This project stemmed from a number of ideas shared between the founders of the project. We were three colleagues lecturing in Education, at Birmingham City University, but we had all come from a background as teachers in schools. Eleni Kanira from Early Years, Emma Bloor from Primary and Chris Bolton from secondary.
Working in the heart of Birmingham, the schools from which we had come had been part of the Trojan Horse issue that happened in 2013. Although this saga was highly contentious and unsubstantiated, (Kershaw, 2014) it did raise a discussion around the radicalisation of school students. Furthermore, press reports had focused on young British Muslims being radicalised and incidents of young British Muslims being involved in traveling abroad to join ‘fundamentalist’ groups. Simultaneously, although not covered as much in the press, there were reports of white British young people joining groups such as English Defence League, which promoted hatred against Muslims and other groups. Further reports highlighted similar issues across Europe. The response in the UK was the introduction of the Prevent Strategy, another area for contentious discussion, but not for this blog.
All this motivated us to think about where the issue of radicalisation might stem from and what could be done to support and enable teachers and students to combat such processes.. What was causing this alleged narrowing of views? Why did young people feel disengaged with mainstream politics? What skills and experiences did we have that we might be able to use to enable young learners? How might we encourage young people to become independent thinkers?
From our backgrounds in teaching we were aware of the exam focused, content driven agenda in schools. We were mindful that at times, we and colleagues, had not always been able to delve into complex discussions in our own teaching for ‘fear’ of taking time out of ‘work production’ – evidence that showed children had covered the curriculum.
We wondered if this was still the case, having been out of schools for some time. Hence, the decision to initiate a needs analysis. Chris posted a questionnaire on Monkey Survey and sent it out to schools across England. Our concerns were confirmed. Teachers felt frustrated by the constraints of exams, they were concerned about their own confidence to deal with potentially controversial issues and were open to ideas to support them. We would continue to take action and move forward with our project. We were inspired by our own backgrounds in drama in Education, and saw this as an effective approach by which we could develop contexts for learning. These contexts would hopefully enable young people to explore real world issues in a safe environment and which would enable discussion of pressing issues, such as immigration.
Chris approached colleagues working in drama departments in secondary schools and asked if we could work with their young people to devise these contexts for learning and trial the work. He created a framework for the building of a story around a wall and an actor. At this stage we had engaged another well experienced colleague from the School of Acting. Terina Talbot has a long established background in Drama in Education and had worked as a teacher- actor for many years. The stories that the children developed work in schools was highly productive.
Now the pilot project was taking off and, over this time, we had made links with a variety of interested people within the European educational context: a PHD student with an established background in DIE (Now Doctor Bethlenfalvy) working in Hungary; Adam Bethlenfalvy had also been involved in a similar project DICE; A Greek educationalist, Stephanos Cherouvis, with a background in working with Erasmus; and an Italian academic, Gilberto Scaramuzzo, using the ‘mimesis’ approach.
We then convened a meeting in Budapest (well there has to be some benefit to all the additional work!). This took place during the summer of 2017 where we discussed these issues further, identifying our common concerns and issues and, after some heated discussion and debate, finally agreed that we were interested in making a bid for Erasmus funding to develop our project further.
This was a challenging experience, and those of us new to this work, were surprised by the level of detail required. Hours, days, nights, weeks of writing, redrafting, action planning, timetable devising, consultation and so on, finally resulted in a completed application. It was just after all this work that the Brexit referendum occurred. We were devastated by the result and despondent that this might affect our application as the British team were the named lead applicants.
Nevertheless, after three months we discovered we were successful!
Demo:Dram was happening and the work would truly begin!