Collaborate and Innovate - sharing research findings in Leicester
Over the past year, Adverse Camber has been part of a pioneering new partnership programme supporting Virtual Schools and arts and cultural organisations in the West and East Midlands to make their activities more attractive and accessible to children and young people in care.
Virtual Schools are the name given to the organisations within local authorities who have responsibility for the education of young people in care. Overall in the Midlands there are around 12,000 children and young people in care.
Adverse Camber has run a number of projects with Derbyshire Virtual School including a new project this summer. This project was our first chance to work with Lincolnshire Virtual School.
On Thursday 19th June, four people from our project, including staff members from the Children in Care team at Lincolnshire County Council and Tanya Akrofi, storyteller, based in Lincoln, shared a joint presentation explaining how taking part in storytelling activities can create a space in which young people feel safe to speak and be heard.
We shared our findings about how much young people embraced the chance to develop imaginative storytelling, based on taking on characters and role play, using props and playing games, doing arts and craft activities, creating magical islands where imaginative stories they created began to unfold. How within a two day session they expressed their likes and dislikes, felt safe to say no and decided what story to share in a final session at the end of the second day.
We heard fascinating findings from projects elsewhere in the region, including ways of raising aspiration for young people to pursue creative careers, the importance of psychological safety and the significance of foster carers. In our project, the commitment of the staff team at Lincolnshire County Council was crucial in enabling young people to take part in a creative storytelling session. The storytellers who ran the session, Tanya and Phil, gave lots of positive feedback and encouragement to the young people, which boosted their willingness to speak and be heard.
We hope to develop follow up work and will keep in touch with the team at Lincolnshire County Council, as well as The Mighty Creatives and Arts Connect, who facilitated the project.