Every learning space needs a guide. Ours is a white rabbit.
Space Bunny is the mascot of our learning space. Our white rabbit symbolises playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope, and the possibility of expanding learning potential.
Follow the rabbit. Go down the rabbit hole. Chase the thing that has caught your attention and see where it takes you. That is how learning actually happens — not on a timetable someone else set, but along the desire lines of your own curiosity.
Playfulness is not a break from learning. It is learning. Wonder is not a distraction from rigor. It is the engine of it. Autistic and Disabled learners flourish when interest leads, when attention is followed instead of corrected, when the environment makes room for the deep dive.
Space Bunny stands for that room. For the hope that potential expands when we stop trying to shrink it to fit. The rabbit hole is not somewhere you fall by accident. It is somewhere worth going on purpose.
Learning how to learn on his own proved one of the most important lessons of his life.
What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry
Our white rabbit (also known as Space Bunny) symbolises playfulness, curiosity, wonder, hope and the possibility of expanding learning potential.
Go down the rabbit hole (embrace serendipity)
The 5-Step Research Method I Used For Tim Ferriss, Robert Greene, and Tucker Max | by Ryan Holiday | Thrive Global | Medium
You have to embrace the accidental.
Remember what the Dormouse said
One pill makes you larger And one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you Don't do anything at all Go ask Alice When she's ten feet tall
And if you go chasing rabbits And you know you're going to fall Tell 'em a hookah smoking caterpillar Has given you the call He called Alice When she was just small
When the men on the chessboard Get up and tell you where to go And you've just had some kind of mushroom And your mind is moving low Go ask Alice I think she'll know
When logic and proportion Have fallen sloppy dead And the White Knight is talking backwards And the Red Queen's off with her head Remember what the Dormouse said Feed your head Feed your head
“I identified with Alice. I was a product of ’50s America in Palo Alto, California, where women were housewives with short hair and everything was highly regulated. I went from the planned, bland ’50s to the world of being in a rock band without looking back. It was my Alice moment, heading down the hole. ‘White Rabbit’ seemed like an appropriate title.”
How Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick Wrote ‘White Rabbit’ – WSJ
One day we took acid and I put on Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain.”
I loved that album and I listened to it over and over for hours, particularly “Concierto de Aranjuez,” which takes up most of the first side. It’s hypnotic. I’ve always been like this. Anything I love I’m going to cram into my ears, nose and mouth until I use it up. “Sketches of Spain” was drilled into my head and came squirting out in various ways as I wrote “White Rabbit.”
How Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick Wrote ‘White Rabbit’ – WSJ
Feed your head
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
🐇 …when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by…
Get your head in the clouds
The rabbit takes you down the hole. This one sends you up.
“You got your head in the clouds” is usually a rebuke — shorthand for distracted, unrealistic, not paying attention to what counts. We mean it as an invitation. Space Bunny stands for wonder, and wonder has to go somewhere. Here it goes skyward.
What gets dismissed as daydreaming is often a deeper way of noticing the world. The track and reflection below hold that noticing up to the light. Feed your head; then let it drift.
What were the skies like when you were young?
They went on forever and they, when I, we lived in Arizona
And the skies always had little fluffy clouds in them and, er
They were long and clear and
There were lots of stars at night
And, er, when it would rain it would all turn, it, they were beautiful
The most beautiful skies, as a matter of fact
Uh, the sunsets were
Purple and red and yellow and on fire
And the clouds would catch the colors everywhere
That's unique, 'cause I used to look at them all the time when I was little
You don't see that
I used to play “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb in class all the time during our multisensory early years creative sessions, so it has personal meaning for me. I chose this track because its playful, looping textures and sampled voice describing childhood skies feel exactly like how I notice the world even as an adult, looping, detailed, non-linear, full of wonder. It captures being monotropic and being in flow, and it invites imagination and authenticity.
The voice on the track recalls skies from childhood in specific detail such as the exact colours of a sunset, the way clouds caught the light, nights thick with stars, and reflects on how that kind of noticing gets less as people get older; they lose their sense of awe and wonder. What gets framed as “too much detail” or “getting distracted by the sky” is often a different, richer way of encountering the world, not a deficit, but a different depth of relationship with it.
Neurodivergent children’s development doesn’t move in a straight line, it shifts and changes, ebbs and flows. When we centre children’s own rhythms, strengths and lived experience, rather than measuring them against a fixed idea of being “on track” and constantly judging against neuronormative expectations, we make room for the same awe, wonder, imagination and flow this track carries, and for the children who notice the sky like that too, in many diverse ways.
Helen Edgar of Autistic Realms