Creative Classrooms: A Voice to tell our Story

Once upon a time, a storyteller, an artist, a film maker and a photographer began a great storytelling adventure.  As these four travellers roamed across the wild and woolly landscape of North Devon, sharing their craft, a raggle-taggle of magical helpers joined them: firebirds, hag-trolls, farmers, giants, talking trees….

In September 2020 I started work on an ambitious three-year programme of education work with Beaford Arts, ten primary school classes in North Devon and three other artists. The project is called A Voice to Tell Our Story,  funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

As summer term 2022 breaks for the holidays, it’s a good moment to look back across the landscape we have travelled through together to this point.

A Voice to Tell Our Story has been an extraordinary experience and a constant inspiration for me throughout these troubled times. Here’s the story so far.

Listeners, tellers and story generators

The star looked down at the young man. “Good,” he said, “I’m glad you want to hear a story. Because I have seen every single story that has ever happened on your Earth. Great lizards crunching up the trees. A king with a table that was round. Great plagues that forced everyone to stay indoors…..”

from The Storytelling Star, the first story on Term 1, Day 1

Throughout A Voice to Tell Our Story I have worked closely with Caroline Preston, the Education Leader for Beaford Arts and a visual artist in her own right. Back in 2020 at the beginning of the project, Caroline and I devised a programme of storytelling and visual art for five year 4 primary school classes in four schools of the TEAM Multi-Academy Trust. In the first three terms, with only one term’s delay due to COVID, we delivered seventy-five full days of teaching on storytelling and visual art, allowing us to dive into the mechanics and methods of our art forms and enable the children to understand them in a little more depth.

133 KS2 children (7-11 years old) from Barnstaple, High Bickington, Witheridge and Brayford learned from me about where stories come from, heard 21 stories from all over the world, learned about the craft of becoming a storyteller, and co-created their own class story using prompts from the local environment. They explored different art techniques with Caroline to express narrative, place and emotion, and towards the end of the year they told stories to each other and to camera. These classes, moving up to year 5, are now working with Matt Biggs, film-maker, and Dave Green, photographer, to learn about the expression of story through film and photography. They are learning about photographic composition, film techniques, puppetry and green screen. I was delighted to attend an assembly at Pilton earlier this week, to see the children watch with wonder as their stories came to life on the screen using their own creative work. (You can see an update on film and photography work here.)

Caroline and I are now repeating the first year’s programme, refined from our experience, with a whole KS2 class at Umberleigh Academy (TEAM MAT) and four further classes from Alumnis Multi-Academy Trust schools in Woolacombe, Combe Martin, Abbotsham and Dolton and Clinton Primary Schools. Matt and Dave will follow with teaching these classes in 2023.

Capturing the learning

“Storytelling is just like Lego in your mind… but you can make anything you want.”

Year 4 pupil, Woolacombe School

Every storyteller working in school knows that stories have many benefits. Stories can teach language, geography, history, maths, and the imprecise science of human nature. They can allow the safe exploration of danger and difficulty, and of a whole spectrum of emotion. They can improve vocabulary, creative writing and oracy skills. Stories are fun, serious, thought-provoking, strange and wonderful.

Through A Voice to Tell Our Story we are collecting evidence of all of these, and the impact storytelling and other art forms can have in the primary school classroom.  But the nature of this project is to work more deeply with story, training children to have confidence in their own creative skills. There is a huge difference between enjoying a storytelling, and raking over the bones of a story to understand it more deeply; listening to someone else, and telling the story yourself; being enchanted by the creativity of our story heritage, and creating that magic yourself through a new story. All of these elements are delivered through the project.

We live in an image-obsessed world where children gain much of their information from TV and YouTube. Following their deep dive into the worlds of traditional storytelling and visual art, the children also learn about expression of story through film and photography. The craft of conveying a story through these media requires technical expertise, reflection, creativity and attention to detail. The children can enjoy watching each other’s work and learning new stories created with wildly different approaches from each class.

We can easily measure the outputs from this project – for example, so far, 254 children have each listened to, and worked with, 21 traditional stories – that’s 5334 listens! But how can we capture information about the project’s benefits to children?

A Voice to Tell Our Story has a built-in process of reflective practice and reporting by artists and teachers after every day’s teaching, carefully managed through ethics and consents from schools and parents. Our dedicated researchers at the University of South Wales are analysing all the benefits of the project with a view to producing evidence of these at the end of the project. Such evidence will be important to inform future curriculum development and, hopefully, encourage more engagement in the arts by schools across Devon and beyond.

A new generation of storytellers

Chris left the palace and walked out into the fields, despairing.  Something was jumping up and down in his shirt pocket. It was the fire ant!

High Bickington class story

Over the last five teaching terms, I have witnessed a transformation in primary school children who have participated in A Voice to Tell our Story. Most children love to be told a story but many are hesitant at first about storytelling themselves. I have regularly seen children gain in confidence as they persist with their storytelling practice, learn to trust themselves and play with traditional story as they tell it. In particular, shy children have found their voice in front of the class (often boomingly so) and those children who struggle with writing have blossomed with the freedom of storytelling from memory. My observations have been borne out by the teachers, who have been delighted with the progress made by their classes, and who report back to us that creative writing skills and oracy levels have improved significantly since the project began. It has been interesting to hear about the broader impacts of our work toward children reaching their targets for whole school improvement as well.

I have been astonished by the teeming imaginations of these children, often needing little permission to be expressed through new stories. I was daunted at the beginning of the project by the task of creating new class stories, strong enough to be worked through other creative media for a whole year; but I needn’t have worried. The stories have developed and changed as they have been worked, as all stories do; and they have curiously reflected back the character of the classes themselves and the environment in which the stories were created. From a World War Two time-travel epic on a Scottish island (Pilton 5JH) to a wild fairy tale full of enchantment (High Bickington), from a dark zoo mystery with tree-prisons (Witheridge) to a bridge-building river disaster and its magical aftermath (Brayford), each story has given Matt and Dave new technical challenges – not forgetting the tea-strainer time machine and the exploding bakery in Pilton 5MR’s story!

I have also improved in confidence and broadened my skills in my own storytelling and teaching. The stories I’ve told have been worked and re-worked to within an inch of their lives, not just by me but by hundreds of seven- to eleven-year-olds. I have learned about class control, different speeds and methods of learning, working in with other curriculum topics, and the things that capture imaginations in the classroom; I’ve learned about the practicalities of getting children out into their local environment, and about working with a diversity of primary schools and communities. As a trained teacher, Caroline has been a constant support and inspiration as I have developed my own teaching practice, and I have learned a huge amount from teachers, children and fellow artists alike.

It is a real blessing, and a privilege in these challenging times, for a storyteller to be able to work in school to this extent, with so much time for each class. I’m looking forward to more storytelling adventures as we complete year 2 and move into year 3.

Watch this space for updates and reports on the project’s findings. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some story snippets from the participants.

“I’m shocked that you were able to become storytellers… You are now crossing over sessions between storytelling and art. I’ll be honest I didn’t think at the beginning of the year you would be able to do it: a massive WELL DONE!” – Teacher, Yr4

“Our pre key stage children have achieved independent writing for the first time using the template you introduced because the pictures help them remember their story sequencing” – Teacher, KS2, Term 2

“How did the goat and the spoon and Tatterhood all get born together?” Year 4 pupil thinking it through, Abbotsham St Helen’s Primary

“We’ve really enjoyed learning about the project…he’s taught the whole family! We’ve even run out of staples as he’s taught us all to make flip books! Thank you for your inspiration.” – Parent, Yr4

A huge thank you to Caroline Preston, Claire Ayres and all at Beaford Arts; Matt Biggs and Dave Green; all the teachers and children engaged in the project at TEAM and Alumnis Multi-Academy Trusts; Philippa Watkins, Catherine Jones and Joseph Sobol at the University of South Wales; and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, funders of A Voice to Tell Our Story.