Former Pupils’ Participatory Creative workshops

The Repair-Ed team reflect on their work with Studio Susegad who ran pilot participatory workshops for former Bristol school pupils.

The Repair-Ed project applied for funding from Oxford University’s Participatory Research Seed Fund to run pilot workshops for participatory elements of the project in two Bristol wards, Hartcliffe & Withywood and Clifton.

The pilot project involved collaborating with artists and cultural producers from Studio Susegad – Leeza Awojoba and Alexa Ledecky – to design and hold two workshops (one in-person and one online) that drew on memory mapping practices, story-telling, drawing and collage to explore and map people’s memories of schooling.

We worked collaboratively with and learned from Leeza and Alexa who brought extensive experience in creative arts-based methods, story-telling processes and creating spaces that centre care and connection across difference. This was particularly significant in the case of our research with people who live/lived in neighbourhoods where there is significant economic deprivation that have a history of extractive research practices, and local authorities and services ‘doing to’ rather than ‘working with’ local communities.

The pilot project has also enabled us to experiment with novel participatory creative methods that support the exploration of memories and experiences of schooling. For example, it has been particularly insightful for our learning around the role of storytelling, and working with analogy and metaphor, in supporting people to access and explore the memories of schooling in ways that feel comfortable, valuable and safer for them.

The collaboration has also given us the opportunity to develop ethical collaborative research practices that support the participation of people often excluded from research. For example, at the beginning of the workshops Studio Susegad began by facilitating an ‘Agreement of care’ in which participants collectively surfaced and discussed the sorts of values and ground rules needed to ensure everyone could participate as fully as possible and felt safer and ‘held’ in the workshop space.

The funding has also had an impact on our project partner, Studio Susegad, who shared the following,

“Studio Susegad continues to explore emergent, inclusive and transformative research cultures and practices, and working with the Repair-Ed team has felt like a great fit for us. Our team has developed an online and in-person workshop model using creative mapping and storytelling techniques which we can adapt for a variety of contexts. The Repair-Ed project could connect into other strands of our work namely around collective imagination and deeper dives into how we use creativity and care in community contexts to explore issues of power, agency and hope.”

The memories generated in the workshops will contribute to the People’s History of Schooling in Bristol, an online digital archive, which forms part of the methods used to explore reparative justice in the city of Bristol.