AUTISM. EVERYDAY LIFE. MEANINGFUL PARTICIPATION.
About Living & Learning Aligned
Living & Learning Aligned is grounded in a simple idea: meaningful participation develops within everyday life.
Children and adults with autism live within routines, activities, relationships, responsibilities, community experiences, work, recreation, and the many ordinary moments that make up a life.
Living & Learning Aligned explores three interconnected ways of supporting meaningful participation across a lifetime: parenting intentionally, building supports, and creating opportunities.
What each looks like changes as the person, family, environments, and opportunities develop over time.
Where Living & Learning Aligned Comes From
Living & Learning Aligned grew from decades of raising my son alongside later academic study and professional work in autism and developmental disability services.
From early childhood, I understood that my son's participation and development depended on more than teaching individual skills. I needed to think intentionally about my own influence within family life, build supports that helped him participate successfully, and make sure he had meaningful opportunities in which to participate, belong, learn, and grow.
Those ideas took different forms as my son moved through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
Supports changed. Opportunities expanded. My role changed.
What remained was the importance of bringing learning and everyday life together.
My later graduate education in Applied Behavior Analysis, professional experience, and continued study gave me additional principles, language, and ways of understanding and explaining what I had been doing across everyday life.
Living & Learning Aligned grew from bringing those perspectives together — lived experience, learning science, professional experience, and a lifelong view of meaningful participation.
What It Is — And What It Is Not
Living & Learning Aligned is an educational body of work for parents, families, and professionals interested in meaningful participation within everyday life.
It offers perspectives, practical ideas, examples, tools, and resources grounded in lived and professional experience and informed by established principles of learning and development.
Living & Learning Aligned is not therapy, clinical programming, assessment, diagnosis, or individualized treatment, and it does not replace appropriately qualified professionals when those services are needed.
About Marianne Clancy
Marianne Clancy is a parent and professional whose work and life have spanned autism and intellectual and developmental disability services across family, educational, employment, and community settings.
She holds a Master of Arts in Applied Behavior Analysis and has worked in roles supporting and educating families and professionals within developmental disability services. She also serves on the Board of Directors of the Association for Science in Autism Treatment (ASAT).
Marianne developed Living & Learning Aligned from the intersection of raising her autistic son across childhood and adulthood, her academic and professional experience, and her longstanding interest in how learning becomes meaningful participation within real life.
Her work focuses particularly on the adult influence, supports, environments, and opportunities that can help people participate, contribute, belong, and increasingly manage more of their own lives.