Autism and Classical Myth: Our new adventure

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.

Monday, 3 October 2016

Our new adventure

Along with other team members I received an email on Saturday morning from Katarzyna Marciniak, the Our Mythic Childhood Principal Investigator, that began "Today is the first day of our new adventure." The period of European Research Council funding began then - 1st October - and so today, Monday 3rd, is the first standard working day of the project. I've spent today's OMC time getting ready for what I anticipate as a pleasurable bureaucratic event - a meeting on Wednesday with colleagues in Finance and Human Resources to finalise the terms of the contract and the payment schedule. Then I'll be able to plan in earnest not only my autism research but also the entries that I'll be coordinating for the guide to classical antiquity in children's literature. Before Wednesday I'm planning to revisit notes I made at a disability and inclusive practice session that I attended earlier in the year on neurodiversity - what was said here helped confirm me in my thinking that research into autism has moved on since the late 2000s when I was first envisaging this project. I'll blog on this soon.

I'll end this posting with a brief mention of my colleague Rosemary Barrow who died recently and whose funeral is this coming Wednesday. Rosemary was one of several people to whom I mentioned my nascent plan for a project on autism and mythology and whose encouragement helped me realise that there was something here worth pursuing. I hadn't realised that, prior to starting her classical postgraduate studies, Rosemary had worked as a therapist in some capacity, She could straightaway see the potential for this research. This - and her subsequent interest - is one of the many things I'm remembering right now and that I believe will remain with me.