 Hello everyone and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today and welcome to this thematic webinar organized by School Education Gateway, the initiative of European Union and as a place to engage with European policy and practice for school education. So my name is Ina and together with my colleague Asi where I delighted to support this webinar today which will be dedicated to creativity and education and today we'll talk about project-based learning approach which involves creativity and meaningful learning that relates to children's life experience. We'll be introduced today to the empirical research done by the Storymakers Company, a social enterprise at Leedsburg University that uses drama and creative writing processes to create storytelling experiences with marginalized children. So today in our speaker panel we have Lisa Stephenson who is a director and founder of Storymakers Company. She's also a cool course leader of drama and creative writing and her research area is creative pedagogy as a former primary teacher and drama specialist. She works in partnership with schools, artists and communities to develop critical spaces for young voices. We also have today with us Tom Dobson who is course director for master degrees in school education and Tom is a former secondary school teacher whose research interest focuses on creative and writing and identity. So I'm very excited to listen to our speakers today. The topic is extremely interesting and if you have any questions during the session please don't hesitate to post them in the question and answer box and we'll try to address as many questions as possible in the end of the session to our speakers. So thank you so much. Lisa, Tom if you're ready I'm happy to give you the floor. Thank you. Good afternoon everyone, my name is Lisa Stephenson. I'm delighted to be here and today we're going to be talking about the Storymakers Company. So a little bit about the Storymakers Company. The Storymakers Company is a practice based research social enterprise that leads Beckett University. It was started by academics, teachers, artists, so it's a collaborative who were all concerned with the marginalisation of the creative arts and within UK primary schools. We work particularly alongside children and artists and cultural organisations and our practice based research really focuses on creative learning in education. We believe strongly that the stories we create and share should celebrate diversity, promote citizenship and critical thinking. So our work just to summarise is about using creative learning to amplify the voices of marginalised groups. So I'd like to just say a few things about the creative learning landscape in the United Kingdom and why we feel that this works really necessary and I'm going to draw from three reports that were published last October. The first report is the report by the Arts Council England which looked at shaping the next 10 years from 2020 to 2030 and this was a report that drew from 5,000 stakeholders to really explore if you like the state of creative opportunities for children across the country and they found that within this report and I quote that the number of state schools teaching the arts continues to decline and while most children have significant enthusiasm for cultural activity that stimulates their creativity, much of what they undertake is in their own time and often online and their access to high quality creative and cultural opportunities outside the home is currently heavily determined by background and postcode and this is a problem, promotes a problem because if children aren't giving access to creative learning then that means that they are not experiencing holistic learning. Going further the Paul Hamlin Foundation and the Cultural Learning Alliance also cited the lack of arts education and opportunities for young people as a social justice issue linking this specifically with arts education to social mobility. There was a further report as well in October of 2019 by the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education again looking at creativity across the curriculum and they called for more research into creativity and the recognition of creativity in education. So Storymakers is about all of these things, it's a response to the UK landscape and specifically a response to children's lack of opportunities for creative opportunities. We're also part of our work is also working with young people and children in a research capacity and we're really interested in what they think and how they feel about creative learning and we're also interested in exploring the links between creative learning and well-being. So the Storymakers company has lots of different parts, lots of different projects and we're going to talk about one specific project today but I wanted to give you perhaps just a further outline of some of our work and again just to reiterate that this work is also about placing value on the work of the artist educator and the ways in which the artist educator works with young people. I've mentioned in schools but also we do have many collaborations with artists educators who are working outside school in community spaces as well. So our aims then are about opening up spaces for children's voice and we're going to talk very much today about children's voice and how we conceptualise children's voice. We mainly use as our artist tools if you like drama which is my own area of research and Tom's area of research is creative writing and so we've really bought our our research and our practice together through Storymakers and we collaborate with many schools, artists and cultural organisations and as I said we're particularly interested in bringing children's voices into the researchers as well so we co-research with children so we're very much about practice through research and some of our projects involve we have three parts really to the work. We have lots of external work so we have Storymakers Hub and that brings together many sort of national, regional and international artists. We have a hub linked to Initial Teacher Education, we have a community artist hub and through those hubs we work together to share our practice, develop our practice and also create new practice. So part of our work is then bringing together and exploring the role of the artist educator and we've just won some funding for that through Erasmus that Tom will talk about later. We have also developed some evidence-based frameworks for school and again this is about trying to recognise and articulate the creative learning that happens in school and we view creative learning very much as an everyday practice. We see everybody as having the capability to be creative and that is our focus. So the artist educator award and the creative learning award for schools is particularly interested in developing a language that's helpful for schools and evidence-based award that thinks about the role of creative learning again with a focus on critical thinking, compassion, empathy and global citizenship and we will explore that later through one of our projects. We have a festival and you can see here these wonderful images are from our festival, it runs every year again it's regional, national and international partners and again we are promoting and sharing the creative work that we are involved in. We also are giving young people a platform to share their views and their ideas so that they are very much part of the process. So that is every year. As Tom mentioned we have an MA, Drama and Creative Writing and that MA has very much come from the shared research and practice that Tom and I have developed through schools and then we have the Storymakers Press and that Storymakers Press is the project that we are really going to focus on for today's presentation. We are going to give you an in-depth example of one of our most recent projects with children with the Storymakers Press to illustrate some of the aims that I have mentioned above. So I am going to hand over to Tom now who is going to introduce the Storymakers Press and tell you a little bit about it. Okay thanks Lisa, that's great and it's really good to be here and to be talking to all of you about our exciting work. Storymakers Press as Lisa said is part of Storymakers Company. We publish children's literature and we do so in a way that we believe is quite unique. There's some text there which you can read about Storymakers Press but essentially what we're doing is we're trying to present in children's literature groups of children who are underrepresented. Okay so there have been various surveys about that including the reflecting realities report by the Centre for Literacy and Primary Education which came out last year and also some work at Sheffield Hamilton University which says in terms of children's literature there is it's very homogeneous in relation to the types of children who are being represented. So for example children from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic groups were seen to represent only 7% of protagonists in children's literature and we think this is outrageous really because it means that children are picking up books, they're going to school, they've been given books to read and they're just not seeing themselves in those books and therefore they disengage. I think what's the point, what's the point of reading? I think certainly in this country there are massive issues with reading for pleasure children are a bit less and less interested in reading books. They have to do it but they're less and less interested and I think part of that reason is that children aren't seeing themselves in fiction. So that's one thing we're trying to address through Storymakers Press by setting up this children's literature publishing house within our university. One of the ways in which we're trying to address that deficit, that problem, is by actively involving children in the co-construction of the stories that we publish. So actively involving children in creating a setting for the story, in creating and developing characters for the story and in developing the actual plot line of the story. More than that we'll involve children in selecting an illustrator and doing illustrations for our stories. We'll also involve children in the editing processes. Lisa, sorry, do you mind just muting yourself because I can just hear the rustling. That's right. So that's the other thing that we do. We're actively working with those children in order to create these stories. Do you mind just going back a slide, Lisa, sorry. Oh yeah, that one, right okay, great. The way in which we do that then in terms of involving children is through drama and creative writing workshops. What Bell Hooks would call an engaged pedagogy and Lisa's going to talk a bit more about that later. By involving children in the writing of fiction, what we're really doing is we're addressing some power structures that traditionally exist within children's literature. So children's books are written by adults for children. Publishers are adults and again the books are read by children and that means that children are often positioned with low status in terms of power and books can be quite ideological in the sort of messages they send out to children. We're quite keen in thinking about what might happen if children are involved, actively involved in the writing of those stories because what we're suggesting is that some of those traditional power structures that exist in children's literature will be disrupted okay and they'll also be disrupted because the children that we're working with are precisely those children who aren't represented currently in children's literature. So the example that we're going to focus on today is a book called Chasing the Volcano which we've just published and we wrote that with a group of children from a school in Bradford. We're based in Leeds and the United Kingdom. Bradford is a city that is just a neighbour of Leeds and this particular school is in an area of low socioeconomic status. There's lots of children there who have got English as an additional language and the school was really interested in us working in particular with children from a Roma background so we work with a group of children seven of whom were either from a Czech or a Slovak Roma background and in particular in this book Chasing the Volcano when we constructed the narrative with the children we were interested in trying to disrupt and address some of the stereotypical representation of Roma children that exists currently in children's literature. So for example Toninato talks about a polarized system of representation in children's literature where Roma characters are either seen in a very negative way as thieves, as liars, as somehow violent or in a very sort of romantic way and that's linked to this idea of mysticism and witchcraft etc and so they're quite Victorian representations that exist. So yeah by involving Roma children in writing Chasing the Volcanoes we were looking to disrupt that as well. Okay if we move on to the next slide, Lisa over to you for a bit. Okay great so I'm going to talk a little bit about how we then co-created the story with the children and over six workshops with the children we used drama to develop key parts of the story and the reason why we used drama and dramatic enquiries specifically was because we wanted to create a sense of community with those young people working with us and we wanted to open up spaces for them to be able to express themselves in a way that felt natural and we wanted to draw not in terms of their oracy we wanted to create spaces if you like for them to use their emotional, physical and linguistic ways of knowing. So we were particularly rather than in the English curriculum speaking and listening is often focused on specifically to do with the spoken word and writing we were drawing on their embodied knowledges and this was particularly important for this group of children because it allowed them to bring culturally relevant material into the into the drama space and also for some of these children two of these children who were new to English they were able to participate in the story in multimodal ways. So this way of working through drama had a focus specific focus on co-creation because within the drama workshops we were creating the story together we were exploring the setting we were creating the characters and we were exploring moments of tension within the within the story and we're working collaboratively and we were working as a community and so voice here is there's a focus on voice which is about pupils listening to each other and responding to each other and the teacher as well working using multiple languages literally in the multiple languages but also in a multimodal way and in this way the workshops were very inclusive and very dialogic and the children had had power to change and create scenarios change the direction of the narrative and create their own their own scenarios within the story and we use specifically then we do specifically on a pedagogy the pedagogy of dramatic inquiry and as a teacher then facilitating those moments within the drama this shared imagination making and meaning that isn't tied to a linguistic mode and of course this was a really rich way for us to work with these particular children because we also know that oral storytelling and storytelling as a as a mode of knowledge production is particularly rich in in in Roma culture. So we were particularly working this in a way over eight workshops and I'm just going to give you an example then of of one of the workshops an image from one of the workshops see my screen seems to be stuck okay so just an image here of our process of co-creation then and you can see here here's one of the images that the children have have created it's worth saying as well I don't think we actually stated that the with the story makers press we're specifically working with children age seven to twelve years old and the reason why we focused on that age group was because our research showed us that there was a lack of representation in stories for these particular this particular age group and actually that some of the stories where there was representation tended to be issues stories and most of our stories are they are not issue stories at all so within this story chasing the volcano there's a definite flipping of the narrative so you can see here in this in this picture you can see the name of character Luca is one of the name of the main characters children were bringing their own experiences and their own names into the story and you can see here that they have introduced the character who is mean and we found out that this character was representative of somebody who didn't want to share and they share their things and this particular child who drew the mean person had been a child who'd just come from Syria so we can see children's lived experiences not only coming into the story but we can see that actually as we create the story the children can move beyond those lived experiences to imagine other realities as well and that really speaks to the work of bell hooks as well you know this is a kind of a reimagining of some of these events so another really important part of of the work is again having cultural reference point culturally relevant material and in this particular story within the drama workshops most of the action centered around a fire the children had arrived in the story in the drama workshops they came to a safe place they'd travelled from across the world in response to a climate catastrophe and they met in a safe place and the central if you like object became very significant in the safe place was the fire and as we co-created our stories within this place within the fiction the fireplace and the fire became very significant and so you can see here here's an image drawn of the fire by James Brooke so we do have again we use some of our students from other courses from MA's to bring the children's artefacts and materials that they create within the drama workshops they also are brought into the story as well so it really is a hybrid text not in just in terms of their ideas but in terms of the things that they make within the workshops and the things that they draw and the things that they that they all of those all those artefacts appear I'm going to come back to the fireplace in a minute going to hand over to Tom now okay thanks Lisa so in terms of chasing the volcano then I'll just talk a little bit about the writing of that story so we work with children and they have as Lisa indicated they have their own writing journals where they can write down ideas and get them to draw as well and it's based on a theory that we developed from a previous project that was sponsored by the United Kingdom Literacy Association where we talk about children engaging in agentic writing okay so this is writing that's meaningful to them just to give you a little bit of the context of that within England there's quite a lot of research which suggests that children are alienated from the writing process okay they're not connecting with the writing process and I think that's because of a wider neoliberal context it's because of our national curriculum and it's because of quite a didactic approach to teaching writing I focus on grammar on the technical aspects of writing so what we've been interested in trying to do through Storymakers Press and some of our other research is to give children the object give give children rather the opportunity to write freely within the fiction within the drama so they always have these writing journals with them and then quite often when they come to write in those journals they're writing from the point of view of the character that they are in the drama and they're having to think about what kind of form their writing should take what kind of language they should use what kind of audience they're writing for and we're calling this agentic writing because what quite often happens in the classroom is that the teacher will make those decisions for the children they'll tell them what the form is they'll tell them who the audience is they'll give them a list of the kind of the kind of words or grammar that needs to be included in their writing so there's not much agency there so we're promoting an approach within Storymakers Press whereby the children are engaged with the with the writing they're writing within the drama and they're making key decisions about what that writing looks like so as Lisa indicated for chasing the volcano the setting we decided was going to be post apocalyptic there was going to have been some kind of climate catastrophe and then the children began developing the setting for that story and they began developing the characters and the plot line now one of the workshops that Lisa ran was focusing on the idea that the protagonist would be looking for a safe place to live the water was rising that their home was no longer tenable as a home so they needed to find somewhere where they could live safely and one of the key moments in this was when they had to leave their home they had to decide which objects to take with them and we've got some really interesting ideas from all of the children and all of the ideas were I suppose symptomatic of the kind of interests that the children had and the kind of experiences that they had outside of school one boy in particular decided to focus on stones he said that his protagonist was a collector of stones and when he had decided to to leave his home he was going to take two of his most precious stones with him this was really interesting there was there was a kind of I suppose it gave the character a bit of a backstory in a sense and we use this within the book one of my one of my the most difficult things that I faced when writing chasing the volcano was trying to decide which ideas of the children to include and which not to include and we were quite keen that every child had some of their ideas included in it but obviously there were issues to do with coherence of narrative you know the stones was a really really good idea not only did it give the character a bit of a backstory but it also served as a plot function this boy was quite keen that these stones had magical properties they were stones that had been taken originally from volcanic rock and smoothed down one of the stones would help the protagonist find his way to a safe place to a high place that was above the water level and to and to a volcano which is why it's called chasing the volcano obviously the volcanic rock rock links to the idea of volcano so the protagonist is in search of this volcano where he will be able to live the other thing the other plot function that it served the other stone the boy decided had had magical properties and so far as when you pressed it against your throat it would change your voice and make you sound younger than you actually were and this became useful to to the boy when he was subject to kidnappers partway through the story so one of the children in our group had an idea that the bad people in the narrative would be kidnappers who were looking for adolescents who could work the fields for them who could help them produce and produce food so the the stone would disguise the voice of the male protagonist to make him sound younger and therefore not as useful to the kidnappers who would be less likely to take him so it was really really fantastic idea I'm just going to read you a tiny bit from the start of the story of chasing the volcano we've actually got a I don't know Lisa if you want if you can click through to the padlet there we can show some of this when we launched the book a couple of weeks ago Lisa and Anna who is our publisher put together an interactive launch for the children so that they could interact with different aspects of the story but so we could also share some of the interviews that Lisa had conducted with the children who were involved in the project and some readings as well now one boy did a really nice reading the boy who'd come up with the ideas of the stones and we were going to play it to you but the sound isn't great so I'm going to just read that little bit of the story to you so this is um this is almost like the backstory to the protagonist he's still at home with his stone collection and he's talking about his stone collection and why he collects those stones I collect stones in my house in England I had lots and lots of stones in all colors precious stones and gems I had over 1500 of them I counted them all at school some of the boys thought I was a geek for collecting them I didn't care I loved looking at the stones I loved holding them in my hands and feeling their weight and the thing about collecting something is that when you start you can't stop paint you think so that was part of the backstory of Jack the protagonist and that was something that came directly from that drama workshop that Lisa led about which objects the characters were going to take with them when they were looking for that safe place it's absolutely fantastic working with the children some really amazing ideas that if I was writing a book by myself I certainly wouldn't have come up with and I think that's something that is certainly true of all the books that we've published this is our third one so far is that they're really vibrant and original capturing those brilliant ideas that the children come up with in the drama and creative writing workshops I'll hand over to Lisa thanks Tom so I'm going to talk about a little bit about the other book that you can see on this image which is the explorers guide and the explorers guide is also part of the work as we've said from story makers is thinking about taking the creative learning that happens when we're co-creating into schools and so what we do with the explorers guide is we take six moments from the story and we explore them in more detail so we unpack them in the guide we provide a detailed framework for well a starting point rather than a framework to support teachers in exploring parts of the story using drama now I mentioned earlier that one of the things we're really keen about is that the stories are not issue stories yet of course you saw earlier from the picture that we have for example the mean man coming into the drama workshops and other things others perhaps more challenging issues that children want to explore through the narrative and so the guides are multidisciplinary for example on our first book which was very much about it was a gaming story but it did explore in the narrative a young boy's relationship with his mother as well his mother we know was he was a carer for his mother and it's we don't particularly explore her why she is poorly in the story the story is essentially a story about friendship between two boys however the children were really keen to know more about mom and she got better in what was wrong with her and we worked with the centre for mental health cams is our acronym in this country for the centre for mental health again to think about the ways that we could do that in a structured and playful way within the explorer's guide so I'm just going to show you another illustration this is from the book and it's also in the guide there's a page there from the guide and just to go back again to that multimodality in terms of the co-creation within within the drama which is which is central to actually opening up spaces for young people's voice inclusive spaces and they are working together it's definitely about collective creativity when we're working within the drama workshops and you can probably see if you look really carefully just on the back of the back of the bookshelf there you can see two two images two drawings and they are drawings that children had actually done or they're kind of interpretations of them within the drama workshops so even within the even within the illustrations themselves we're working with our illustrators to make sure that and every aspect that we can of children's ideas are valued and shared and embedded within the story so this particular section of the of the guide it did explore the notion of precious objects and it was it one of the first activities using using the pictures and you can see on the right hand side there there's a bit about our ethos in the in the guide and it talks about the professional collaboration for each book and this particular story chasing the volcano does have links to the eco emergency so again at the back of the guide what we're trying to do from these six moments we want these these are also co-produced with teachers so we want them to be really helpful useful resources and again kind of our ethos is trying to bring and value creative learning in school so at the back of the guides what we do is we do map all of the activities against in particular parts of the of our national curriculum and they're mostly mapped in relation to I'd say the relational parts of the national curriculum which tends sometimes to get forgotten in a very busy school life so they map to the relationship curriculum which is a new curriculum that was only released this year and they map to the citizenship curriculum a lot of this is about ethics and kind of working together and thinking about social problems and they map to many other different areas the social emotional aspects of the curriculum so I'll give you an example now and we'll just have a quick go at this obviously we're not together it's a shame and we can't we can't actually have a dialogic sharing of our ideas but what we try to do as well in the in the guide is we try and map what we call world building so when we're working with children in the drama we have certain techniques that we use and that it bring children into the fiction and they we use particular language we use the word invitation so we invite them to be part of the story to bring to start to relate to that story by doing something particular together and I'll give you an example of that and beyond that what happens once children perhaps feel they're part of the story perhaps they've explored a setting or created a setting or perhaps they've kind of taken a an identity within the story then we explore then we have an element of the guide called exploration where we really try to get inside that character's head or to kind of really think about what's going on in the story thinking as if we are a character and then beyond that we come away from the story and we reflect on that so there's an element of critical reflection within this it's deep exploration of the story events so if I gave you an example and these are very simple as well one of the first activities around the precious objects and it relates to a page on the book and it asks it's just a bit of text to read out which says what if you were like Jack rushing to pack your things to leave home what's the precious object that you would bring remember you only have a small rucksack and there may be no electricity so it needs to be something with a special meaning or memory draw your object in your journal so we suggest within the guides that children have free journals free writing journals not just for writing but for drawing as well and I'm going to ask you to do that then just we're going to have one minute sort of breather within the presentation and I'd invite everybody if you were Jack what is the precious object that you would bring perhaps just the one the one precious object and I'm going to invite you to draw that precious object and if we had the time or we were if we were together then what I'd invite you to do sitting in a circle I'd invite you then to share to share stories of your object and to talk through them and what we would find then is a real sense of bringing our own lived experience into the space as we share them we may go on from there to explore how it feels to leave a place and then again to go on from there to think about what makes something precious and is a precious object just because it's expensive so we might go on to have a deeper exploration of the text. So what's really critical I'd say within the guide as well is that we have a particular framework that is that is linked to all the activities and this comes from our research with children and a lot of our research with children within that research they talk very much about this sort of work being linked to their well-being and so again this isn't about having a tick list this is an attempt this is our way again this is this is working this is research in practice but it's our way of recognizing the kind of learning and knowledge production that goes on within this within this creative within these creative learning experiences so we have there a specific well-being framework a community framework and we've called it an imaginary or a imagination framework many of the young people that we work with they talk about feeling that they don't have the opportunities for imaginative freedom within school so again we kind of foreground these as being really important parts of creative learning and each activity in the guide is mapped against this framework. So finally then just what I like to do is talk because at the heart of all the work again is also young voice and so with all our projects we talk and we we we evaluate and reflect on them in in in light of children's responses and I think it's really worth sharing some of these and some of these so sometimes when I feel angry I just use my imagination and draw and I think I'd like to come up I'd like to mention that quote first of all particularly because as we mentioned earlier we are really um placing importance on literacies when we're working with young people that they are they are using multimodal ways of working and that includes their bodies collective creativity and drawing writing and non-verbal ways of working as well and this is about emotional literacy so this was something when we asked one of the children they particularly reflected on that this was kind of if you like this is very much linked to their own well-being again another quote I feel like my mind escaped from activity just to reiterate these are children aged seven to twelve years old it makes me feel free I think it and I do it and this is one of the kind of quotes we get again and again you're learning that it's okay if you have this idea you're learning it's okay to make a mistake and again very much within the work at the heart of the work is the idea that it is important to to take risks and that there's no right and wrong answer that actually within the stories and even the story itself which was if you think about chasing the volcano was a story really you know a apocalyptic story but the children within that story are acting they are coming up with possible solutions they're thinking outside the box and this is at the heart of what we call critical agency so what we're trying to do within the work and is we're trying to promote children's capability to ask questions about the prevailing norms and values and thinking about how this kind of knowledge production really matters in 21st century learning and I particularly thinking about what happens you know what happens we talked about marginalised groups but what happens when children suddenly experience something or they suddenly they've never imagined other possibilities they suddenly imagine that there are other realities and that they have other options these realities can be pertained and again this is at the heart of our particular focus on creative learning and we feel that that is critical for 21st century learning and it's critical for celebrating and acknowledging difference as we move forward and so that is again really part of some of the complexities that we're exploring within the workshops. I've put some we've put some links in there we'd love to hear from you there's our links to Twitter we have a website which talks about lots more of our projects and we also you can find out more about our books as well from the link that's below and I know that these these are going to be shared I'm going to hand over to Tom I didn't know whether Tom you wanted just to mention something about the references. Yeah great thank you thank you Lisa so here's the references for some of the publications that we've mentioned two of them there the Dobson Stevenson and Aredi references from 2020 and 2019 they've researched publications about the processes with which we've been engaging and the first one there writing a novel with Roma primary school children was actually published today in children's literature in education so if you want to read a bit more about the processes behind the writing of saving the volcano then I'd suggest having a look at that. Yeah great and I suppose the other thing just to quickly mention Lisa is that Lisa and I are leading a project which focuses on artist artist educators across Europe it's a Erasmus Ka201 funding project we've just got the money for that so we're going to start work on it next week and through our Twitter handle we'll keep you up to date with with what we're doing but essentially we're looking at teacher professional development in terms of teachers employing some of the processes that artists would use with their children with their classes and we're looking at the benefits of that so that's how it's going to be really exciting. Thank you okay I think that's it from us. Thank you yeah perfect thank you so much it was really really very inspiring thank you so much Lisa and Tom well right now we have some time to address some questions that had been had been addressed to our speakers and a couple of questions were related to the languages so for example people were wondering if there is other versions of languages of the books Chasing Volcano and the other question was related to whether the children are English native speakers or English learners could you please answer these questions please thank you. Yes so unfortunately the books are not in other languages although that's something that we would be really interested in exploring in other projects and sort of bilingual working in that way but no unfortunately they're not and in terms of the sorry the second question in it was was whether the children were native English native English speakers yes or someone who is learning English now so is a second one. No most of them I'm thinking that I know particularly three children at least half of that group were not native English speakers so they were I think we had Syrian at least three of two of them were new to English as well so they just joined the workshops after kind of starting at the school so that was why it was so important that they were able to participate and bring their ideas to the learning in multimodal ways through the drama. Excellent thank you and yes we have another question from Austin Nicholas Dragos when conducting the project how were and if any students with disability or diagnosis involved and how were they accommodated? Yes so within this particular story we didn't have any students with with disability it's something that we're really interested in in we're really interested in developing a similar story with neurodiverse children and I mean again we've just worked with the with particular schools that we have partnerships with so it's an area that we'd really like to explore in because obviously the stories are about diversity and it's all it you know in its full remit so it's a book that we would like to co-create with children that focus particularly on some of those areas. Thanks a lot Lisa. Yes we have many more questions and please we still have some time so please don't hesitate to post more so we'll address as many as possible so the next question is from Han and it says how much drama first of all the clarification for drama would you translate this is a similar to theatre improvisation needs to happen before a child can write something with more imagination and detail in other words how many hours of this approach makes a difference? Gosh that's a really tough question and I just would say that in terms of the approach drama again it's a particular type again a particular focus on drama I call it dramatic inquiry so it's its heart it's very dialogic and it's also children are working creatively they're working in groups so they're co-creating together so I don't know if I could put because it depends on the child and the group but what we find when children are working together they're co-creating is that children were reading each other's images each other's pictures each other's body language and so they were and they were telling and they were interpreting each other's stories through the through the workshops and also we know that actually if children are working in an embodied way using their bodies particularly as well that really helps with with language production because they're able to see and feel um feel the words if you like and that really helps at the very least with remembering them and so I think when we had a with this particular group I think it depends with the group you're working we we had a mixture of children some were new to English very new so the English they literally just arrived so they were interpreting the story through images and with their bodies and then some of the children actually were native English speakers so they were working obviously very had very strong spoken language and then I think a few of the children as well were second language speakers as well so I think again with this group of particular children because storytelling is such a strong cultural um it's valued so much in in Roma culture the children were extremely um proficient and skilled at telling the stories through the use of their bodies and they were extremely expressive so we were able to create have this dialogic conversation sometimes they use their own language as well but we were all able to make meaning together within the story by kind of um noticing and working together so I know that's not an answer but I do think it depends very much on the group of children I don't think there's a specific amount of time but what I do know is if children are working collaboratively and there's lots of imaginative prompts the development of um of language is much more natural and um and meaningful for children can I just come in there um you know on that one as well um just to just to um further what Lisa was saying um so my myself research background is creative writing and Lisa's is the drama so together we are doing the drama and creative writing I think they were at times during the workshops I was a bit I was saying to Lisa come on let's get let's get them to the writing we need to get to the writing we need to find out more about this character um we need to develop some of the descriptions of the setting and Lisa will be like well they're not quite ready they they're not quite there yet they're not quite ready fiction enough and it depends on the group so we've worked with now four groups of children we're working on our fourth a fourth book which is superhero story um at at the moment and with some children it seems to take a long time a long longer to get into the fiction for the children to it be immersed in that fictional world so that they could do writing but there isn't really it's there's not really a set equation for it in terms of how much time it depends and just to build on that as well you know I think one thing that's really um powerful when you're working in this particular way um is that and I'm thinking of the picture of the that we shared with you with the mean person on it the particular child who drew that did have was new to English but they were absolutely had the will they were they wanted to share this story they wanted us to know about this character so they felt comfortable if you like not to struggle with language but to to stand in front of us and to kind of you know to reach for the words and we'd all be sort of you know you know supporting and working together and doing action so I think within within this kind of work this is very motivational for young children within the story and um and so I think there is a commitment as well to exploring language on a deeper level and just to reiterate what Tom says as well um in the United Kingdom um oracy and we've talked about oracy being um multimodal it is very much seen as the poor relation if you like of writing and reading and so what happens often is that children come in school experiences there isn't the time given to this type of learning mainly because it's it's difficult to evidence so part of the work again is just for us and part of the research is really um you know trying to create a language to support this sort of learning into school and to to recognise it as a really important and for children meaningful way of knowledge production thank you so we have a couple of more questions so we'll address two maybe three so could you please tell us what was the process of translating the language of drama into narrative should I say something on that Lisa yeah okay so I think so the drama gives the embodied experience quite often um the children take on the role of a particular character and then they were free to do some writing in their writing journals it's not the kind of literacy or the kind of writing that would normally happen um in in in school there was that freedom so we're calling it translation because there's something that that character has experienced there's something that child has experienced as that character and then they're finding a way to write that in their writing journals so they're needing to choose the genre they're needing to decide how they start it they're needing to decide what the purpose for that piece of writing is what kind of language could could be used and they're doing that in in a non-threatening environment because they know that it's not going to be marked it's not going to be assessed it's not going to be judged but that's really what we mean by translation it's it's problem solving essentially they're having to make those decisions um about their writing and that's why we call it agentic writing because they've got agency and control it's also perhaps just worth saying as well that you know within with this particular group of children as well who were not at the stage of writing um in their books what we did is each week within the drama workshop we came away we looked at the artifacts we looked at the workshops we watched video analysis and we wrote a kind of a part of the narrative as we as we we tried to interpret it and then we would take it back to the workshop and they would build on that so the the building of the narrative also was cumulative within the workshop and children then could could could change you know events events within those workshops so we didn't just write it at the end at each point of the narrative the children were building on it and they were part of the process excellent thanks a lot and one last question so could you explain more about the benefits of dramatic inquiry um gosh well there's this is my phd so there's lots lots to lots I could say there there is one article on the bottom of the uh of the reference list which looks at well-being um I think that they're particularly for for dramatic inquiry I'm interested in the idea of collective creativity and um that children are given the opportunity to practice if you like making decisions within the fiction so they have the opportunity to make choices and to try out those those choices so I think that that is one of the um of the aspects that is extremely beneficial I think by working in this way they are coming across lots of different ways of seeing things multiple different ways of seeing things and I think for me this multiplicity is a really important part of the work and that we're seeing difference as positive um that children are kind of you they're working in that way um and um I did have a quote actually that probably sums it up um I would think particularly uh this is from Maxine Green who said that um that actually the social imagination if we're thinking of of dramatic inquiry as a collective experience of um exploring different ways of being and different ways of thinking collectively then the the idea is it would support children in developing the capacity to invent visions of what should be and what might be in our deficient society on the streets where we live and in our schools and I think this idea of seeing other ways of being and exploring other ways of being is absolutely critical um and that it's something that we have to give children the opportunity to explore um to take risks in doing um and to feel that that is a valuable way of working thank you so much Lisa and Tom I think we will uh draw this webinar to the end although I can definitely see a very very um a series a very strong interest in this topic and I can see that our audience uh does not only post question but also share their experiences and they definitely want to um to practice this initiative that you've just introduced which is which is really great to see it's very inspiring um so uh thank you so much uh just before we finish I would like to also uh share with some some practicalities with our audience so we will continue the talks about social inclusion and education the next week we will talk about Intel Cartular Learning on Tuesday 17th November so you're more than welcome to attend this webinar thank you so much one more time to uh our speakers today and for our audience to be here today with us it was really inspiring really thank you for your contribution so much and I wish you a wonderful evening as well as a very fruitful and productive week ahead thank you so much goodbye