the story was true. Nothing would make me happier to know a non-speaking individual with profound communication difficulties independently completed college class work and achieved their degree without undue influence from a facilitator.

The key concept here is independence. Sadly, the typing activity shown in the video does not appear to be independent, but rather reliant on the facilitator’s cues and input.

As I have stated many times, my criticism is of the technique FC and not the individuals being subjected to it. I believe in every individual’s ability to communicate in some way, be it verbal or non-verbal, but I do not presume competence in facilitators’ abilities to use FC without cuing their clients.

Did the student want to select “z,” “a,” or “s”? Watching the FC session in the CBS LA news report frame by frame, it appears the student pointed to “z” first, then touched in between “a” and “s” twice before moving to “c,” quickly sliding to “v” then “n”. The facilitator said “a” but the video did not record her calling out the other letters. It is hard to think of a word in the English language that contains the letters “zacvn” or “zscvn” in consecutive order. (CBS LA, 2022)

The technique was not specifically named in the article, but referred to as typing on a letter board. This omission was possibly an attempt by proponents to hide FC use and avoid negative criticism.

My guess from watching the video and reading the accompanying news article was that the facilitator-student pair appeared to be using Rapid Prompting Method (RPM), Spelling to Communicate (S2C) or the same technique named something else by the facilitator. (See An FC Primer for information about the various styles of FC and problems with facilitator cuing)

A quick Google search brought up an article* written by Mary Brown, the student’s mother. In it, she revealed that as a child, her son was diagnosed with moderate to severe autism. He has a history of being subjected to FC (presumably the touch-based version) and Rapid Prompting Method (RPM) where a letter board is held in the air for him.

The facilitator looks at the letter board and calls out letters while the student looks off into the distance during a facilitated session. Is this really an historic achievement? (CBS LA, 2022)

There is no reliably controlled scientific evidence that FC or any of its variant forms produces independent communication. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) have FC and RPM opposition statements. Their concerns, as reinforced by opposition statements from other organizations, are lack of scientific evidence, facilitator cuing, prompt dependency, and potential harms, like false allegations of abuse. In addition, FC is not recognized by the International Society of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (ISAAC) as a legitimate form of AAC.

None of this is mentioned in the article.

If I could rewrite the news story—or, better yet, convince the reporters to rewrite the news story after doing some research, here are the questions I would love to have answered:

• How is it that the facilitator is translating the typed messages when, according to FC guidelines, the facilitator’s job is simply to provide physical and emotional support. What, exactly is being translated when the person being facilitated is supposedly typing independently?

• If FC is “translation,” then what are the training and licensing requirements? Do facilitators, for example, share the rigorous standards of a translator for the deaf? Are there extra licensing requirements for an FC “translator” for different settings (e.g., classrooms, court rooms, medical environments, workplaces)?

• What happens if the student is given an article to read (without the facilitator present or knowing the content) and then asked to answer questions based on what was read? Proponents would call this “message passing” and claim the student would be too nervous to answer questions using blinded conditions, but is it too much to ask of a college student to demonstrate independent mastery of course content?

• Why does a facilitator need to hold the board in the air? Doing so increases the chance of cuing due to the ideomotor response? If the student can point on cue without physical touch, why not use a stationary keyboard? What would happen to the accuracy of letter selection if the facilitator was out of auditory and visual range?

• In the video, the student’s eyes do not appear to move as rapidly as his hand does while pointing to letters. Sometimes, he appears to be looking in the opposite direction or over the top of the letter board. Do the physical movements of his eyes match the movements of his hands in selecting letters?

• There are times the individual in the video is not looking at the board during the typing activity and appears disengaged. Can he recognize letters, spell words, and comprehend what is being typed? How does he keep track of the location of letters on a plastic letter board using a one-finger, hunt-and-peck-style typing method with no “home base” when he’s not looking? How can the facilitator know whether or not the student is paying attention if their own eye gaze is fixed almost exclusively on the letter board?

• The individual in the video appears to be pointing only to one small area of the letter board and, even with the quick, carefully edited video, it does not appear that definitive letter selections are always made. Is it possible, with the rapidity with which the student pokes at the letter board and the unclear letter selection, that the facilitator is calling out letters not actually selected? Does the facilitator have enough processing time to know which letters are selected and/or identify when the student points in between letters by mistake? If he points to or brushes over several letters in rapid succession, how does the facilitator know which one he intended to touch?

• What are UCLA’s and Columbia’s admission policies and how is it that a student using a thoroughly discredited technique (FC) was admitted to these schools? Likewise, RPM has no scientifically rigorous evidence to support claims of independent communication, as revealed by this systematic review. How is it that admission staff do not know enough about AAC to recognize facilitator cuing and control in FC/RPM/S2C?

• Did UCLA put measures in place to make sure the student completed course requirements independently? What, for example, would have happened to the student’s ability to demonstrate knowledge of class content if the facilitator was out of visual and auditory range? What would have happened to the student’s understanding of course content if a facilitator not familiar with the class supported the student during tests? Will Columbia put such measures in place?

• Did any of the instructors have questions about authorship? How were these addressed in class and by administration?

• Are instructors and university officials concerned about promoting pseudoscience? Are they worried about potential malpractice for using a discredited technique in their classrooms?

• What were the costs to the university for providing a student with a facilitator using RPM? This study explores the economic costs for RPM use.

• How can facilitators and university officials be held accountable for continuing to promote and use FC and RPM, techniques opposed by many educational, medical, and advocacy groups? (See Opposition Statements)

In my opinion, the CBS Los Angeles staff reporters failed in researching and reporting this story. A quick Google search revealed the student had a history of FC and RPM use. This, alone, should have raised red flags and generated questions about the claims being made in the story.

Given that it did not, I hope that the list of questions in this article can help the next reporter recognize FC for what it is and think more critically about this issue. Perhaps a reporter in New York who is willing to ask critical questions about FC could follow up on the story.

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*I checked this link for a follow-up and The Autism Community in Action (TACA) website had taken down the article.

Mary Brown’s article about Woody was no longer available on the TACA site.

But, I was able to find the article on the Internet Archive: Woody’s Story on a Mission for Woody. To quote the discussion in the article about RPM:

I latched onto the pointing/typing thing early on, first with Soma Mukhopadhyay and the Rapid Prompting Method, then later through Facilitated Communication.

I was also able to find a blog post on a website called Feral Parrot that interviewed Woody Brown. The interview mentioned his use of Rapid Prompting Method (RPM).

From “Emerson and Me”: Interview with Woody Brown by Evan Krikorian and Noah Kim of Feral Parrot: The Inscape Blog posted on 4/13/2020.