Autism and Classical Myth: Autism, empathy and dyspraxia

Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Wednesday, 28 January 2015

Autism, empathy and dyspraxia

The other day, a student said something to me that has both shaken up and transformed my understanding of both dyspraxia and autism. He said that he had once heard the following defintion of dyspraxia as: "autism with empathy". Like any definition this can't allow for everything but it's made a lot of things make sense and I don't think I'll ever see autism or dyspraxia in the same way again - nor perhaps empathy.

Some very initial attemptions at finding the source of the quotation and putting this in the context of current research/debate:

Dziuk, M. A., Larson, J. C., Apostu, A., Mahone, E. M., Denckla, M. B., & Mostofsky, S. H. (2007). Dyspraxia in autism: association with motor, social, and communicative deficits. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 49 (10), 734-739.

Could dyspraxia be misdiagnosed as asperger's?

Selections from the Dyspraxic Adults site

Comments welcome!