Fun, toil, party... How fortune tellers can help us play Herculean games - World Autism Awareness Week Day 2

Yesterday, in the first of the postings I put up for World Autism Awareness Week, I mentioned that I was going to do two things over the Week. One was to reflect on work I’m doing in the UK. The other was to explore the fit between this regional focus and what’s going on beyond the UK. I shall have a particular opportunity to do this towards the end of the Week when my project gets presented at a Classics conference in the US.

For today, World Autism Awareness Day, I’m going to discuss something that seems to be so widespread in children’s culture to suggest that it might have potential for engaging children from many different localities – with classical myth, and with a key aspect of the specific project I’m developing for autistic children, namely making choices.

The thing in question is this – it’s what as a child in South Wales I used to call a ‘fortune teller.’ I learned in Warsaw last year from a colleague based in Australia who grew up in New Zealand that they have other names too including Cootie Catchers and Whirlybirds. The colleague was Liz Hale who, in a workshop she was leading, got us using them as a means to show their potential in relation getting children interested in classical myth,

To use a fortune teller (I’ll stick with the term I’m familiar with…), it’s necessary to make choices. I am finding it hard to describe them. They are one of those children’s games that are so complicated that only children can explain. But here’s a link to the Wikipedia page which includes information on how to make them and how to use them.

The outcome you reach depends on various choices that you make by manipulating the fortune teller. While playing with fortune tellers under Liz’s direction, I was struck by how potentially relevant they could be to my project, which includes exploring how Hercules is engaged in making a choice. I was also struck by how useful this might be for autistic children, some of whom can be stuck in relation to making sense of how the present can turn into the future.

Later in the same week at Warsaw, at a workshop I was leading on Hercules’ choice, I mentioned the idea that I was forming of using fortune tellers – and this idea was well received. It remained just this, an idea, until November of last year when I got students from my classical mythology class at Roehampton University trying out the Choice of Hercules activities.

Having handed out various props, stickers, colouring pencils and printouts of the scene, along with things like blu tak, glue and scissors, I let the students get going. They really went for it, some working independently, others in groups, to produce some rather wonderful creations. And one of these, not prompted at all by me was this: a fortune teller.

This shows, I think, that I must follow up on this. I have a few ideas in formation on how to take this forward. I shall be taking part in a at a big UK-based classics conference in July (FIEC/CA in London: event details here) where several classicists will gather together to show and tell public engagement work they are involved in. I am contemplating making fortune tellers part of what I demonstrate there.

It's the Roehampton-student fortune teller that is illustrated throughout this posting.

If anyone has any thoughts on whether – and how – I should go forward with this, do let me know.

One update: In respect to the collaboration with colleagues in Israel that I mentioned yesterday, I might not get an opportunity this week after all to comment on this initiative – because my meeting to discuss the collaboration has been moved to next week. Instead, to keep an international flavour I plan, tomorrow, to indulge in a brief discussion of something French and Belgian that bears on my interest in autism.

Till tomorrow!