Creating Welcoming Learning Environments: Disseminating Arts-Based Approaches to Including All Learners in Their Education

The well-being of children and young people is regularly a cause for concern in the UK at the current time and the role and nature of educational experiences are often drawn into discussions about how children and young people's needs can be met to ensure they take up fulfilling roles in society. At a time of changing populations, the role of educational institutions can also be questioned so that we may ask what educators can do to build and maintain community cohesion to ensure children and young people have positive experiences of education and development in their formative years. In this project, findings from a large project funded by the AHRC entitled 'Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Law, the Body and the State' will be translated into the context of mainstream primary and secondary schools in England to enhance activities by taking an arts foundation (music, film making, textiles and craft work and poetry) in order to support children and young people's engagements with each other and their learning. The focus for the activities will be to conceptualise the arts as a language and to build in opportunities within and beyond the national curriculum to engage children, young people, their parents, carers and communities in developing a positive sense of self and an understanding of others. The main participants in the project will be teachers and school-based staff who will share their existing expertise in using the arts to create welcoming learning environments and to develop their skills in potentially new areas, such as film making, so that they can take back to their schools new ideas and skills which they have developed through participating in hands-on workshops. The project will run on a co-operative learning model in order to recognise existing practices before moving into new areas of practice. However the project also acknowledges that teachers in some schools will be more experienced than others in working with linguistically and culturally diverse children and families depending on teachers' own backgrounds and professional experiences and the location of their school, whether rural, urban or coastal. The project outcomes will be available as resources for teachers and educators both nationally and internationally through a user generated website, a 'how to' book and a book discussing and presenting ideas in more depth. The value of using arts-based methods in developing inclusive, respectful and enriching learning communities is seen as having relevance beyond the locations in which this project will take place and these contexts will be reached through the web and paper-based outputs.

At the heart of this project is the goal of bringing together arts-based approaches to teaching and learning and creating welcoming learning environments for the benefit of all learners including, in particular, those who are new to English and newly arrived in the UK. By hosting events in which teachers and school-based staff can share their current ideas and practices and develop new skills through engaging with creative artists in a series of workshops, the project will generate an evidence base which all teachers may benefit from in the form of the project website and two books. These outputs will sustain the impact of the project beyond the lifetime of the funded project and will contribute to the knowledge base and discussions of how children's sense of well-being, identity and inclusion in their school community can be supported and enriched.
Staff from one of the collaborating organisations, South Gloucestershire EMTAS, will have experience through this project of working with creative artists in specific contexts such as whole-school projects (e.g. arts weeks or 'one world' weeks), at induction events for new pupils and families, and in particular curriculum areas (including but not limited to arts-focused subjects). The project will therefore feed into the future work of South Gloucestershire EMTAS.
The project takes a three-stranded approach to generating an impact on the practices of teachers and school-based staff in their work with children and young people. The workshops will provide participants with direct, first-hand experience of learning how arts-based approaches can be used in teaching and learning activities. The conference will provide a forum for sharing and discussion of practical approaches which have been used by school-based staff and teachers in schools with children from a diversity of backgrounds (in terms of socio-economic status, languages, ethnicities, time in the UK) and in different geographic locations (urban, rural, coastal). Finally, the website will provide a space in which ideas can be shared and discussed in a range of modes (visual, audio, text-based between school-based staff, teachers and creative artists) and this network can move the discussion beyond the region in which the project will start.
As the project progresses, input from the advisory board will be used to inform, enrich and extend the impacts being planned for the project activities. The advisory board will meet three times during the duration of the project and the members have been identified as key contacts in fields that are central to the goals of the project. They include the following who will advise the project in the ways listed:
1) Alison Fletcher (Head of Research at Cabot Learning Federation, Bristol) - additional ways of reaching into and influencing school practices,
2) Robert Sharples (NALDIC representative) - extending the project goals nationally,
3) Wan Ching Yee (Research Fellow, Bristol University) - engaging teachers and parents in arts-based approaches such as drama to deepen understandings of educational issues,
4) Richard Fay (Lecturer in Education, the University of Manchester) - intercultural communication and arts-based methods in educational research
5) a parent member of the board, yet to be approached, will give voice to a parent perspective on how schools can create welcoming learning environments.
The project team (the PI, Co-I and RA) will also be supported in their work by a critical friend, Dr Mary Carol Combs, from the University of Arizona, whose extensive experience working in multicultural education in the USA will broaden out the perspective and ambitions of the project's work.