Creating Welcoming Learning Environments: Disseminating Arts-Based Approaches to Including All Learners in Their Education

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The well-being of children and young people is regularly a cause for concern in the UK at the current time and the role and nature of educational experiences are often drawn into discussions about how children and young people's needs can be met to ensure they take up fulfilling roles in society. At a time of changing populations, the role of educational institutions can also be questioned so that we may ask what educators can do to build and maintain community cohesion to ensure children and young people have positive experiences of education and development in their formative years. In this project, findings from a large project funded by the AHRC entitled 'Researching Multilingually at the Borders of Language, the Law, the Body and the State' will be translated into the context of mainstream primary and secondary schools in England to enhance activities by taking an arts foundation (music, film making, textiles and craft work and poetry) in order to support children and young people's engagements with each other and their learning. The focus for the activities will be to conceptualise the arts as a language and to build in opportunities within and beyond the national curriculum to engage children, young people, their parents, carers and communities in developing a positive sense of self and an understanding of others. The main participants in the project will be teachers and school-based staff who will share their existing expertise in using the arts to create welcoming learning environments and to develop their skills in potentially new areas, such as film making, so that they can take back to their schools new ideas and skills which they have developed through participating in hands-on workshops. The project will run on a co-operative learning model in order to recognise existing practices before moving into new areas of practice. However the project also acknowledges that teachers in some schools will be more experienced than others in working with linguistically and culturally diverse children and families depending on teachers' own backgrounds and professional experiences and the location of their school, whether rural, urban or coastal. The project outcomes will be available as resources for teachers and educators both nationally and internationally through a user generated website, a 'how to' book and a book discussing and presenting ideas in more depth. The value of using arts-based methods in developing inclusive, respectful and enriching learning communities is seen as having relevance beyond the locations in which this project will take place and these contexts will be reached through the web and paper-based outputs.