Joanna McIntyre and Susan Jones of CRACL have been awarded funding from the University’s ESRC Impact Accelerator fund for a project called ‘Building a City of Literature’.

The project builds on over a decade of educational research in the Centre on the most effective ways of developing sustainable partnerships between schools and local cultural organisations.  It extends our work on the signature pedagogies of creative practitioners and uses arts apprenticeship and mentoring models which have been explored in CRACL research in order to develop local knowledge amongst pupils and teachers, using the arts as a means to develop a sense of value about place.

Teachers from three Nottingham city schools joined us at the School of Education to launch the project. They will be working with creative practitioners from local arts company Sheep Soup to support their pupils in researching, writing and performing plays about the communities in which their schools are located.  They will start by exploring some of the resources which have been developed as part of CRACL’s long-standing research partnership with community arts company Excavate.

These include the scripts of two community plays, written by local playwright Andy Barrett.  The first play, Road to Bilborough, is a spy story about the friends and neighbours who migrated into a local council estate in the 1950s.  The second, A Lifetime Guarantee, was a play which resulted from a project which examined the history of the site of Nottingham’s former Raleigh factory (now the Jubilee Campus).  Performed by a community cast, both plays toured local venues to packed out audiences.  Both were based on the oral histories of those who lived and worked in the places they are about.  The oral histories generated as part of the Raleigh project have been archived on a website, and this will provide further material for pupils and teachers to explore.

With these two plays and the website as a starting point, the Building a City of Literature project will support teachers and pupils to explore the processes involved in researching, writing and presenting stories about the places in which they live and learn.  One of the outcomes of the project will be playscripts, which will be published as a resource for schools to use.   Work from the project will also feature on a website, developed in collaboration with the teachers involved, which will support other teachers with practical strategies for developing place-based approaches in their schools.

By working with local creative practitioners, the young people involved in the project will also be made more aware of the possibilities available to them to engage with creative organisations in the city, whilst the development of place-based approaches to teaching and learning of literacy offers strong support to Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature status and to the Arts Council’s initiative on Cultural Education Partnerships, both key aspects of Nottingham city’s agenda for engagement with the arts in the city.