Mother of an Asperger child, this 49-year-old Aveyronnaise, teacher at the Capdenac-Gare college, has three passions: her fight for inclusive education, writing and stones.
Emmanuelle Fayel believes in the power of crystals and stones. His favorite features prominently on the left ring finger. This is charoite. “It’s to avoid ruminating, to better channel energies,” she says. Worries, of course, as a mathematics teacher at the Voltaire college in Capdenac-Gare, like all teachers in all establishments in France. But she also has some as a mother. Aged 49, she has two boys aged 13 and 11. The youngest was diagnosed with Asperger’s autism at the age of 6,
Never mind. On her fingers as on her wrists, she also wears citrine, “synonymous with joy”, and amethyst, “symbol of strength, wisdom and humility”, which says a lot about her character, as well as about her daily fight against autism which she revealed in a small book, “A stranger so close”, published in February 2020.
Emmanuelle Fayel is also involved as a school inclusion referent at CRI46, an association of parents of children and adults with autism spectrum disorder, as a referent parent for caregivers. “I did the training and I am now in the loop, she underlines. The main objective is to provide expertise, in order to form a fundamental pair with professionals, to be a link between theory and the experience”, confides Emmanuelle who intends to weigh in the debates, with the association. “We are force of proposal.”
But who hides behind the committed woman? Born in Rodez, in 1974, to parents from Sénergues, Emmanuelle Fayel went to Paris at the age of… three months, in the suitcases of her father, who continued his studies in the PTT in the capital. A year later, direction Bordeaux, before returning to the capital of Aveyron, following the changes of his father, a senior telecom executive.
Her baccalaureate C series in her pocket, picked up at Foch high school, she joined Toulouse to enter preparatory maths sup. Then Faculty of Mathematics at Paul-Sabatier University. The sequel took place in Paris, where she gave free rein to her curiosity, her need
to meet different people
and his desire to share.
After a first position in Chartres, in the violence prevention zone (“It was a difficult introduction because I was 25 years old and I was, at the same time, teacher, educator, social worker and psychologist!”), she chained Rieupeyroux, Figeac and Capdenac, where she has been teaching for eleven years.
Meanwhile, she learned, in January 2018 and within a fortnight, that she was suffering from breast cancer and that she had an autistic son with Asperger’s. She then took
the bull by the horns, took care of herself, formed herself, surrounded herself, with a leitmotif written in capital letters wherever she goes: “It’s often not enough. And that’s precisely what I am, the not much !”.
She suggests, challenges, questions about what she calls the whirlwind. If she has not been spared in her life, with a lot of fuss, Emmanuelle Fayel is also a follower of brainstorming. Still in action, the Aveyronnaise is thus working on “a new project”: the writing… of a comic strip. “It’s my idea, she confirms. There is an important signal to send, in this case to move forward in perfect complementarity between parents and professionals. Yes, there are hiccups and we can avoid them.”