Inclusivity and Diversity in UK Classics Programmes

I've started this posting with an image that I've just chosen for a poster I'm currently putting together.  It's to advertise a workshop that I'm co-organising at Roehampton for this coming May.  The event will explore issues surrounding the creation of an inclusive and diverse classical curriculum and as one of our planned themes is disability, an image that conveys a Hephaistos one could read as variously marginalised or powerful seems fitting.  Here are draft details of the event:

Roehampton University, London, Thursday 23 May 2013 11.30am-3.30pm

This HEA-funded workshop aims to explore the extent to which UK Classics departments can improve on inclusivity and diversity in their student bodies. The idea for the workshop was generated out of work being done at the University of Roehampton in an HEA funded project on ‘Re-imagining Attainment for All’ which is investigating what factors enhance the success of and what elements are barriers to the success of for BME students. The workshop will also build on previous work at Roehampton into making learning happen for disabled students studying classical civilisation.

Topics to be covered include:

• What is the perception of Classics and related degree programmes such as Ancient History and Classical Civilisation among prospective students?
• Do some students feel excluded from studying Classical subjects?

• Why do so few students from particular black and minority ethnic groups apply to study Classical subjects?

• What support is there/should there be for disabled students, e.g autistic and dyslexic students?

• How can the degrees/curriculum be made attractive to a diverse range of students?
For further information, please contact Susan Deacy (s.deacy@roehampton.ac.uk) or Fiona McHardy (f.mchardy@roehampton.ac.uk)

Classics in therapy

I've started with this image of the Hyde Park Wellesley (as?) Achilleus moument for two key reasons.  Firstly, I'm currently exploring the extent to which 'our' reception of classical culture has been shaped by the sculpture that tranformed civic, and also private, architecture in the 18th and 19th centuries, not least in London.  Secondly, it seems an apt illustration connected to a development which was reported on at an event I attended last month on Classical reception teaching.  Prof. Lorna Hardwick surveyed the range of developments in classical reception around the world, including at the US, where one area of increasing interest is the therapeutic role of classics, including the work with with war veterans pioneered by Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietman.  I'll find out who is working in this area - in the meantime, I'd welcome suggestions as to whom to contact!


I'll report soon concerning other recent experiences that bear on this blog.  I anticipate that this will include reflections upon how the mythological topics we choose to study are ones that 'speak' to our lives in complex ways - more that we might realise.  Linked with this, I've been discussing with colleagues how far they way we respond to myth can have useful therapeutic potential, from childhood experiences discovering the stories onwards.  One speaker at an event on classical mythology at the Open University earlier this year spoke about how one woman's engagement with the Demeter-Persephone story helped her deal with her experiences at a time when her daughter was leaving home.  There is one thing that concerns me, namely that this kind of engagement could be risky: the distance between ourselves and the material is broken, but there is no therapist to support us - unless we are in the safe space of, say, a dramatherapy session.

Disability Studies and different bodies in antiquity

Since beginning my blog, I have become increasingly aware of how the growing field of Disability Studies has the potential to impact both upon my myth and autism project, and upon my research into other aspects of classical mythology.  I'm especially interested currently in its potential to offer fresh insights into a pair of deities frequently connected with one another (in e.g. Hesiod's Theogony and in Athenian cult/art/literature: witness for example their representition side-by-side on the Parthenon frieze).  The deities in question are the disabled god, Hephaistos, and his technological and sexual partner, Athena.  The visual depiction that I have chosen to illustrate this posting is Giorgio Vasari's Vulcan's Forge which represents Athena as - I think - out of place in, if not superior to, the world of the smithy over which the god precides.  I'm interested in why this aspect of their relationship should have been emphasised in the sixteenth century and how far it has a counterpart in ancient representations of the relationship between the gods.


The value of examining Hephaistos from a Disability Studies perspective is easy to convey - he is the god who was either born lame, or who became lame after he fell from Olympos, when he was thrown off the mountain after he was born by his mother, Hera.  Here incidentally, we encounter one of those chicken-or-egg instances of Greek myth: his mother detested him because he was lame, or he became lame after his mother threw him off the mountain.  Athena's relevance to this approach is harder to convey initially - she is, after all, a goddess celebrated for her bodily perfection, and her roles included the patronage of hygieia, that is, good health, a quality that can be contrasted with adunatos ('disability').


I aim to look at various aspects through the lens of Disability Studies, including:


1. Why Hephaistos, born as a result of the contest between Zeus and Hera to produce a parthenogenic child, is born disabled, when Zeus' child, Athena is bodily 'perfect'?


2. The connection between Athena's body and the lost body of her mother, Metis (aka Outis: 'Nobody'), who is swallowed by Zeus when she is about to give birth.


3. The connection between the body of Athena and the monstrous body of Medusa, whose head she wears on her aegis.  Why does Athena react with horror when she catches sight of herself playing the aulos and sees her puffed-out and gorgon-like cheeks?


A key question to ask when conducing this study will be one that is engaging specialists in Disability Studies, namely: are attitudes towards disabled persons cross cultural (or even rooted in evolution) or are the Greeks' views of disability a condition of their own particular cultural contexts.  It is possible to steer between these two positions.  One consequence of the 'social model' of disability studies (refs. to follow!) has been that, to understand more deeply how disability is socially constructed, there is scope for multi-disciplinary study from specialists in areas including anthropology, literature, art and history.  From history, classical history included, we can enrich our understanding of how disability was regarded in different periods.  I therefore see the potential to do two key things:


1. Find ways to shed fresh light upon the classical world
2. Add to work being done to historicise disability


I shall build on this post in due course including by supplying references to key works in Disability Studies as applied to the Greek world.

Autism, Asperger Syndrome, Perseus and Athena

Inspired by emails that I've received just this week from two separate teachers working with autistic children, I have been revisiting an an article I wrote for the 2009 Bulletin of the Council of University Classics Departments setting out what I then saw as the rationale fuelling my work.
 
The remainder of this posting will take the form of a very slightly updated version of that article not least as the journal is temporarily unavailable in its electronic format.  Once it becomes available electronically again, I shall give details of the url.  I also plan, in a subsequent posting, to discuss the image that I have chosen to head this posting: The Baleful Head that Perseus, as represented by Burne-Jones, sees yet fails to become subsumed by.

I began with some general comments on Asperger Syndrome, the autistic spectrum condition on which I was then envisaging focusing.  I am now thinking that a more 'general' autistic focus would be preferable, a development on which I shall report soon.  Anyway, I made these comments with a caveat that they were generalised comments that reflected how little is yet known about the condition in spite of progress in understanding, diagnosis and treatment over recent years (see Frith, 2003; Frith, 2008). Asperger Syndrome is, I stated, an autistic spectrum condition, more commonly diagnosed in males than females, which can result in often subtle differences in aspects of social behaviour, communication and application of mental flexibility (e.g. Brown and Miller, 2004; Martin, 2008). Each person with Asperger Syndrome will have particular needs and challenges. People with Asperger Syndrome, who are often of average or above average intelligence, may have particular strengths, which can be harnessed when they are given the right support, which include attention to detail, a methodological approach, accuracy, reliability and good motivation.

I noted in the article that I tried out my initial hypothesis—that classical mythology might provide a fresh means of supporting people with Asperger Syndrome—on several colleagues, all of whom thought the topic worth pursuing, not least one who, I discovered, had worked previously in therapy and suggested that I approach dramatherapists as potential research partners. Subsequent contacts with current practitioners had encouraged me further that classical mythology’s potential therapeutic uses would be worth exploring, as has my preliminary reading on dramatherapy.  I reported that when I started reading Jones 2005, I anticipated that I would be solely lapping up new knowledge, but I also found myself thinking from a fresh perspective about material that I had been teaching for several years. I discovered that the approach taken to drama in dramatherapy, not least the application of the Aristotelian model of catharsis, intersects with one of the approaches currently being advocated in classics to the mythmaking of ancient drama which, as Buxton stresses in his chapter in Woodard ed. (Woodard, 2007: 166–89), characteristically selected material that drew upon the underside of myth. Tragedy created a mythic environment that explored what was troubling, problematic and antisocial between the individual and society, as well as between family members such as siblings of the same or opposite genders, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons or fathers and daughters. Ancient drama goes to the heart of dramatherapy as it is described by Jones as ‘forming the meeting point between psychology and drama’ (2005: 41).


To give some indication of ancient myth’s possible value for dramatherapy, I started with a visual image (Attic red-figure cup from Cervetri by Douris; Rome, Vatican 16545) that has been regularly used an illustration in volumes on mythology, due largely, I would surmise, to its combination of popular goddess and well-known story. By depicting Athena as the patron of heroes, assisting Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece which is hanging on the tree behind him, not only does it show Athena in one of her most prevalent guises, but it includes a good range of her attributes too, including the owl which is shown only on relatively few vases. There is much scope for interpretation, for example of how the aegis’ scales match those of the monster in a way that might suggest a ‘dark side’ of Athena, something that Klimt seems to intimate in his Pallas Athena, where the scales of the aegis match those of the Triton in the vase painting in the background
The artist, Douris, has picked a key moment from the iceberg of material at ancient mythmakers’ disposal and packed it into unities of time and place. But precisely what that moment is on the vase is unclear, which took me to another reason why I picked this particular example. It draws attention also to how much remains unknown in spite of the wealth of evidence for classical myth. The mystery for us—not the intended audience, at least I assume not—is in what is happening between Jason and the monster, who seems to be regurgitating him or to be in the process of swallowing him, a detail omitted from the literary versions. There is more as well: Athena’s assistance-giving is at odds with the literary accounts that we possess (e.g. Mimnermus fr. 11a; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 3) where it is Medea who serves as the helper-maiden of Jason, when she assists him in yoking the bulls, sowing the dragon’s teeth and then putting the dragon to sleep while he takes down the fleece.

The image illustrates myth’s mixture of familiarity combined with an otherness that keeps it frustrating with its stories that we know and yet often never really know. Neither did the ancients, however, have some canonical version of a myth as recent work on the topic is stress-ing (e.g. Morales, 2007; Woodard, 2007). What I anticipate being able to bring to dramatherapy is an engagement with this duality of mythology: between the reassurance it provides of a familiar story, combined with possibilities for creativity. I am planning, as one of my initial investigations, an exploration of what might be done with the ‘gaps’ of classical myth in the light of some of the fundamental goals of dramatherapy as Jones introduces them: ‘to free the imagination and to increase spontaneity’ (2005: 4).

One of the things that attracted me to classical studies as an undergraduate student was its interdisciplinarity, although I doubt I knew that term then. Back in 2009, I made the point that I had never really stepped outside the confines of the discipline, broad though these boundaries are. Where I had thought ‘big’, through applying gender theory for example, or comparative anthropology, it had been with a view to enhancing classical research. Now I have an opportunity to be able to think about how research into classical mythology might have an impact beyond the humanities. I anticipate that guiding my further forays into dramatherapy and mythology will be the potential of the doubleness of mythology to reach people with Asperger Syndrome. I felt able to contend at this early stage that classical mythology has the capacity to take someone with Asperger Syndrome into a world that is separate from daily life while allowing engagement with the challenges encountered in everyday life. I was, and still am, at too early a stage in my investigations to make any conclusion other than to say that the therapeutic potential of classical mythology appears to be considerable.

Works cited

• Brown, M. and Miller, A. (2004) Aspects of Asperger’s: success in the teens and twenties, Bristol: Lucky Duck Publishing.
• Frith, U. (2003) Autism: explaining the enigma, 2nd edn, Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell.
• Frith, U. (2008) Autism: a very short introduction, Oxford: OUP.
• Jones, P. (2005)The Arts Therapies: a revolution in healthcare, Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge.
• Martin, N. (2008) REAL Services to assist students who have Asperger Syndrome, Sheffield Hallam University Autism Centre, available at www.skill.org.uk/page.aspx?c=61&p=150#HE
• Morales, H. (2007) Classical Mythology: a very short introduction, Oxford: OUP. Woodard, R.D. (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, Cambridge: CUP.

Dramatherapy

In early postings to this blog I noted that one possible area of research was into dramatherapy's potential to reach autistic people. I'm excited to note that, from tomorrow, I shall be taking the Dramatherapy Summer School at Roehampton.

In documents I produce, I've tried to go for accessible formats - e.g. using pastel colours for handouts for dyslexic students. Much though I loved the intial design of this blog with its picture of a building at the top with a classical-ish design, I've tried for something that is more accessibly formatted in terms of background and clarity.

Disabled students in Higher Education

Once again, I am beginning a posting with an apology for a lack of activity on my part, this time for several months. Again the reason is that I am continuing to complete my book for OUP in a addition to other duties, which include the role of Academic Disability Coordinator for the School of Arts at Roehampton. With this latter hat on, I have proposed, together with a fellow Disability Coordinator, a workshop for a forthcoming learning and teaching conference, the abstract for which reads as follows:

How to make learning happen for disabled students in Higher Education

‘Making learning happen’ is an apt phrase to use when thinking about disabled students in higher education and the growth of disability studies. As well has having increased access to higher education for disabled students, the Disability Discrimination Acts (DDA) are impacting upon the practice of all staff, who need not only respond now to the needs of individual students, but also to make anticipatory adjustments on the expectation of teaching disabled students with a range of impairments. This workshop will consider how the social model approach adopted by the DDA, while a step forward in enabling participation, has not yet gone far enough in removing barriers to learning and teaching in the classroom. Through a review of the research into experiences of disabled students in higher education, we will reveal a mixed picture that points to several areas for further development.

Students with Asperger Syndrome in Higher Education

After several months of silence while I’ve been focusing on trying to finish my book, this posting reports on some of the points that were raised at a training session I attended at Roehampton recently entitled ‘Students with Asperger Syndrome in Higher Education’ and run by a representative from the Prospects Employment Service which is part of The National Autistic Society. When I'm able finally to devote myself to autism and mythology, I'll reflect on how the strategies that were suggested might feed into my research.

The abstract for the paper at the Learning and Teaching conference that I included as my previous posting noted rather generally that ‘during the past decade or so, an increasing number of students with disabilities have entered higher education, including those with Asperger syndrome’. The training session provided some statistics that gives a more precise picture and if anything strengthens the point that we made in the workshop. In 2003, autism spectrum disorder was added to the disability section of the UCAS form. That year, 165 applicants disclosed that they were on the spectrum, of whom 139 were offered places. In 2008, the numbers rose to 851 applicants, with 706 offered places. That these five years could have seen this c.400pc increase indicates how aware teachers in HE need be about the difficulties experienced by students with AS and how vital it is that we seek strategies to help facilitate their learning. There are no statistics available on the subject choices of students with Autism, unfortunately, but Humanities subjects can be quite a popular choice.

Each autistic student will have particular needs and challenges. That said, there are several strategies worth considering which mostly involve taking a ‘back to basics’ approach (which might benefit some of our neurotypical students as well?). People with AS may have particular strengths which can be harnessed when they are given the right support, which include attention to detail, a methodological approach, accuracy, reliability, good motivation. People with AS are often of average or above average intelligence.

Communication and social interaction

Characteristics/Areas of impairment: People with AS are not born with an ability to communicate so this is something they are continually learning to do; with communication skills not innate as they are in neurotypical people, there are challenges in e.g. reading body language, eye contact, facial expressions as well as unwritten rules of interaction/cues of how to act appropriately and process info. They may find it hard to know what to say or do in social situations which can make group work difficult. Another tendency is to interrupt to talk over conversations. They might display repetitive behaviour often associated with high anxiety manifested in e.g. asking the same questions week after week which is done to seek reassurance and not because they have forgotten the information. People with AS may experience heightened sensory reactions and could be distracted by e.g. noise outside the classroom, an air conditioning system or the sound of the AV console. Some students with AS come to University to develop social relationships.

Strategies: Use multiple forms of communication, e.g. ppt with ppt slides as a handout. Be explicit in communicating information – students with AS may take things said literally and for instance not understand sarcasm. Make clear at the start of a course what the acceptable modes of behaviour are – e.g. whether it is acceptable to ask questions; whether students may interrupt the lecturer. For group work, provide step-by-step instructions and offer structured discussions; tutor should divide students into groups rather than letting students take initiative. Neurotypical students might sometimes ostracise a student with AS or else take advantage of their motivation or reliability. Be flexible over assessments, e.g. allowing students with AS to give oral presentations directly to the tutor rather than to the whole group.

‘Theory of mind’/social imagination

Impairments: Difficulty with reading other people’s feelings or gauging what people are thinking or feeling. Challenges with coping with situations that require initiative or judgement; difficulties over organising and planning; they might find it hard to see outside the ‘now’

Strategies: Provide direction with anything that requires initiative e.g. when to start and assignment; devise weekly timetables; perhaps send phone or email reminders.

Flexibility of thought

Impairments: Abstract thinking can be difficult, e.g. understanding essay questions. People with AS will find analogies difficult to understand as well as hypothetical questions.

Strategies: Help students to understand that there is no one correct answer to an essay. Lecturers very often use analogies to help students make sense of a particular event, concept etc. These stressed these can be missed by people with an AS yet other students, e.g. those with dyslexia, may find them useful. Rather than seeking to omit analogies, a suggested strategy was to make clear when an analogy was being used via an introductory phrase of the ‘now I’m going to make an analogy’ kind.

Dealing with anxiety

Impairments: People with AS often experience high anxiety and sometimes, linked with this, depression

Strategies: As well as providing verbal information on aspects of the course, write down what is required. Perhaps ask the student to repeat back what you have told them. Be strict where it may benefit the student – e.g. make clear that information will be provided only a set no. of times. In encouraging students to develop a timetable, find ways to account for breaks or interruptions. Make clear the purpose of any assignment and set out what the student is expected to do in order to complete it. Provide structure by giving notes on lecture topics in advance. Give feedback immediately on e.g. inappropriate behaviour, but avoid negatives – don’t tell a student with AS not to do something but find a positive action to place stress upon. Stay fresh with the student each time there is a change in a routine.