7D. CASE STUDY
Igniting Writing
Big Brum with Erdington Hall Primary School, Birmingham
“The power of bringing in theatre to the school. It was a visual thing, it
engaged them all. A story is not the same. It’s about being immersed in it,
being part of it, having a role. They enjoyed that, and it showed in some of
the posters they wrote for the villagers. Throughout, it gripped the majority.
- Y3 teacher
Overview
This partnership work involved Big Brum working with Year 3 children and
staff at a primary school in Erdington, Birmingham in Summer 2013.
The school had recently become an Academy, and was looking to rebuild its
curriculum around the children, making use of the aims of the Cambridge
Primary Review.
Erdington Hall is a large Primary school in a relatively deprived, but culturally
diverse, part of the city. It has above average figures for children receiving
free school meals, or with special educational needs. According to Ofsted
(2012) over half of all pupils speak English as an additional language.
Developing children’s written and spoken skills in English is a high priority for
the school.
Aims
The aim of the project was to use 'The Giant's Embrace' (a TIE programme
based on an unfinished fairy story) as a stimulus for an extended piece of
group writing, making use of talk and drama in its development.
In the process, we would also help build classroom teachers’ confidence and
skills to use drama and story approaches in developing children's literacy,
oracy, and personal and social development.
What we did
“It was not just a race through the genres. The teachers used Drama
elements more. Because we stretched it out, it allowed them to see some
incidental writing opportunities.”
- Deputy Headteacher
Using a full day’s TIE programme as an initial hook for children’s interest, Big
Brum’s Actor Teachers then worked with the Year 3 teachers in planning
follow-up sessions across the term, culminating in a sharing event for parents
in July.
This idea of a ‘hook’ that could then be built on was a key element in the
school’s new literacy planning processes, and these processes framed the
whole project .
From the ‘hook’, the children moved into retelling the story [embedding
learning] and exploring its narrative structure. Their ideas were then captured
through characterisation, discussion, role play, description, creating diary
texts, and reading other fairy story texts for comparison and understanding.
In the next phase, moving from teacher demonstration to independent
learning, opportunities were sought for shared, supported and independent
writing, and for interrogating character (including in role) .
These planning processes proved a learning opportunity, and sometimes a
challenge, as the Company and the school endeavoured to get used to each
other’s sometimes unfamiliar planning processes and terminology.
From time to time, one of the Actor Teachers would come in to work with
children in role as the Story Maker, including at the final sharing event. This
included introducing new twists to the story that would move the story on, and
challenge children to come up with new ideas.
For example, the children found an unfinished letter for the Giant among a
group of objects he had left behind. They were able to invest the letter and
the objects with their own meanings, and to use them to start constructing
their own story-worlds.
Later in the process, we introduced a scenario where the village council has
demanded that Tom – the child at the centre of the story – tells his story to
them, as they begin the process of restoring the forest that the Giant has
destroyed. This lent purpose to the need to re-tell the story’s narrative.
Children engaged at a profound imaginative and emotional level with this
scenario, some worried that the forest might still not be safe, and beginning to
devise new strategies for overcoming the Giant is he still remained a threat.
That said, sustaining the children’s imaginative momentum across a full term
proved challenging at times. Nonetheless, a huge amount of incidental writing
began to emerge from the work, across a wide variety of genres, including:

Diary entries

News reports

Story frames

Information leaflets

Retelling the story [including using stops and starts]

Narrative – of the story’s ending

Persuasive posters
How it worked out
“It’s stimulated their imagination. They have been the story.”
- Year 3 teacher
What did the children get out of the project?
From the start, the TIE programme as an ‘initial hook’ was a key element:
“Having such a good hook sets things up, brings children into it. It was good
to be able to go back to that. Everything could connect back: diaries, news
pieces and so on.”
This imaginative engagement not only motivated learning, but engaged some
of the most withdrawn children: “They were intrigued from the very beginning
and remained focused due to the level of engagement with the events in the
story. The quieter children are interacting with both their peers and the actors
by sharing ideas and joining in with various tasks … It increased their
confidence. One child could talk in front of an audience for the first time.
They wanted to be involved. It wowed me!”
One girl, new to the school, came into project a couple of weeks after it
started. Although she was a recent arrival to the UK, and had little or no
spoken English, she was quickly able to pick up some of its narrative
elements, and to enjoy enacting parts of the story eg in role as the Giant.
The project had specific benefits for some boys’ writing: “For those who are
not the readers, the hook helps them, it gives them something they’ve seen
and understood. A couple of boys were not interested at the beginning, but
their writing had moved on a long way by the end. They can do freeze
framing (eg around the trapped Giant) much better, having seen and
experienced the drama, than from just reading a story.”
While it proved a challenge to sustain children’s imaginative engagement over
a full term, the project nonetheless “worked in terms of how it generated
writing outcomes for the six weeks. “ Did we need to start a new story at
some point?
The power of telling the story through drama helped engage children’s
emotional interest: “If it was just a story they’d have forgotten it. They were
able to feel it, for example they felt empathy with the Giant.”
As always, the project experienced some tension between ‘running with the
kids” and having to deliver against some predetermined outcomes, whether
set by the school, or beyond its control.
In addition to the Literacy outcomes, the story’s exploration of needs, wants
and greed encouraged cross-curricular links to research [using ICT], Science
[diet, sugary drinks, the properties of the metal material in the Giant’s ladle],
and even some Maths.
What did the teachers get out of the project?
Letting children lead their learning: “It’s about having the confidence to trust
the children to involve themselves, to do what they are meant to. Otherwise,
it can feel like it’s descending into chaos.
Planning to use Drama effectively: “It’s made me think about where I could put
Drama into planning, Where could I use that next time? We’re doing this, but
could we do it with Drama, rather than another way? … Drama does not
always mean lots of noise, everyone up. It can be lower key than that, but it
can still be Drama.”
Professional creativity and curriculum development: “It was not just a race
through the genres. The teachers used Drama elements more. Because we
stretched it out, it allowed them to see some incidental writing opportunities. It
has impacted in our curriculum review, where we have build in a higher
element of incidental writing, so that teaching and learning becomes more
fluid.”
In future, both parties would like to do more on finding a common language for
planning, perhaps emphasising pedagogy more: “the why? more than the
what?”
Links and further reading
Cambridge Primary Review http://www.primaryreview.org.uk
Edward Bond and the Dramatic Child: Edward Bond’s plays for young
people (Ed. David Davis). Trentham Books, 2005.
The Giant’s Embrace – Programme details and feedback:
www.bigbrum.org.uk/Programmes/giantsembrace.html
Learning through theatre (Eds. Anthony Jackson and Chris Vine). (3rd
Edition). Routledge, 2013. Chapters 2 and 7 are written by Chris Cooper, Big
Brum’s Artistic Director, and include examples from the Company’s work,
including ‘The Giant’s Embrace’. Chapter 16 takes Theatr Powys’s 2006
production of “The Giant’s Embrace’ as an example of a Theatre in Education
programme that effectively embraces both language development and critical
pedagogy.
Big Brum TIE, Pegasus Primary School,
Turnhouse Road, Castle Vale, Birmingham B35 6PR
Tel: 0121 464 4604
Website: www.bigbrum.org.uk