Yesterday, I blogged on the
first of two workshops I ran in Warsaw last week as part of the 2019 programme
of events for the Our Mythical Childhood
project. Today, and in the hours before I leave a city that’s become like a
second home, I am blogging on the second workshop. This was held on Thursday (May
23) in the Polish Theatre to a wide-ranging audience. This audience included the
participants from the conference, themselves a mixture of academics and
students from many countries. Also present were the high school students and
their teachers who had earlier on presented their project on Polish historical figures who
shaped, or who were in some way shaped by, the classical tradition. I was delighted
when I learnt that the founder and manager of Life is Cool, the café staffed by
autistic people where I’d presented the earlier workshop was also going to be
present.
As with my posting about the
Life is Cool workshop, what follows is drawn from the notes that I took along
with me. The posting is accompanied with artwork produced during the workshop, starting here with Anna Mik's. I’ll say more about this at the end.
Today I will share with you
some activities that I am creating for autistic children – and you get to have
a go. What you’ll do can’t be the same as in the sessions with autistic
children – because here we have just half an hour. But I hope to give a flavour
of what the children will do.
This workshop is building on
a session on Tuesday of this week in Life is Cool, a café staffed by autistic
adults. The focus of this workshop, Making Choices, has been inspired by my
discussion with one of the café staff who took part in the workshop – more on
this later.
When you receive your
handout and some pencils, start colouring in. Also use the orange highlighter
in your conference pack if you would like. The drawing on the handout is the
artefact on which the activities are based. It looks ancient, but it is
actually from the eighteenth century, from a villa in Roehampton in London, and
so it constitutes an instance of eighteenth-century classical receptions
to add to those from Poland that we heard about earlier today.
Colouring in is key to
engaging with the activities and with its key figure, Hercules, who has reached
a strange place. There is lush vegetation on one side and a rocky landscape on
the other side. Two women, or goddesses appear, each representing one side of
the scene, and they task Hercules with making a choice, between a life of pleasure
on the one hand and a life of hard work with eventual rewards on the other.
The colouring in you’re
perhaps doing: one reason for this is to encourage you to LOOK. There are lots of
details at the scene, some of which can be missed on first glance (the serpent
on top of the helmet for instance, or some of the drinking vessels). This is
one thing that makes the image potentially relevant for autistic children, for whom
processing information can be a challenge, especially in a new situation. There
can be a multi-sensory dimension to this, encompassing sight, and sound and
touch. And colouring in can help engage with this, including by letting anyone
grasp just how overloading the new place is.
And this is all the more
case in relation to Hercules, who has an excellent fit with autism, as those of
you who were also at the workshop on Tuesday heard me set out. For instance, nothing
is easy for him. Hercules keeps having to learn rules afresh. He is able to do
things that others cannot though his strength and cunning, yet he experiences
what can look like overload – and as a result he sometimes carries out acts of
violence.
Have a look at how he is
depicted on the image. Is he being thoughtful as he is trying to make his
choice? Is he in shutdown? If the
latter, this isn’t to say that he isn’t feeling anything – it could be that he
is feeling lots of things, lots of emotions, all at once. I’ve heard being
autistic as like a recurrent panic attack, including coming out of needing to
process lots of information in one go.
The activities are seeking
to deal with two key things. Firstly – fitting with what I’ve just been describing
- they are concerned with understanding, regulating and communicating emotions. Secondly, they are concerned with making choices.
Making choices can likewise be a challenge for autistic people, whether the decision is over something ‘big’ or something ‘small’,
for example what to have for dinner.
There are four stages in the
activities, which are designed for children aged 7-11 but can be adapted for
older or younger children, namely:
- Introduction
- Emotions
- Choices
- Where next? (how the present turns into the future)
In the workshop in Life is
Cool on Tuesday, we focused on emotions. Today, I’ve decided to move the focus
to choices. This is in response, in part, to the colleague from the café who
took part in the workshop with whom I had a great discussion about what choice
Hercules would have made.
The activity falls into
three parts:
- Story
- Discussion
- Creative activity
If we had more time, we
could all have a go at trying out the activity; for now, however, I’ll talk you
though the various stages, though I will also give you a brief opposite to have a go
at doing some aspects of the task.
Story:
here we get to the point where Hercules makes a choice between the two paths in
life.
Discussion:
here the participants think about a time when they had to make a difficult
choice, however ‘big’ or ‘small’ this might appear to be. Indeed, have a quick
think yourselves about a difficult choice you’ve made. It could be something
like whether to accept a job offer; or it could be what you chose to have for
breakfast this morning, or were you decided to sit in this room.
Creative activity: Based on what you’ve coloured in, and based on the discussion activity,
what choice do you think that Hercules makes? Put a tick by the side you think
he chooses, or a smiley face perhaps. Tell me – perhaps via email – what you
decided. And note that there is no correct answer. Hercules is the great doer
of hard work. Hercules is also recurrently depicted as a great lover of the pleasures
of life. This lack of a right or wrong answer points to one further reason why
I’ve picked this particular episode – whichever path people choose can lead to
a further engagement with Hercules…
What I’ve not yet blogged on is how much I gained
from the feedback from participants afterwards including from the manager of
Life is Cool. I understand, too, that one of the schools who took part have
shared their colouring in via social media. I’ll link to that in a later
posting.
The artwork accompanying this posting was
done by two of the participants: Anna Mik and Giacomo Savani. Anna’s spin on
the Choice adds a stunningly unexpected third voice to those who are tasking
Hercules with making his choice. Giacomo has animalised - as wild cats - the three
human-like figures.
The present turns to the future: I’ll end with this
segue. The work of both Anna and Giacomo anticipates the topic of our next
gathering, in May 2020, on the theme of Mythical Nature.
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