Autism and Classical Myth: Roehampton students join Our Mythical Community including for autism-related training

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, 17 March 2021

Roehampton students join Our Mythical Community including for autism-related training

There is a lot happening relevant to my autism and classical myth project at the moment, including some news I would like to share right now. I'm building up to sharing more still during Autism Week (29 March-4 April).

The Our Mythical Childhood project, for which I'm creating materials for autistic children, includes students at various stages along their academic journeys, not least undergraduate students from several universities such as Alessia Borriello from the University of Bologna. Alessia is pictured below during a team meeting in late December 2019 in Warsaw, just a few months before lockdown turned Alessia's role into a solely "remote" one.

This "mythical community" now includes two further trainees, Erika Ruminaite (below, above) and Adam Soyler (below, below). Both are University of Roehampton students who, as part of their studies for their History degrees, are taking placements with the project as part of the Historian at Work module during March and April 2021.

Erika and Adam will each be contributing to the project's activities around creating materials for autistic children. They are not able to join fellow team members around the table right now but - via social media, Zoom and so forth - they are working with colleagues at Warsaw, Bar-Ilan and Roehampton including conducting interviews with project members about their work using classical myth with autistic children (Adam) and organising an online event to be announced during Autism Awareness Week (Erika). There is more information about their roles here.