Encourage Education Services

A great list of books with neurodivergent characters from Reel2e (www.reel2e.org), an organization that supports families of children who are both gifted and neurodivergent.

https://www.reel2e.org/post/books-featuring-neurodiverse-characters

Books Featuring Neurodivergent Characters Need a holiday gift or some winter break reading? Check out this list of books featuring neurodivergent characters, organized by grade.Elementary • Just Ask: Be Different. Be Brave. Be You. by Sonia Sotomayor and Rafael Lopez (differences) • The World Needs Who You Were Made to Be by Joanna Gain...

"Too often, says Tsabary, parents get caught up in unnecessary power struggles with their children, fighting to be right rather than trying to connect with or understand them."

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/26/1172161496/build-a-stronger-connection-with-your-kids

FREE resources for kids about America’s 250th anniversary!
🇺🇸🪖🎉🎆

America 250 | Kids Discover Online Celebrate America's 250th anniversary with this full menu of resources to use with your students, FREE all summer long.

"...even as employers have become more willing — even eager — to hire graduates on the autism spectrum, their hiring practices continue to shut many qualified candidates out."

Autistic students who make it through college face a bigger challenge: getting jobs Colleges now offer career readiness classes and one-on-one coaching for students with autism

Do what you love. Love what you do. ❤️

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=938218945875751&id=100090629623461&mibextid=wwXIfr

In 1929, Joseph Campbell's academic advisors told him to "pick one subject." He refused, walked away from his PhD, rented a cabin with no running water for $20 a year, and spent five years alone reading every myth, legend, and story ever written. What he discovered became the hidden blueprint behind Star Wars, Harry Potter, The Lion King, The Matrix—and your own life.
Columbia University. 1929.
Joseph Campbell had done everything right.
He'd earned his master's degree. He'd studied in Paris. He'd studied in Munich. He'd read widely, thought deeply, and arrived back at Columbia with an unusual proposal:
He wanted to study Sanskrit, modern art, psychology, and medieval literature.
All at once.
His academic advisors looked at him the way academic advisors look at people who are about to make a terrible mistake.
"Pick one," they said.
It was reasonable advice. Careers are built through specialization. Expertise requires focus. The academic world rewards those who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
Joseph Campbell understood all of this.
He still refused.
And then he walked away from the entire system.

He picked the worst possible moment to do it.
The Great Depression was arriving. Jobs were evaporating. Families were losing everything. Friends who'd made sensible career choices were struggling. The idea of walking away from a prestigious academic path—at this moment, of all moments—seemed like either extraordinary courage or complete insanity.
Campbell's family was horrified.
His friends thought he'd ruined himself.
He rented a cabin in Woodstock, New York.
Twenty dollars a year.
No running water. No career. No plan except this:
Read everything.

For five years, Joseph Campbell disappeared into books.
From dawn until dusk, every single day, he read:
Hindu scriptures and Buddhist sutras. Greek myths and Roman legends. Native American stories and African folklore. Medieval romances and Arthurian legends. The psychological theories of Carl Jung. The novels of James Joyce.
Every culture. Every tradition. Every century.
He wasn't studying for exams. There were no exams.
He wasn't building toward a degree. There was no degree.
He was looking for something he couldn't quite name yet—a thread he kept sensing beneath all these stories, connecting them across time and geography and language and culture.
He was looking for the pattern.
His routine was almost monastic: read, take notes, synthesize, repeat. No social pressure. No career benchmarks. No one telling him what mattered or what to focus on.
Just one man in a cabin with no running water, surrounded by the accumulated myths of human civilization.

In 1934, he started teaching literature at Sarah Lawrence College, an institution that actually welcomed the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that had gotten him thrown out of the conventional academic system.
But the real work continued.
Because he'd found the thread.
And now he needed to pull it.

Here's what Joseph Campbell discovered in that cabin:
Every hero story ever told follows the same pattern.
Not similar patterns. The same pattern.
Greek. Hindu. Christian. Native American. African. Buddhist. Medieval European. Ancient Egyptian.
Different characters. Different settings. Different gods and monsters and magic systems.
Same skeleton underneath.
The hero begins in an ordinary world. Receives a call to adventure. Initially refuses the call—because the call is terrifying. A mentor appears to guide and prepare them. They cross a threshold into an unknown world full of challenges.
They face trials that test everything they are. They approach the innermost cave—the place of their greatest fear. They endure the supreme ordeal that seems to destroy them.
And then—transformed by what they've survived—they return home.
Not the same person who left.
Someone new. Carrying wisdom. Carrying a gift. Changed in ways that can now change others.
Campbell called it the monomyth.
The Hero's Journey.
The hidden architecture of human storytelling, present in every culture that has ever existed, emerging from the same deep structures of human psychology—our fears, our desires, our need to make meaning from suffering.
He published his findings in 1949 as The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The world ignored it.
Mixed reviews. Modest sales. Academic circles found it interesting but overly ambitious. The general public didn't notice.
For 28 years, the book sat on shelves.
Campbell kept teaching. Kept thinking. Kept following the thread.
He followed his bliss.
That was his phrase—the one he became most famous for. Not a command to be happy. A command to follow what genuinely lit you up, even when it made no practical sense, even when others thought you were foolish, even when the Depression was happening and everyone else was playing it safe.
"Follow your bliss."
He had done exactly that. And for 28 years, the world hadn't noticed.

Then came 1977.
A young filmmaker named George Lucas released a science fiction movie that nobody expected to matter.
Star Wars.
Luke Skywalker—a boy on a desert planet who yearns for something more.
A call to adventure: Obi-Wan Kenobi appears with news of a mission.
An initial refusal: Luke says he can't leave, he has responsibilities.
A threshold crossing: He leaves the only world he's ever known.
Trials: The Death Star. The Force. Enemies he's not ready for.
A supreme ordeal: The final trench run, everything on the line.
Transformation and return: Luke Skywalker becomes a hero. The galaxy is changed.
George Lucas had read The Hero with a Thousand Faces while developing Star Wars.
He didn't just borrow from it. He structured his entire film around it.
And when Star Wars became the highest-grossing film in history, Lucas said publicly:
Joseph Campbell is the man who taught me how to tell this story.

The world suddenly needed to know who Joseph Campbell was.
The book that had been ignored for 28 years became essential reading. Writers, filmmakers, and storytellers studied it obsessively.
A screenwriter named Christopher Vogler distilled Campbell's framework into a practical guide for Hollywood. His internal memo—and later his book The Writer's Journey—became the template that shaped an entire generation of films.
Now look at the movies you love:
The Matrix: Neo is the ordinary man who discovers he's something more. Morpheus is the mentor. The Oracle guides him. The training montage. The supreme ordeal. The return, transformed.
The Lion King: Simba refuses his destiny, flees, is called back, faces the supreme ordeal, returns transformed.
Harry Potter: Ordinary boy discovers magical world, crosses threshold, undergoes trials, faces death itself, returns transformed.
The Lord of the Rings: Ordinary hobbit carries a burden no one should have to carry, crosses into the unknown, faces the supreme ordeal, returns forever changed.
Every single one follows the pattern Campbell discovered in a $20-a-year cabin during the Great Depression.

In 1985-1986, filmmaker Bill Moyers sat down with Campbell for a series of conversations about mythology, meaning, and the human experience.
Those conversations became the PBS series The Power of Myth—one of the most watched programs in PBS history.
It aired in 1988.
One year after Campbell died.
He spent his final years watching the ideas he'd developed alone in a Woodstock cabin reshape cinema, literature, psychology, and culture.
He died at 83, on October 30, 1987.
Having lived the hero's journey himself.

Here's the part that should stop you:
The hero's journey isn't just a storytelling template.
It's a description of how human beings actually grow.
Think about the most transformative periods of your own life.
You were called—by loss, by opportunity, by crisis, by love—into something you didn't choose.
You probably refused at first. Because the call was terrifying.
You crossed a threshold into unfamiliar territory.
You faced trials that tested everything you thought you were.
And somewhere in there—in the hardest part, the part you'd rather not think about—something in you broke open and became something new.
You returned. Changed. Carrying something you didn't have before.
That's not a movie plot.
That's your life.
Campbell didn't invent the hero's journey.
He recognized it—in every culture, every century, every story humans have ever told.
Because it mirrors something true about human experience.
About how we actually change. How we actually grow. How we actually become ourselves.

Joseph Campbell told his advisors "no" in 1929.
He walked away from the conventional path.
He rented a cabin with no running water for $20 a year.
He spent five years reading everything.
He discovered the hidden pattern in every story ever told.
He published a book nobody read for 28 years.
And then Star Wars happened.
And the world realized:
The man who walked away from the path had mapped it.

He had one piece of advice for everyone who asked how to live:
"Follow your bliss."
Not because it's easy. Not because it makes practical sense. Not because others will understand.
But because the alternative—following someone else's map, picking one subject, staying safe, staying specialized, staying inside the lines—
Produces a life that fits the expected pattern but misses the actual journey.
Campbell chose the journey.
The cabin. The books. The Great Depression. The 28 years of being ignored. The vindication. The legacy.
He lived the hero's journey to discover the hero's journey.
And the story he found—the one every culture tells, the one every human being lives—
Was his own.

"Many neurodivergent children do not fail the academic curriculum. They fail the hidden curriculum. They struggle not with the content of school but with its social architecture: the unwritten rules of peer interaction, the performance of attentiveness, the management of tone and eye contact and turn-taking in ways that signal belonging."

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-schools-exclude-neurodivergent-children-design-2026-eva-redford-1srre

"Not every child is a literacy or mathematics prodigy, of course, but they all, if allowed to be their own teachers, are driven to discovery. I've rarely met a parent who was not, rightly, blown away by their preschooler's capacity to learn in this way. 'Children who don't go to school,' explains Dr. [Naomi] Fisher, 'live in a state of alert awareness because they're not expecting to be told what to do and not expecting to be evaluated.' It frees them up, she says, to look for patterns and make connections. A child who has not yet been taught the dubious lesson that they need adult instruction and approval for their learning instead comes to rely upon their own curiosity, which is what play-based, or self-directed, learning is all about."

Self-Directed Learners Live in a State of Alert Awareness Psychologist and author of the book Changing Our Minds , Naomi Fisher, once told me that her three-year-old son took an ear...

For some people, being told to read a book feels like being told to enjoy a marathon.

The people who love it often struggle to understand why everybody else doesn't.

As a dyslexic adult, that doesn't seem like a particularly controversial thing to say.

Yet every time I hear discussions about "The Year of Reading", I find myself wondering whether we're all talking about the same thing.

Because people keep telling me we're in the middle of a reading crisis.

Children aren't reading.

Adults aren't reading.

Nobody reads anymore.

And yet most people spend huge chunks of their day reading.

They read WhatsApp messages, emails, subtitles, news articles, social media posts, comments, captions, websites, reviews and instructions.

Many people process thousands of words every single day.

What they are not always doing is reading books.

And those are not the same thing.

I love books.

I am glad books exist.

Learning to read is one of the most important skills a child can acquire.

But reading and reading books are not identical concepts.

One is a skill.

The other is a format.

And increasingly, I think we're confusing the two.

Sometimes I wonder whether literacy conversations are dominated by people who love books.

Because if you ask a room full of book lovers how to encourage reading, the answer often seems to be:

"More books."

But for some people, books are hard work.

For some, they are exhausting.

For some, they are frustrating.

For some, they have spent years being told they are behind, struggling, reluctant or not trying hard enough.

After enough experiences like that, books stop feeling magical.

They start feeling like a test.

The irony is that many of those same people still love stories.

Still love information.

Still love learning.

Still love ideas.

They just access them differently.

Through audiobooks.

Text-to-speech.

Podcasts.

Videos.

Online communities.

Formats that are often treated as somehow less worthy than a printed page.

But why?

If a child listens to a 12-hour audiobook, have they really engaged with the story less than someone who read it with their eyes?

If a dyslexic teenager uses text-to-speech to access information that would otherwise be inaccessible, is that cheating?

Or is that literacy evolving?

Stephen Fry once said:

"Books are no more threatened by Kindle than stairs are by elevators."

Perhaps reading hasn't disappeared.

Perhaps it has simply changed shape.

For many dyslexic, disabled and neurodivergent people, alternative routes into stories and information are not a compromise.

They are accessibility.

Maybe the goal was never to create book lovers.

Maybe the goal was to create curious people.

People who can access information, understand ideas, think critically and continue learning throughout their lives.

The purpose of literacy is not to worship a particular format.

The purpose of literacy is to open doors.

And once the door is open, I don't much mind how somebody chooses to walk through it.

Perhaps we're asking the wrong question.

Instead of asking why people aren't reading books the way previous generations did, perhaps we should be asking:

Are we still measuring 21st-century literacy with 20th-century expectations?