Stories of Hope: Toward an Inclusive Pedagogy for Relevance and a Positive Future

Abstract

There is much evidence that hope is in short supply for children in much of the world. This article reports on a 2 day project seeking to begin the restoration of hope in children a school serving a large community of refugees. In this school the majority of children have lost the hope of peace and security at home and escaped to the safety of neighbouring Uganda. The project aimed to illustrate the impact of periods of secure ‘down time’ as the first step towards addressing the trauma these children have suffered.

We wanted to know if a focus on inclusive values, the essentially wordless arts and collaborative working outdoors, would support school ambitions toward building more cohesive communities and healthy environments. Children were given many free choices within 4 strongly structured, practical, sensory activities in the school grounds. A team of volunteer evaluators were trained to document attitudes, body language, application and conversations in notes, photographs and recordings. They noted that during their activities autobiographical, often hopeful stories arose between children sharing the same language as they decided how to represent values like: compassion and fairness, respect and justice. This report describes the planning, methods and immediate outcomes of these sessions and reflects on possible wider implications. Chiefly we observed that encouraging children’s values stories, working collaboratively on tightly-framed arts activities and allowing group or personal agency appeared to generate an attitude of positivity and personal relevance – prime motivators for learning that require further and longer term research with an undifferentiated whole class.