 At
age 13, when working at a summer day camp for handicapped
children, Catherine Faherty knew immediately that
this would be her life's work. Her early education
and training was at Eastern Michigan University
where she worked in the afternoons at the lab school
for exceptional children on campus.
Afterwards, Catherine taught children and teenagers
with developmental delays, as well as typically-developing
children. After moving to Asheville in 1985, she
was introduced to autism when she was hired to teach
elementary aged children with autism. Since 1990,
she has worked as a psychoeducational specialist
at the Asheville TEACCH Center, one of the regional
centers with the TEACCH Program through the University
of North Carolina.
At the TEACCH Center, Catherine works on weekly
diagnostic evaluations for children and adults with
autism, is a parent consultant and child therapist,
consults to school programs, trains teachers and
other professionals locally, nationally, and internationally,
runs social groups for children and adults with
autism, and enjoys her relationships with her friends
in the autistic community. She has written manuals
used in TEACCH trainings, developed training models,
and has written a workbook for children with autism
and their parents and teachers, titled "Aspergers…What
Does It Mean To Me?"
Catherine, who is Greek-American, founded the Greek
Autism Project in 1995, nationally organizing Greek
Americans to support the work of the Autism Society
in Greece. The Greek Autism Project raises funds
to translate and publish books on autism for parents
and professionals, who have had virtually no services
or information related to autism in their native
language until recently.
Catherine lives with her husband in the mountains
of western North Carolina and has one grown son.
She enjoys gardening, cooking, reading, Greek ethnic
dancing, camping out in their yurt, playing percussion
and drums, improvisational dulcimer and piano, and
hopes to learn to play the accordion. Catherine
begins most days by lap swimming at the local YMCA.
The book "Aspergers…What Does It Mean
To Me?" provides children with high functioning
autism and Aspergers, and their families and teachers,
a method to understand the effects of autism in
their daily lives. Explaining that autism is "another
way of thinking and being," it shares information
in an autism-friendly style about sensory experiences,
talent, people, communication, school, friends,
and feelings. Each workbook chapter contains relevant
topics to be explored by the child, followed by
sections for parents, teachers, and therapists explaining
how they can structure the child's experience in
order to encourage understanding and positive interaction.
The structured teaching ideas are helpful both at
home and in school.
Catherine's presentations revolve around the importance
of helping persons with autism make sense out of
their life experiences. She suggests that structured
teaching strategies are pivitol to clarifying the
meaning of everyday life and that they serve to
create a belief, early on, that "things make
sense". Catherine talks about the stages of
discovery she has observed in working with people
with autism and discusses several strategies which
can positively affect understanding, both on the
part of people with autism and those in their lives.
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