'Sounds like being autistic': how the 'classical tradition', especially myths of Hercules, resonates with autism - next month at King's College London, via zoom...

 I've just noted that the previous posting I made is dated exactly a month ago - I didn't plan such a gap, but have been caught up with a mixture of annual leave and article writing since then. Here is some news: I've this morning had the notification that I'll be giving a short pitch of a paper at a "Healing Classics" event next month. The event will be online and will consist of short presentations ahead of a longer, in-person, event at King's College London next year.

Details of the event are available here (as at 09.08.21)

And here is my title and abstract

'Sounds like being autistic': how the 'classical tradition', especially myths of Hercules, resonates with autism

This paper will look - though an autism lens - at a key commitment of 'Healing Classics' as set out in the Call For Papers, namely with 'the continuing creativity and vitality inherent in the classical tradition'. The focus will be around how - and why - classical myth can 'speak' to an autistic 'world' while helping autistic people make sense of the other, 'non-autistic' or 'neurotypical' world: the 'world' metaphor for being autistic or otherwise will be discussed during the paper. The paper, grounded in a social rather than medical model of disability, will not be concerned with any possibility of 'healing' via classics but with how classical themes can resonate with distinctive autistic ways of being and experience. The key classical theme for exploration will be myths of Hercules which - as I shall set out by discussing a set of activities I have designed for autistic children - have potential to resonate with autistic experiences including around causality, social interaction and processing and communicating emotions.

I'll end with some images from my Hercules activities which might speak particularly to a 'healing' aspect - and which I might well pick as illustrations for my paper. 

The drawings are all by Steve Simons - with the colour and captions of the third one by Anna Mik.

Autistic children speaking out via classical myth - at the Children's History Society conference, June 2021

Last month was a super-active one for me including where autism-linked and myth-linked – and autism-and-myth-linked - activities are concerned. I’ve been involved in so many activities that it’s been hard to do what I like to, namely to reflect on events via this blog. 

Today, though, I am going to make a start with an activity that took place in two stages – for a panel at the latest conference of the Children’s History Society Conference held, via Zoom, at Manchester Metropolitan University, organised by Dr April Pudsey.

The event’s theme was “Children and Young People Speaking Out”. The panel I was on, “Children with Special Needs: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Agency and Autonomy,” concerned what it means for autistic children to speak – including to speak out – via classical myth. 

My contribution was a joint one with Prof. Lisa Maurice, with whom I’ve had quite a few joint projects of late. While the conference took place 17-19 June, Lisa and I met to record our contribution in advance, earlier in June. It’s the first time I have taken part in an event where the live part takes place to discuss recordings circulated beforehand – and it was a special experience recording the session with Lisa.

I ran though initiatives on my part creating – and trying out – activities for autistic children based around the figure of Hercules. I talked about the inception of my Hercules project in the context of interests in myth and in autism - and I shared examples of the resources for activities as well as information about one of the sessions and some examples of workshops I have hosted.

In the Adam Room at the University of Roehampton with
school students from the "Class of 2020' looking at Hercules
choosing on an 18th century panel

Lisa, then, ran through the work she has done – informed by, and in turn informing – mine in collaboration with her colleagues at Bar-Ilan University, including Dr Ayelet Peer.

Some of the slides from my part of the presentation accompany this posting as images, and the video will be available - I'll share it in due course.

Hard Work, Hercules and Pleasure - high-quality drawing by Steve Simons of
a chimneypiece panel in the Adam Room at Roehampton
- the key focus of the activities I was discussing at the conference

Perhaps in part because I hadn’t just given a presentation and so was ‘fresh,’ meeting specifically for discussion worked better, than, for instance the discussion - as I remember it at least - after a paper I gave on the autism activities at the University of Reading for the series “Making Classics Better” in April. We’ll see – that session’s recording is out, and I’ll share it via this blog and via ACCLAIM once I’ve watched it through.

The discussion at the Children’s History Conference panel included consideration of complex emotions and how special interests and skills have a fit with mythological heroes. And we ended – ended because our break-out room closed; we could have continued for longer – with reflections that picked up on a point I’d made concerning how autistic people can find classical myth appealing when they are able to see aspects that reasonate with themselves in characters and scenarios.

The Adam Room scene as coloured and captioned
by Anna Mik at an autism and myth workshop

April Pudsey – as I’ve mentioned above also the organiser of the event – raised the possibility for the fit here with approaches, including queer theories and disability studies, around what it means to find oneself in another world. I suggested that we might have, here, a topic for a future event. There is so much to consider here – including the fit with the LGBT+ History Month event on classics and children’s culture that I’ve blogged about previously...

Comments about the session include this one and this one.

I also carried on threads of discussion afterwards with people who’d been at the session, including on the topic of girls and autism and the figure plans I have for activities including other mythological figures – starting with one I have been considering for years now – Medusa.

 I shall pause for now and aim to blog later on this summer to refection other things I’ve been up to as well as fresh things that come up…

 

 

Preparing Historians at Work for future professions via remote placements between Roehampton, Warsaw and Bar-Ilan

What a few weeks... The panel I mentioned in my previous posting took place last week - and the potential for follow-up is huge. I should even be able, I think, to share the link to the recording. For now, though, I'm blogging to share what's coming up next autism and myth-wise...

Next week, Roehampton University's 2021 Festival of Learning and Teaching takes place - in an earlier posting, I mentioned what I'd be doing during the festival. This was after the news arrived that the session I'd proposed had been accepted. 

The two-day festival includes, on day one (Wednesday 16 June), so a week today, the session in question:

"Preparing Historians at Work for future professions via remote placements between Roehampton, Warsaw and Bar-Ilan"

The session bears on the main theme for this year's festival, namely: "preparing our students for their future professions." I shall be presenting along with two current students, Erika Ruminaite and Adam Soyler, the "Historians at Work" of the title of the presentation and of this posting.

What follows are the session aims and abstract as submitted to the Learning and Teaching Unit at the university, along with other details, photos too, starting with the following two. Both show activities which took place at Warsaw, in a cafe staffed by autistic workers. The reason for the location, along with what's being coloured in, will become clear during the session - and to an extent during this posting...

First, and in large part quoting the proposal submitted to the event organisers, here are its aims:

1. To present work of by second-year Humanities students in placements at Roehampton/Warsaw/Bar-Ilan for a European Research Council-funded project: Our Mythical Childhood.
2. To consider the roles and experiences of the students including organising an online event and interviewing practitioners working with autistic students.
3. To explore the impact of the placement on students’ learning experience.
4. To reflect on the impact of the placement on the project, including the development of materials relating to lessons for autistic children.
5. To map the experiences on the placements on Roehampton Enabling Strategies, QAA PDP recommendations, and Case Studies in Pegg et al. 2021. 

Here's the 'official' Our Mythical Childhood image of Erika:

And here's the same for Adam:

Here, now, is the abstract: 

This presentation will share, and reflect on, the work done in spring 2021 by second-year Humanities students on the Historian at Work module in placements at Roehampton, Warsaw and Bar-Ilan Universities for the European Research Council-funded project, Our Mythical Childhood… The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges.

The presenters will outline the roles and experiences of the students as “mythical trainees” in tandem with students from the University of Bologna. As will be discussed, these roles included, for one student, organising and promoting an online event for practitioners working with autistic children in the UK, Poland, Italy and Israel. Meanwhile, the roles of another student included interviewing members of the network ACCLAIM: Autism Connecting with CLAssically-Inspired Mythology about their work using classical topics with autistic students.

The impact on the students’ learning experience will be explored, as will the impact of the students’ activities during their placements on the project, including the development of new materials relating to lessons for autistic children. As well as reflecting on their experiences, the presenters will map their experiences on the placements onto the University of Roehampton Enabling Strategies 2019-2025, especially 6, to: “embed research and knowledge exchange across the University.” Meanwhile, the role of the reflective assessment for the module will be discussed in relation to the QAA (2009) recommendation to use PDP to enable students to “plan, integrate and take responsibility for their personal, career and academic development.”

The presenters will, also, consider the potential benefits of placements by mapping their experiences in relation to Pegg et al (2021,) including in relation to aim 3 of the Redesign of the Learning Experience initiative at Birmingham City University concerning “embedding the ‘real world’ in the curriculum with work experience [and] placements;” and in relation to the PALANTINE project at Lancaster University’s study of “work placements and work-based learning” to “ensure real-world experience.”

And now for more photos! The first shows ACCLAIM as it was being launched, in Warsaw in 2019 (at one of the three universities listed in our presentation's title) by myself (from Roehampton - another of the universities in our title) and by Lisa Maurice (from Bar-Ilan, the third university mentioned)

Here's the initial ACCLAIM poster, on display during the conference where we launched the Network

And, next, here we are at the launch again, at the White Villa of the Faculty of Artes Liberales at the University of Warsaw. Note the inscription on the wall above the windows, in Polish, Latin and English. Anyone recognise the source of the quotation?!

The first set of photos in this posting were taken during the same conference where ACCLAIM was launched. Here, participants at the Warsaw event are taking part in activities designed for autistic children.

Here are two remaining sections of the application:

Which conference theme/s will be addressed?

• preparing our students for their future professions
• preparing for work placements and internships (virtual or face to face)  
• participatory and reflective learning
• redesign of current modules /programmes to enhance employability (see Pegg et al, 2021)

5 key references that relate to the chosen topic:

ACCLAIM: Autism Connecting with CLAssically-Inspired Mythology Network http://www.omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/acclaim

Our Mythical Childhood… The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges http://omc.obta.al.uw.edu.pl/

Pegg et al (2021) ‘Pedagogy for Employability’ http://oro.open.ac.uk/30792/1/Pedagogy_for_employability_170212_1724.pdf 

QAA (2009) Personal Development Planning – Guidance for Institutional Polcy and Practice in Higher Education http://www.recordingachievement.org/images/pdfs/pdpguide2009.pdf

University of Roehampton (2018) 'Enabling Strategies 2019-2025 https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/globalassets/documents/corporate-information/enabling-strategies-2019-2025.pdf

Concluding now... We have just between 14.20 and 14.45 for our presentation, and I think that the 15 minutes we have - to follow a pecha kucha format - includes discussion time. So a challenge will be to cover the key ground in a "talk less, show more" manner. Now I think of it, I might structure the presentation around the pictures included above, along with some others such as, perhaps, these ones, also from the cafe in Warsaw staffed by autistic people:

I'll report back on how the session goes...

What I'm doing today, tomorrow and later this month including participating in an autism and mythical hope panel tomorrow at the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies conference...

For a while, in the early years of this blog, there would be periods of non-blogging from me. These silences often reflected the progress I was making with autism and classical myth - that is, that there wasn't much, or at least not much I could put into words. In recent times, and this is one such, when I go quiet, it is often because I have been busy preparing activities, events, articles etc - even now a book - linked with the topic.

Page 1 of the Israel Society for the Promotion of Classical Studies conference,
including the Mythology of Hope panel - the red, including for my paper, denotes
virtual presentation... Screenshot captured as best I can manage after several attempts
each of which worked less well than this one!

Today, my key task is to prepare a paper for a classics conference in Israel tomorrow where I shall talk about my project as part of a panel on autism and classics - and how classical topics can resonate with autistic children, and how this engagement can be demonstrated by activities in Israel (by my fellow panellists) and the UK (by me).

I shall be zooming in while my fellow, Israel-based, speakers will be there in person. I shall use this blended format as an opportunity to say some things about the possibility for 'remote' activities for autistic children. Such activities need not, I shall consider, be a second best, but might offer a means of enjoying and exploring being autistic - through ways that in in-person activities cannot allow.

Before I get stuck into the paper, I shall be attending - at Roehampton, but again via Zoom - a planning meeting for a possible bid that might include an autistic dimension. I shall also be doing other activities in preparation for upcoming events including a panel in the middle of this month at this year's Children's History Society conference - again via Zoom. And I shall be preparing for a talk I shall be giving soon, with two Roehampton students - though Zoom again - during this year's University of Roehampton Learning and Teaching Festival. This presentation will be on the placements the students have been doing with the Our Mythical Childhood project, including around autism and mythology. 

I shall also be doing some followups to an ACCLAIM Network event last week - which was too wonderful to share easily here (so more will follow), and I shall be starting to look though the proofs that arrived yesterday for a chapter on Hercules and autistic "hope" for a volume coming out of the "Mythical Hope" stage of the Our Mythical Childhood project.

This sounds like quite a lot - and I've missed out a couple of things - and if this posting reads as a little breathless, that reflects how I'm envisaging the day. I'm going to get started now...

Acclaiming autism and mythology in children's education on 24 May - along with Hercules from Roehampton and London newly imagined...

It is my pleasure to share information - now with graphic! - of the ACCLAIM (Autism Connecting CLAssically-Inspired Mythology) Network event a week today, on Monday 24 May. The full poster is here along with a link to a pdf version. All very welcome - please share with anyone who might be interested!

Why I'm planning to animate the Higher Education and autistic classrooms guided by Panoply

I didn't plan to blog today, but I've been inspired to by a session on animating ancient vases this morning with Sonya Nevin! 

This was the session I mentioned previously, when I blogged last week. It's the second of two sessions where the Myths and Mythology class I'm currently teaching at Roehampton joined the weekly Our Mythical Childhood seminar in Warsaw.

Vase animation-linked activities in action, from the
 Panoply vase animation pages on the
Our Mythical Childhood website here
 

What Sonya showed was just how far an animations approach to ancient vases can open up new ways to look at ancient art, myth and at contemporary people's own relationships with that material.

It is possible, as Sonya set out, to explore different perspectives on vases, to think in fresh ways about what people think they know or see - and the there is potential too for using vases in activities beyond the Higher Education classroom, for example with children and with displaced people.

Further examples of Panoply-inspired creativity
 - also from the Our Mythical Childhood website here

Sonya showed two of the animations she has created with Steve Simons, starting with Hercules capturing and bringing the Erymanthian Boar to Eurystheus.

I commented in the zoom chat that I could see potential for using the animation in activities with autistic children. At the same moment, independently, one of the Warsaw students said that she would like to use the animations with autistic children. We have arranged to follow up!

The possibilities, I would say, for dealing with issues like anxiety, empathy and emotions is huge. As Sonya set out, activities linked with the animations can include looking at vases from different characters's point of view. In the case of the Boar vase, this could be the queen, or Eursytheus, or as I suggested - on the day when new UK legislation acknowledging that animals can feel pain and joy has been announced - the point of view of the Boar.

For more on the Boar animation - and for other animations, including the extraordinary Sappho animation, visit the Panoply site here or the Our Mythical Childhood Panoply page here. The Our Mythical Childhood webpage is here. 

Coming back to the vase I have written about in my previous two postings - the one where Herakles is being brought by Athena to Zeus - Sonya mentioned during the session an activity I tried out in class several years ago where students story-boarded that vase. The side they story-boarded, however, was the other side, the side where Athena is coming out of the head of Zeus while a third figure - Hephaistos? Hermes? Prometheus? - moves away with an axe: 

Sixth century BCE lip cup now in the British Museum.
Image source and further details here

I know that, somewhere, I have the story-boards the students created. For now, here is one of them along with what I  wrote in a learning and teaching portfolio I was creating at the time, in 2015:

"To encourage students to think in fresh ways about evidence I have recently tried out an innovative learning activity, story-boarding in  a module I am currently convening for the first time – an introductory module on mythology for first year students. My colleague Sonya Nevin, the co-founder of the project Panoply: Animating Ancient Vases uses this technique in her workshops with school children and students and the story boards are subsequently animated by her partner. Struck that the storyboarding itself could have pedagogic value I asked the class to make storyboards for a specific artefact we were discussing in class: an archaic Greek lip-cup depicting the birth of Athena. I include here an example of the innovative, thoughtful resulting work that was produced – with students taking different perspectives on the mythological moment being depicted and the messages about divinity and mythology being asserted. This fed back into class discussion of the multiple ways of reading individual pieces of evidence and on the meaning created by each new user of a given artefact. The activity is helping to skill the students for one of their assignments: a report on a classical mythological artefact in the British Museum"

Actions for me:

1. Use animations further in the HE classroom

2. Use animations further in activities for autistic children

Sonya (left) and me (right) at a myth and education conference in
Cambridge in February 2020, the last time we met in person before lockdown...

Liminality, heroism and a *possible* further perspective on why Hercules can chime with autistic experiences interrupted by news of a presentation acceptance

Like my current two postings, this current one is practising what I preach. I'm currently recommending that the students I'm teaching should blog each week for the Myths and Mythology module assignment - and my goal is, likewise, to blog each week in response to what comes up in class. 

Choice of Hercules chimney piece, Adam Room, Grove House -
collage of photos by Maria Vorovieba

I am motivated to do this blogging because I have tied myself into doing it. But I'm motivated, too, due how how lively classes this week have been due to the engagement of students and the guest tutors: yesterday Grace Page and Cristiana Lucidi on heroines and heroes and, today, Aimee Hinds on myth and reception.

This posting responds both to yesterday's exploration of how to make sense of hero myths. It also looks at what it means to create receptions today of heroes from classical myth.

One thing that each session was concerned with was what it is about classical myth that can "speak" to people today. As we explored in both sessions, classical myths are culture-specific but the cultures in question can be contemporary ones.

My initial plan had been to turn again to one of the images I looked at last week: the lip cup showing Herakles being pulled by Athena to Zeus - and to see whether if could fit Van Gennep's schema of initiation myth, which Grace discussed, of separation - liminiality - intergration.

But I'll put that plan on hold for now - beyond saying that I think it can - my thinking is that it can validate each term in turn, and validate all three at once...

Here's why I'm putting it on hold - as I was teaching the news came though that a session I proposed for next month's Learning and Teaching Festival at Roehampton has been accepted. Along with two Roehampton students, who have been doing placements with the Our Mythical Childhood project including for its autism "wing," I'll be discussing the impact the students have had. The focus will include a discussion relevant to the one we had in class today around why classical myths can continue. The presentation's topic will, also, be relevant to our discussion in class today around what the responsibility are of those who are creating the receptions.

I'll share session's goals and abstract soon,along with the references pulled from the application form.

And I'll get back to the initiation schema at a later point - but I'll throw out for now that Hercules is ever being separated, ever liminal, ever and being reintegrated, before being separated, liminal, and integrated all over again. And it's being stuck in what can be envisaged as an ongoing cycle that can help explain, I think..., what makes Hercules so appealing in relation to experiencing the world as an autistic person...