Raising awareness of neurodiversity in young people

Shabnam Wasim, the university’s Community Engagement Manager worked alongside Dr Beth Hannah, Reader in Educational Psychology from the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law to facilitate a community engagement project which involved a collaboration between the University of Dundee, Dundee City Council Community Youth Development Team, Morgan Academy, and Comics Youth SCIO.  

Young people aged 12-14 years participated in six workshops and helped co-design a comic to support younger pupils around the topic of neurodiversity. 

 The aims of the project were to: 

• Support the young people to explore the theme of positive self-identity, increase the understanding of individuality and to raise awareness of neurodiversity.  
• Build confidence in the young people in being able to express themselves to others (social communication). 
• Collaboratively work together to support young people in producing a comic which expresses their ideas and creativity, using their own lived experiences. 

The project resulted in the co-creation and production of a comic entitled ‘New Beginnings’. 

Download the comic

Throughout the project, the young people engaged consistently well, and all members of the group contributed to the development of the main character, the storyline, and the comic design itself. While Sam was a fictional main character in the comic, he reflected aspects of each of the group members. The group are especially happy that the comic is going to be used to help other young people, particularly those with similar experiences to them. Some members of the group are interested in now becoming peer-to-peer mentors so that they can support other young people using the resource.