Montana State University Billings
Free Tickets Available
Thu, 18 Sep, 2025 at 08:00 am - Sat, 20 Sep, 2025 at 04:00 pm (GMT-06:00)
Montana State University Billings
1500 University Drive, Billings, United States
Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference
The Montana Center for Inclusive Education and Institute for Neurodiversity at Montana State University Billings (MSUB), in collaboration with the OPI Montana Autism Education Project, is pleased to host the first annual Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference at MSUB, September 19-20, 2025, with a pre-conference intensive behavior workshop for educators on September 18, 2025.
This is a free conference designed for educators, related service providers, families, and advocates. The conference will feature leading experts in the field alongside a panel of autistic and neurodiverse individuals, sharing their lived experiences, evidence-based approaches, and tools to support meaningful inclusion across educational and community settings.
Dr. Jessica Minahan, Ph.D., BCBA, LABA, is a licensed and board-certified behavior analyst, author, special educator, and consultant to schools internationally. Since 2000 she has worked with students who struggle with mental health issues and challenging behavior in public school systems. She specializes in training staff and creating behavior intervention plans for students who demonstrate explosive and unsafe behavior. She also works with students with emotional and behavioral disabilities, anxiety disorders, trauma histories, and Autism. Her particular interest is to serve these students by combining behavioral interventions with a comprehensive knowledge of best practices for those with complex mental health profiles and learning needs.
She is a blogger on The Huffington Post, the author of The Behavior Code: A Practical Guide to Understanding and Teaching the Most Challenging Students with Nancy Rappaport (Harvard Education Press, 2012), and the author of The Behavior Code Companion: Strategies, Tools, and Interventions for Supporting Students with Anxiety-Related or Oppositional Behaviors (Harvard Education Press, 2014).
She holds a Ph.D. in Education from Lesley University, a BS in Intensive Special Education from Boston University, and a dual master’s degree in Special Education and Elementary Education from Wheelock College. She has a certificate of graduate study (CGS) in teaching children with Autism from the University of Albany and received her BCBA training from Northeastern University in Boston. She is sought-after internationally to speak on subjects ranging from effective interventions for students with anxiety to supporting hard-to-reach students in full-inclusion public school settings.
Dr. Barry M. Prizant, Ph.D., CCC-SLP has more than 50 years experience as a clinical scholar, consultant, researcher and program consultant to children and older persons with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and related neurodevelopmental disabilities and their families. He is a Speech-Language Pathologist and holds the Certificate of Clinical Competence (CCC-SLP) of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. Barry has served as a tenured Professor of Communication Disorders at Southern Illinois University and Emerson College, Boston, where he developed specialty tracks in language disabilities and autism in the Master’s and Doctoral programs. He also was Founder and Director of the Communication Disorders Department at Bradley Hospital, with an Associate Professor Appointment in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in the Brown University Program in Medicine, and was an Advanced Post-Doctoral Fellow in Early Intervention at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Barry has developed family-centered programs for newly diagnosed toddlers with social-communication disabilities and ASD and their families in hospital, school and university clinic settings, and consults widely to schools and agencies in New England as well and nationally and internationally, from early intervention through high school settings. Since 1998, Barry has been Director of Childhood Communication Services (CCS), a private practice, and at Brown University, he has served as an Adjunct Professor in the Center for the Study of Human Development, and currently in the Artists and Scientists as Partners Group. He has published more than 150 articles and chapters on autism, childhood communication disorders and child development, has given more than 1000 seminars and workshops in all 50 states and 30 countries.
Barry has served on the Editorial Board of six scholarly journals and wrote a regular column for Autism Spectrum Quarterly for five years. Barry is the co-author of the book Autism spectrum disorders: A developmental, transactional perspective (2000), the assessment instruments, The Communication and Symbolic Behavior (CSBS) Scales (1993) and The CSBS-Developmental Profile (2002) (with Dr. Amy Wetherby). Other research and clinical interests include early identification of young children with disabilities, impact of childhood disability on the family, family-centered support and treatment, understanding language and communicative characteristics of children with social-communicative disabilities including ASD, and the relationships between communication disorders and emotional/behavioral disorders in children.
His latest book (with Tom Fields-Meyer), written for a mainstream audience is Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism, published in 2015 by Simon & Schuster, with an expanded edition published in 2022. Uniquely Human is now published in 26 languages, was selected as the featured book on autism by the United Nations in 2017, and was ranked by Book Authority as #1 of the “100 best books on autism of all time”. With a wealth of inspiring stories and practical advice from thousands of children and older people on the autism spectrum and their families, Uniquely Human conveys a deep respect for the qualities in people on the autism spectrum. It offers a compassionate and insightful perspective that has been called “life-changing as well as uplifting”.
Barry also co-hosts a podcast, Uniquely Human: The Podcast (www.uniquelyhuman.com), with his friend, Dave Finch, an autistic audio engineer and NY Times best selling author.
Over the past two decades, Barry and his colleagues work has also focused on developing the SCERTS Model for individuals who have or are at-risk for social-communicative difficulties including autism, and their families. The SCERTS Model is an evidenced based framework now being implemented in a dozen countries with the manuals having been translated into Japanese, Italian and Korean with other translations in process, providing many unique opportunities for international collaboration and travel. Barry has partnered with Community Autism Resources, a parent-run and parent-established family support center for the past 26 years in developing and providing a weekend parent retreat for parents of family members with autism. He coordinated the two day ASD Symposium for 20 years that raised funds to support the parent retreat, one of the first conferences to feature autistic self-advocates as keynote speakers.
Barry has received widespread recognition and many honors in his career. He was an invited speaker at the United Nations for World Autism Awareness Day on two occasions (2013 & 2017) and received the Divine Neurotypical Award• of the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership (www.grasp.org), for contributions to improving quality of life for persons with autism spectrum disorders. Barry was the recipient of the 2005 Princeton University Eden Foundation Award for career contributions in autism, Fellowship in the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association and the Massachusetts Speech-Language Hearing Association Clinical Achievement Award on two occasions. In 2014, he received Honors of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the highest recognition given to a member of ASHA (175,000 members). As a performing percussionist, Barry has a special interest in the positive impact of the performing arts on neurodivergent individuals and consults to two theatrical and musical performing arts organizations, The Miracle Project of Los Angeles, and the Spectrum Theatre Ensemble of Providence, RI.
Michael McCreary is an autistic comedian, actor, author and TEDX speaker who’s been performing stand-up comedy since age 13. In the past 10 years, he has performed stand-up shows and keynote addresses in every province in Canada – plus the Yukon - and across the United States. He has done shows for tech giants IBM and SAP International; for universities such as McMaster, Queen’s, McGill, Montana State U and the University of Texas; and for many agencies and autism organizations: Autism Ontario, Autism Canada, Autism Nova Scotia, Autism Asperger’s Friendship Society (Calgary), Firefly Autism (Denver), Autism Yukon, Geneva Centre for Autism, Autism Society Newfoundland & Labrador, Pacific Autism Family Network; and for schools and school boards across the continent.
Michael has also written the book “Funny, You Don’t Look Autistic” (Annick Press); hosted the Autism Ontario video “Autism: See the Potential” https://vimeo.com/144769608; has consulted on the TV show “Ransom” to ensure the authenticity of a character with autism and has been featured on The National and on CBC Radio’s “Laugh Out Loud!”
He was the featured comic in Commander Chris Hadfield’s Generator show at Massey Hall in Toronto in 2016:
Michael McCreary gives you permission to laugh at the lighter side of the Autism Spectrum.
Info: About 10 percent of kids in school –approximately 9-13 million students — struggle with mental health problems. Whether running out of a class, not doing their homework, disrupting others, or quietly being defiant, their behavior is often misread and misdiagnosed. The frustration level teachers and parents face can be overwhelming, and traditional behavior plans are often ineffective and even unhelpful in addressing certain behaviors because they do not acknowledge the underlying causes. The training will provide empathetic, flexible, practical, and, more importantly, effective strategies for preventing inappropriate behavior from the start in the classroom and dealing with it once it’s already happening.
Info: With up to one in four children struggling with anxiety in this country, overwhelmed adults are in need of a new approach as well as an effective and easy-to-implement toolkit of strategies that work.
Through the use of case studies, humorous stories, and examples of common challenging situations, participants will learn easy to implement preventive tools, strategies, and interventions for reducing anxiety, increasing self-regulation, accurate thinking, and self-monitoring in students.
Info: Among the many reasons new teachers leave the field within their first five years, disruptive students are at the top of the list. Without intervention, these children are at risk for poor performance, diminished learning, and social/behavior problems in school. Overwhelming, negative, and inaccurate thoughts can contribute to student disengagement. When this is the case, traditional suggestions such as incentives, offering breaks, graphic organizers, or even checklists will not help the student initiate an activity. As a result of this workshop, participants will be able to easily implement preventive tools, strategies, and interventions for reducing oppositional behavior, increasing work engagement, initiation, persistence, and self-monitoring.
Info: In this presentation, the challenges and advantages of educating children with ASD in inclusive learning environments will be explored. Six essential components that will be considered are planning, attitude, expectations, flexibility, supports and team work. Particular emphasis will be given to the importance of the role of teachers and related service personnel in creating a culture and sense of community in classrooms and across each school, with the support of specialists, paraprofessionals and administrators.
Info: Problem behaviors remain among the most difficult and stressful challenges for practitioners, parents, and individuals on the autism spectrum and with related neurodevelopmental conditions. These behaviors hinder learning, participation, and relationships. While positive, preventive approaches have emerged, many behavior management practices still lack a developmental and relationship-based perspective that builds emotional regulation and trust. Recent research highlights the need to go beyond behaviorism by incorporating developmental, emotional, and relational dimensions. This presentation introduces a “Bio-Psycho-Social” model addressing physiological, cognitive, and social-environmental factors. Attendees will learn respectful, practical strategies to assess, prevent, and support individuals with challenging behaviors while creating learning environments that foster emotional regulation, engagement, and meaningful relationships.
Info: In this presentation, Dr. Prizant will debunk myths surrounding 1) behaviors observed in autism, including echolalia and self-stims; 2) the view of autism as a tragedy that is too often communicated to the public; and 3) the belief that autism is only experienced by the individual with an autism diagnosis. The emphasis will be on why it is more accurate to understand autism through the lens of neurodevelopmental differences, and view autism as a shared human experience. The presentation will conclude with a paradigm-shifting perspective supported by a summary of evidence that leads to a compelling new way of understanding and living with autism. This perspective challenges approaches that focus on "fixing" autistic people by attempting to eliminate symptoms, and “de-pathologizing” unhelpful and negative perceptions of the autistic experience.
Info: While therapies are often the focus of childhood disability treatment, far less attention has been given to building successful family-professional collaboration—even though families often find insensitive professionals and disorganized systems more challenging than the disability itself. Since positive outcomes are linked to family engagement, it is essential for professionals to foster stronger collaboration. This presentation explores common challenges families and professionals face and outlines key elements for success, including family-centered practices, trust-building, effective communication, and offering meaningful, practical supports that improve family life.
Info: Get ready to laugh and learn with Michael McCreary, a professional stand-up comedian, author, and autistic self-advocate. In this engaging virtual keynote, Michael blends humor and insight to share his journey growing up on the spectrum, breaking stereotypes, and finding his voice on stage. With heart and honesty, he challenges myths about autism and celebrates neurodiversity through storytelling that resonates with families, educators, and self-advocates alike.
Info: MSU Billings' Dwight Welch will moderate a panel of autistic and neuordiverse individuals and their families where they will share their lived experiences and take away lessons learned along the way.
Also check out other Arts events in Billings, Entertainment events in Billings, Workshops in Billings.
Tickets for Mountain West Neurodiversity Conference can be booked here.
| Ticket type | Ticket price |
|---|---|
| Thursday | Free |
| Friday | Free |
| Saturday | Free |
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