Story Makers: Creative Pedagogies Research Centre

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Collective creative pedagogies for learning, wellbeing and ethical action.

Story Makers is a creative pedagogies research centre and interdisciplinary hub in the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University. We bring children and young people, teachers, school leaders, drama specialists and other creative practitioners, cultural institutions, researchers, and education, wellbeing, health and policy partners together to reimagine education.

Youth voice is where our work begins. Through co-participatory research, children and young people identify the experiences, challenges and changes that matter to them. Teachers and senior leaders then work alongside researchers and creative practitioners to co-design curriculum, develop pedagogy and sustain change.

About Story Makers

Story Makers was founded by Dr Lisa Stephenson in 2017. Our work responds to the narrowing of curriculum, the marginalisation of the arts and models of wellbeing that locate responsibility only within the individual.

We understand learning and wellbeing as embodied, relational and collective. Our research examines how drama, story-making and other creative pedagogies enable learners to imagine, inquire, encounter different perspectives, negotiate complex questions and consider how they might act.

Story Makers is distinctive in connecting specialist drama and creative practice with schools, cultural institutions and interdisciplinary expertise in education, wellbeing, health, psychology, literacy, social justice and policy. This creates a hub in which practice generates research and research returns to curriculum, professional learning and system change.

Our principles

Youth voice and agency

Children and young people are knowledge holders and partners in educational change.
Wellbeing through relationship

Wellbeing develops through participation, belonging, dialogue and shared action.
Collective creativity

Creativity is social, relational and ethical, not only an individual capacity.
Inclusion and anti-racism

Curriculum and pedagogy should examine whose knowledge is represented, whose voice is heard and what change is needed.
Teachers as co-researchers

Teachers' professional knowledge is central to curriculum and pedagogical development.
Sustained change

Long-term professional learning and leadership matter more than one-off interventions.

Our distinctive research contribution

Story Makers provides rare longitudinal evidence, grounded in children’s perspectives, of how collective creative pedagogies cultivate wellbeing and social-emotional learning dispositions over time. These dispositions are the attitudes, values and ways of relating that shape how learners understand themselves, participate with others and respond to the world.

Our work addresses an important gap in research. It examines how creative pedagogies are experienced by children - not only how they are intended to work - and how teachers develop the confidence, professional agency and leadership required to embed them across curriculum and school culture.

Central research focus

How do collective creative pedagogies cultivate the wellbeing and social-emotional dispositions that enable reflection, multiple-perspective taking, responsible decision-making and ethical action?

Creative pedagogies and dispositional learning

Story Makers researches how creative pedagogies can transform curriculum, relationships and participation. Our interdisciplinary research includes drama, storytelling, creative and critical literacies, arts-based inquiry, embodied learning and co-participatory approaches developed with children, young people, teachers, artists and cultural partners.

Across these approaches, we examine how pedagogy activates relational and social-emotional learning: enabling learners to notice and reflect on emotions, listen to different perspectives, collaborate, imagine possibilities and move towards ethical action. We are particularly interested in how these capacities become embedded across curriculum, teacher development and institutional cultures.

Within this wider field, Dr Lisa Stephenson's research on Drama Worldbuilding, meta-affect and the Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity provides an important conceptual and practical strand. This longitudinal work offers a language for recognising how creative learning cultivates agency, emotional enquiry, possibility thinking, ethical dialogue, imaginative freedom, belonging, confidence, and embodied critical reflection.

Drama Worldbuilding is a collective creative pedagogy developed through Stephenson’s research. Learners collaboratively create and inhabit a fictional social world, using story, role, dialogue, writing, visual methods and embodied activity to explore curriculum knowledge, relationships and ethical dilemmas.

The aim is not performance. The imagined world provides creative distance: a space in which learners can encounter different perspectives, test possibilities, make decisions and reflect on their consequences.

Meta-affect describes the capacity to notice, interpret and reflect on feelings as they arise within individual and collective learning. Creative pedagogy makes emotion, relationship and perspective visible, enabling learners to move from emotional noticing towards relational awareness, collective reflection and responsible action.

Longitudinal research with children and teachers identified eight dispositions for collective creativity, social-emotional wellbeing and ethical action:

Agency, autonomy and openness
Emotional enquiry
Possibility thinking
Negotiation and ethical dialogue
Imaginative freedom
Teamwork and belonging
Self-efficacy and confidence
Embodied learning and critical reflection

The dispositions provide a shared language for recognising complex learning. They are not an assessment checklist. They help teachers and researchers notice how learners participate, relate, reflect and act through creative curriculum experiences.

Longitudinal research with children and teachers identified eight dispositions for collective creativity, social-emotional wellbeing and ethical action:

Agency, autonomy and openness
Emotional enquiry
Possibility thinking
Negotiation and ethical dialogue
Imaginative freedom
Teamwork and belonging
Self-efficacy and confidence
Embodied learning and critical reflection

Longitudinal research and impact

Across longitudinal partnerships in Bradford, Doncaster and Calderdale, Story Makers has worked with 20 primary schools, more than 4,080 children and 72 teachers. The research combines children’s perspectives, teacher action research, classroom observation, creative artefacts, reflective inquiry and independent evaluation.

What the evidence shows

Stronger pupil voice, agency and meaningful participation
Growth in belonging, emotional awareness, empathy and collaborative decision-making
Rich opportunities for oracy, critical reflection and curriculum engagement
Particular value for SEND learners and children whose voices can be marginalised in conventional classroom participation
Increased teacher confidence, professional agency and creative leadership
The importance of co-planning, coaching, practitioner research and leadership support in sustaining change

The scale and duration of this work enables Story Makers to examine how dispositions and pedagogy develop over time, how change differs across contexts and what enables creative practice to become embedded rather than dependent on individual teachers.

Current research

Embedding and sustaining social-emotional learning across schools and trusts

A three-year trust-wide action-research partnership with Exceed Learning Partnership investigates how Drama Worldbuilding and collective story-making support social-emotional learning, oracy, inclusion, curriculum engagement and teacher leadership across nine primary schools.
Empowering pre-service teachers

This three-year international project connects eight university partners across seven countries. Through co-participatory research, young people create catalysts for action that shape creative pedagogical workshops and curriculum co-design within initial teacher education. The study examines teachers' creative identity, social-emotional dispositions, professional agency and ethical action across differing policy contexts.
Curriculum, oracy and democratic pedagogies

Current work investigates how creative and culturally relevant pedagogies connect curriculum knowledge with dialogue, learner agency, anti-racism, belonging, critical literacy and democratic participation.
Creative pedagogies and literacies

International research and publication explore how drama, storytelling, critical literacies and multimodal practice empower learners across school, community, further-education and teacher-education settings.

The story Makers hub

The Story Makers Hub is our interdisciplinary infrastructure for research, knowledge exchange and sustained educational change. It brings together:

Children and young people as research partners
Teachers and senior leaders as practitioner-researchers and curriculum co-designers
Specialist drama practitioners, artists, authors and creative educators
Schools, trusts, universities and teacher-education providers
Cultural institutions and community organisations
Education, wellbeing, health, inclusion and anti-racism specialists
Policy makers and professional bodies

The Hub creates the conditions for interdisciplinary teams to develop, test and evaluate creative pedagogies in real educational settings. It connects rigorous research with local knowledge, specialist creative practice and the realities of curriculum implementation.

Why it matters

There is a persistent gap between short-term creative projects and sustained curriculum change. The hub builds long-term partnerships in which youth voice informs research, teachers and leaders shape curriculum, creative specialists deepen pedagogy and evidence travels into professional learning and policy.

Professional learning and curriculum co-design

Story Makers works with teachers, senior leaders, schools, trusts, creative practitioners and teacher educators to develop research-informed creative pedagogy.

Curriculum co-design is central to our approach. Teachers and leaders work with learners, researchers and creative practitioners to connect curriculum knowledge with local contexts, lived experience, wellbeing and ethical questions. Inclusion and anti-racism are built into this process.

Ways to work with us:

Long-term school and trust research partnerships
Curriculum co-design with teachers and senior leaders
Drama Worldbuilding professional development
Creative Pedagogies Diploma and postgraduate study
Teacher action research, coaching and professional noticing
Research, evaluation and policy partnership

Research, policy and partnerships

Our research contributes to national and international conversations about curriculum, creativity, wellbeing, social-emotional learning, oracy, inclusion, anti-racism, teacher development and ethical citizenship.

We work with policy makers, professional bodies, arts organisations and cultural institutions to identify gaps between policy ambition and classroom implementation. Current links include Arts Council of Wales, the Department for Education and Skills in Welsh Government, OECD and the Chartered College of Teaching.

Our approach enables evidence to travel in both directions: policy questions shape research, while children’s experiences and teachers’ professional knowledge inform recommendations for curriculum, teacher education and sustained professional learning.

Stephenson, L. (2026). Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity, Social-Emotional Wellbeing and Ethical Action. Impact Project Report
Stephenson, L., Nixon, B., Hodgson, R. and Austwick, R. (2026). Activating children’s social-emotional learning through story-making: A collaborative approach in primary classrooms. Impact, 27
Stephenson, L. and Young, H. (2026). What is a curriculum for life? British Educational Research Journal
Stephenson, L. and Lofthouse, R. (2023). A pedagogy of professional noticing and co-inquiry: Embedding drama for oracy across the primary curriculum. Impact
Stephenson, L. (2023). Collective creativity and wellbeing dispositions: Children’s perceptions of learning through drama. Thinking Skills and Creativity
Stephenson, L. and Patel, N. Story Exchange Project: Empowering pupil voice through Drama Worldbuilding. Impact report

Dr Lisa Stephenson

Reader / Carnegie School of Education

Dr Lisa Stephenson is a Reader in Creative Pedagogies in the School of Education at Leeds Beckett University. She is the founding Director of the Story Makers Creative Pedagogies Research Centre, which champions creative methodologies and co-participatory research with children and young people. Her interdisciplinary research spans education, health and the arts. It focuses on using dramatic inquiry through Drama Worldbuilding to empower learner co-agency, wellbeing and transformative social-emotional dispositions, Through longitudinal research, she has led several national and international projects focused on teachers’ professional learning and the co-creation of holistic curriculum and assessment opportunities for social-emotional literacy.

Email Dr Lisa Stephenson