Autism and Classical Myth Academia Discussion Session

Last week, I did something blog-related though not on this blog. I started an Academia Session – to seek comments on the blog and especially on the activities I put up in February around the Choice of Hercules. It has struck me that I should now do the reverse, namely to direct anyone reading this blog to the Session!

To date, people who have joined the session have raised some really great points, including on the potential for the resources I’m creating for use with adults as well as children. People have been sharing helpful details too. These include details of a centre for autism research in the US with whom I might make contact, and – just this afternoon – a reference to an article on the Choice of Hercules in comparative perspective.

If you would like to join the Session – to read what has been posted to date, and potentially also to contribute to one of the threads – here is the link.

And here is the text that accompanies the Session

Autism and Classical Mythology

Introducing… a set of activities for use with autistic children on the theme of the Choice of Hercules

Approaching a decade ago, my academic life took a new turn. This was after a meeting that I did not expect to have any bearing on my research – or on public engagement, let alone on any impact my research might have beyond the ‘academy.’ The meeting was with a special needs teacher at a secondary school who mentioned one thing that she and her colleagues had noticed – this is that autistic children often respond well to learning about classical mythology.

After the meeting, I kept mulling over this observation and I kept wondering what it was about classical myth that might speak to autistic children. I also started wondering whether there might be anything that I could do to help engage this excitement that autistic children feel for the material. I love classical myth – it found it – it found me - when, ex nihilo, I began reading a book that my grandfather gave me when I was around 10. He would often pick up books for me at jumble sales and summer fayres. I would await his visits wondering whether he had found anything new. A book that he gave me one time was one that I doubt would have interested me at first – I wouldn’t have had any route in. It was Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes. But I started reading it and went into in a world that was speaking to me and changing me. This interest and love never went away. It remains with me the more I engage with Greek myth – which is my main research interest.

Around ten years ago, after the meeting mentioned above, I started to make some tentative plans for a project around autism and classical myth. I was not sure whether it would go anywhere. But, as I began reading on autism and on specific therapies, notably dramatherapy, and as I started making contacts with relevant specialists I increasingly felt that the project would be worth pursuing – indeed, all I tended to get from others was encouragement.

After several years, something happened that turned what was an ambition to develop materials that might be useful in work with autistic children into something tangible. I became part of a project directed by Professor Katarzyna Marciniak in Warsaw on how the classical world is played out in children’s culture. This project bid for and won European Research Council funding for work with several strands, one of which is the development, by me, of a set of resources for use with autistic children.

The project began in October 2016 and, in February 2018, I completed a first set of resources. This set is made up of a series of activities around an episode in the life of Hercules, a mythological figure whose autistic resonances are especially vibrant. My next step will be to share these activities with various people and I am very open to refining or even reworking them in light of feedback from practitioners and academics and indeed from anyone with interests that bear on the topic.

I have set up this Academia session to share the resources – and to see whether anyone would like to give responses to them at this stage – however brief and initial. The resources are set out in the blog that I set up several months after the meeting with the special needs teacher. If you go to the blog, you will be able to work backwards through the postings. The address is: https://myth-autism.blogspot.co.uk/

The series of (eight) Hercules-themed activities is detailed in postings from February 2018 and there are several postings from before that where I explain the rationale of these activities. If you would like to start at the beginning, then perhaps you might go first to this posting from December 2017. This is the first of several introductions to the activities.

I shall be presenting the activities at a workshop in Warsaw in May 2018 detailed here, in the most recent blog posting I have put up prior to starting this forum. Any comments can shape what I present there over the next month as I prepare this session.

I now await comments!

Susan Deacy, 12 April 2018