Snowdrops and Curly Hair: learning about autism from autistic people - for World Autism Awareness Week Day 5

Friday: Day 5 already!

There are many non-autistic people who have made a massive different to people’s lives. I mentioned one yesterday: Lino Ventura, who set up the Fondation Perce-Neige in the 1960s. And Ventura’s initiative is one of several examples I’ve discussed in this blog. I’m about to book a place on an event run by an organisation named The Curly Hair Project, whose origins are different. The Project is the initiative of someone autistic. This is Alis Rowe, the author of The Girl with the Curly Hair, a set of 'visual guides' to autism, one of which is illustrated here to the right. She also writes the materials that used in the Project’s sessions. 

One goal of the event I hope to attend is to enable participants – autistic or otherwise – ‘to learn insight and strategies from people who really live with the condition’. It seems a no brainer that autistic people be key to initiatives about autism. And last autumn, when I shared my ‘Choice of Hercules’ activities with a group of autism specialists, at least one was from the Participatory Autism Research Collective (PARC), which promotes the involvement of autistic people in research into autism.


Hercules' "Virtue" - drawn by Steve Simons

A month or so after that, I had a different kind of experience. I'd just been at an event which saw make a difference to the young – primary school aged – children who were taking part. This was an interactive theatre performance where, with a troupe of actors, the children took part in activities inspired by Shakespeare. I’d met the students previously and I was taken aback when I saw how readily and enthusiastically they took part in the various activities – which even including being picked up, and, sometimes, being whirled round and round. One of the children commented afterwards that what they most liked about the event was being able to fly.

The performance with the children was followed by a workshop, for adults, led by the theatre’s director. At one point, the director was asked whether they ever work with autistic actors. They said 'no'. Their view is that one autistic person will only compound the challenges that other autistic people face.

I’ve been bothered by this. I'll aim to articulate this in a future posting. For now, I’m going to make the Curly Hair Project booking...



More tomorrow!

A Mythical Childhood in The Far West - World Autism Awareness Week Day 4

Last May, in Warsaw for Our Mythical Childhood, I presented my Choice of Hercules resources for the first time in Life is Cool, the café run by autistic people which I look forward to visiting again next month. The title of the workshop I ran there began thus: ‘At every crossroads…’ As I explained, I’d gone for ‘crossroads’ because of key things the activities are seeking to do. Those using them choose, with Hercules, between two paths in life. As I also explained, the phrase ‘at every crossroads' is my translation of Jacques Brel’s ‘a chaque carrefour’ from Quand on n’a que l’amour.

A Brel moment followed when Dorota, the translator who working with the café staff, sang part of the song. Now this was a deep moment for me and I shall now convey a little of why it went so deep. I’ll build up to a direct connection - via the ‘mythical childhood’ of our project, and the ‘mythical childhood’ of Jacques Brel [1] - to an initiative, supported by Brel, which has been making a difference for decades to the lives of children, including autistic children. 

Those of us collaborating on our project named Our Mythical Childhood have discussed often how our own childhood experiences have informed our work for the project. We have engaged in play as well –something fun, and also something serious. This includes when, with Liz Hale as our play-leader, we made the fortune tellers. I recalled this in my posting on this Week’s Day 2. As I have discussed previously, autistic children grow into autistic adults.

Jacques Brel’s writing is often concerned with childhood, including childhood as a time that adults carry with them, knowingly or unknowingly. Childhood is Brel’s ‘Far [‘Wild’] West.’ It’s a place that, in Mon Enfance (My Childhood’) has been conquered by his ‘oncles repus’ (‘grown-up - or ‘smug? - uncles’). In the film Le Far West (1973) – where Brel's character, Jacques, claims to be Hercules at one point (!) – childhood is a time and place that adults long for and yet which remains with us. At least I think that this is the case. I’m likely hugely simplifying – but it’s is something that has struck me each time I’ve watched the film.

The film includes a performance of one of Brel’s most explicit reflections on childhood – a song whose very title is L’Enfance (Childhood). Here is where the explicit fit with autism comes in. Proceeds from the song went to a foundation for disabled children. The Fondation Perce-Neige (‘Snowdrop’) was set up by Lino Ventura, Brel’s co-star in the film. The Fondation still very much exists, and this week it is marking World Autism Awareness Day: please see here – last checked 04.04.19.

The song is performed during the film and a key figure from the song recurs in the soundtrack. I’ll end with Brel – with the second verse:

"L'enfance
Qui nous empêche de la vivre
De la revivre infiniment
De vivre à remonter le temps
De déchirer la fin du livre"

"Childhood: who stops us from living it, from reliving it infinitely, from living by rewinding time, by tearing up the end of the book?"

Till tomorrow...

[1] Sara Poole even writes of Brel’s ‘mythical childhood’ in her discussion of childhood in his work (Poole, S., 2004. Brel and Chanson: A critical appreciation, University Press of America, pp. 59, 60.)

Autism and Hercules: in the classroom and 'for all people everywhere' - WORLD AUTISM AWARENESS WEEK DAY 3

For today’s posting, to mark Day Three of World Autism Awareness Week, I would like to follow up on one thing I wrote about yesterday, namely the ‘Choice of Hercules’ work done by students in my Myths and Mythology class at Roehampton not long before Christmas last year. I’ve been musing on the session since yesterday, including on the potential for my project in HE teaching as well as for ‘public engagement.’ And so I’m going to delay the posting promised yesterday, on something Belgian-French related, and get that out later in the week.

As well as the fortune teller I talked about yesterday, there were some thoughtful explorations created by the students, of what it means to choose as – and with – Hercules, including those pictured in this posting. Comments from the students on what they took from the session included:

 “The way that different people with different learning abilities will engage with resources and how classical mythology (and classics) can be for all people everywhere.”

“How fun it can be incorporating myth and ways it can help children with autism – I really enjoyed making our Herculean nativity scene"

I did the session as a one-off: as an example of how the module topic, classical myth. I'm now wondering whether it can have a role in encouraging students to think from new angles about classical myth and the ancient and postclassical meanings and applications of myth. When I hadn’t long started this blog, I contemplated - in this posting - designing a module with autistic students in mind: and indeed with all students in mind, as good disability practice is good practice per se.  This was in March 2009, so over a decade ago. I’m considering doing something comparable now for my myth class in future iterations.

I have just been invited to speak about my autism work in a history pedagogy conference in Liverpool later this year. In light of the public engagement focus of my autism work, I had initially wondered whether my project would be relevant for a conference sharing practice in learning and teaching in higher education. I’m now starting to think that it could be relevant after all. The fit with the other papers at the CAMWS Conference panel I’ll be participating in later this week (watch this space) – which are all concerned with university classical pedagogy – is likewise perhaps strong than I’d realised. As mentioned previously I’ll put up the text of that talk later in the week.

 

Till tomorrow!

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!