A case study was carried out within a primary school to investigate how it taught inference. A whole class, explicit teaching approach, was used. It was felt that this did not give students the opportunity to bring their personal response to a text or recognise the fact that many texts are open to different interpretations. Therefore, a different approach was initiated. Using a practitioner inquiry methodology, three Year 6 classes studied Gary Crew's postmodern text The Watertower over a short period. They used process drama techniques to generate their own meaning from the text. Observations were kept, and group interviews were held with six focus students. The findings indicated that when students are offered the opportunity to create meaning from a postmodern text, all students were engaged and could make a range of sophisticated inferences. The students' engagement with the visual images was so high that it became reminiscent of Bakhtin's concept of Carnival thereby turning normal classroom practices upside down. The limitations of this research included the fact that this approach was temporary and just one text was used over a short period of time. Notwithstanding this, there is an argument for using creative approaches to facilitate students' actively seeking meaning from texts.
Attainment-focused policy often reduces literacy to measurable outcomes, overlooking the communicative, embodied and relational practices through which meaning is made. This paper examines how drama pedagogy can expand literacy as a collective practice that supports wellbeing, belonging and democratic participation. Drawing on bell hooks' concept of engaged pedagogy and the emerging concept of wellbeing literacy, the paper analyses comparative findings from two longitudinal collaborative action research projects across 15 primary schools involving more than 4000 pupils. The curriculum approach, conceptualised as Drama Worldbuilding pedagogy, combines story-making, dialogic inquiry and collective problem-solving. Foregrounding both pupil and teacher voices, the findings show how children developed self-awareness, compassion, confidence and communicative agency. The paper argues that wellbeing literacy is cultivated through embodied, relational and ethical participation within teaching communities. These insights are conceptualised as the Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity, Wellbeing and Ethical Action, a framework for understanding how wellbeing literacy emerges through collaborative meaning-making. The findings extend wellbeing literacy research by demonstrating how creative pedagogies support collective wellbeing and democratic participation, while highlighting the importance of professional learning communities in sustaining pedagogical change. In doing so, the paper argues for a shift from literacy as performance towards literacy as relational, embodied and democratic practice.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the potentialities of open-ended board games for story generation in educational contexts. We have analysed story prototypes created through D-Stories, a collective storytelling game designed for this project. The research was carried out between 2023 and 2025 in Barcelona in two different higher education contexts. In D-Stories, story cards, organized in basic typologies that prompt potential interrelations, are turned into a story prototype through playful collaboration and improvisation and iteration. Thus, cards and connections shift through chance, individual and collective choice. Using the notion of partial stories, which allows us to analyse cards as self-contained but connectible story elements, we carried out a content analysis of 54 stories, looking for narrative strategies (RQ1), how card contents were turned into narratives (RQ2), the most popular cards (RQ3) and the most frequent connections favoured by game design (RQ4). Even if conventional narrative strategies were predominant, there were some alternative approaches to storytelling and emerging intertextual connections, social imaginaries and even stereotypes. The spaces of possibilities opened by open-ended storytelling games are powerful tools for creative literacies in different educational settings and levels.
This classroom-based qualitative case study examines how critical and digital media literacies can be coconstructed with elementary students amid South Korea's contested rollout of the AI Digital Textbook (AIDT). Framed by engaged and creative pedagogies, the study conceptualizes the classroom as a democratic space where teachers and learners collaboratively interrogate educational policy that directly affects children. The case involved 28 sixth graders who participated in a five-lesson unit-provocation, news analysis, stakeholder exploration, role-play debate and civic writing-designed during a period of intensified policy debate over whether AIDT would become a mandated textbook or remain an optional resource. Data sources included student artefacts generated during classroom activities, civic writing and reflections and transcribed classroom dialogues; analysis traced critical incidents where significant learning occurred. Findings show that (1) establishing a safe environment enabled students to surface lived concerns and move from everyday experience to discourse-level critique; (2) role-play and deliberation helped students recognize competing stakeholder interests and the contingency of authority; and (3) civic writing translated critique into public voice, with several students voluntarily submitting policy proposals to government portals. The study argues that even under strict political-neutrality constraints, integrating critical and digital media literacies through engaged and creative pedagogies can cultivate learner agency and extend literacy from classroom interpretation to civic action.
