Narratives of change: creating a community of inquiry using drama

This paper presents the Sustainable Glasgow 20141 Project ‘Narratives of Social Change: Supporting Sustainable Action through Creative Multiliteracies’, which brought together a team of teachers, educators and researchers working in the city of Glasgow to work collaboratively as a professional community of inquiry (PCI) to examine themes connected to migration and diversity. The paper focuses on the use of text-based drama engagement as a means of uncovering and establishing the key themes of inquiry to be explored collectively by communities of learners. The project was based on the potential of children’s literature to generate themes for critical exploration connected to global migration. By building such collabora-tive communities of inquiry between schools and universities, we suggest it may be possible to create more sustainable ways forward in terms of meeting the needs of Scotland’s diverse learners and teachers, and in producing new narratives that reflect the growing diversity of our classrooms. Used in this way, dramatic engagement could offer practitoners a crucial point of access into meaningful forms of social action