Three Ways School and ‘The Train Line of Doom’ – digital storytelling at a Bath special school

Schools of Creativity

Can drama-based digital storytelling help students with special needs express themselves creatively and engage parents in the creative learning process in school and at home?

Three Ways School in Bath works with children with a wide range of special needs and is one of Creativity, Culture and Education’s 55 national Schools of Creativity, exploring ways of embedding creative practice across the curriculum and sharing their knowledge with other schools both locally and nationally. The school, which caters for children from primary to 6th form, maintains creativity should be at the heart of teaching and learning, no matter what challenges the children face.

Over 2009 and 2010, Three Ways School used their involvement with Schools of Creativity to investigate how drama-based storytelling could engage parents in the creative learning process both in school and at home. The project aimed to develop student voice and expression through the use of digital technologies, and from the outset the pupils were involved in developing the project alongside the creative practitioners, offering the students a real sense of ownership of their work. Parents were also involved in the creative process from the outset to encourage their support in school and at home and giving them the opportunity to use school facilities outside normal school hours.

Aims

The digital storytelling project investigated the potential of storytelling and emergent technology to encourage students to express their creativity and to inspire parental involvement in their children’s education. Three Ways also looked at how the learning from the digital storytelling project could be disseminated across the different key stages and how the results of the project could be performed for peers and parents.

The project

For the digital storytelling project, the school employed a specialist interactive performance artist, Keir Williams (a SMARTlab intern) and storyteller, Michael Loader, to help students with low self-confidence and speech and language difficulties to launch themselves into creative and dramatic pupil inspired performances using the latest in digital storytelling technology.

The school wanted to encourage their students to engage with natural and manmade environments through the storytelling tradition, collecting materials for their own digital story to be performed for other pupils and their parents in the school’s sensory studio. The project started with visits with the creative practitioners to a range of sites including castles, woodlands and stream lined valleys where the students gathered an array of digital and multisensory materials to enrich their stories and inspire their plots.

This was followed up by a series of storytelling sessions with the professional storyteller. Students were empowered to use their own voice to express preference in terms of story content and the materials used to support the retelling of their tales. Parents were then invited to a digital storytelling festival based around the stories they had developed (including ‘The Train Line of Doom’ of this article’s title) and run by the students in the school’s sensory studio. For the storytelling festival performance, students developed their own costumes and sets for the performance, helped by parents encouraged to be more active in their involvement with the school.

Results

Pupil feedback during their annual reviews and records of achievement found the storytelling project was one of the highlights of their year and analysis of the performance footage enabled students to reflect on their achievements and gave speech and language therapists on site the opportunity to see some of the students they worked with performing with confidence and speaking clearly to an audience of largely unfamiliar adults. The teachers found pupils expressed growing confidence and fondness for their story locations, and found this was particularly true for students on the autistic spectrum, whose anxiety about the unknown was alleviated as time went on.

Students went on to apply the technological skills developed during the project to other areas of their learning, including interactive displays and animated presentations during whole school assemblies. One parent expressed their surprise that their previously text wary son had both taken to writing his own stories at home on the computer and were more motivated to read since their involvement in the project.

Sharing the knowledge

An important element of being a School of Creativity is sharing the knowledge gained throughout the programme and Three Ways, which involves a large number of people involved with the care and support of their pupils, has strong links with their feeder schools, regular multi-agency meetings and outreach work to ensure best practice is shared between a wide range of professionals locally and regionally.

Three Ways’ development as a Specialist School for Physical and Sensory Needs ensured they already had a pioneering approach to curriculum development, assessment and the integration of new technologies in their work and existing links with creative industries and the academic community provided them with a forum for reflective dialogue and a firm platform from which they could engage with further research and sustainable development especially in the use of new digital media.

Conclusion

Traditional teacher led approaches to creative projects have been challenged by pupil led investigative explorative learning during the digital storytelling project. One teacher commented: "pupils became some of my harshest critics and most demanding directors!"

Pupils were afforded a greater degree of self expression by the storytelling project and their wellbeing was tracked both quantitatively and qualitatively. The school has gone on to introduce storytelling as a proven part of the curriculum in primary and secondary and so the legacy of this project will live on.

Staff were inspired by all the Schools of Creativity projects during the year and in the light of the whole school presentation one commented: "I could have listened to that all day it’s all so fascinating". Teachers have commented that their own practice has been challenged and enhanced by the input of the creative practitioners and pupil response to the schemes.