Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity, Social-Emotional Wellbeing and Ethical Action

This impact paper provides large-scale, longitudinal evidence from over 4,000 children showing how collective creative pedagogies support pupils’ social, emotional, and ethical development within the curriculum. Rationale: Evidencing Children’s Voices on Collective Creativity, Wellbeing and Social-Emotional Learning National and international guidance (OECD; DfE Curriculum and Assessment Review) highlights the importance of helping pupils work collaboratively with others, listen actively, consider different perspectives, and act responsibly. These competencies underpin behaviour, wellbeing, citizenship, and academic learning, yet they are not always developed systematically or equitably. Creativity is widely positioned as a core educational priority, yet dominant research continues to privilege individualised, cognitive accounts of creative capacity. Such approaches marginalise children’s voices and under-theorise the social, relational, and ethical dimensions of creative learning. This impact paper applies the term collective creativity (Stephenson, 2022) in the classroom and focusses on relational learning. This paper shares longitudinal work which addresses gaps in empirical research by examining children’s experiences of social-emotional learning through a creative pedagogical approach called ‘Drama Worldbuilding’ which uses collective story making, inquiry-based learning and problem-based learning to activate ethical action (Stephenson, 2022). The impact paper synthesises empirical data from three longitudinal projects conducted across 19 primary schools and involving more than 4,080 children and their 72 teachers over five years, in which teachers co-designed their humanities curricula with creative practitioners from Leeds Beckett University to support children’s social-emotional learning. Children’s articulations of their learning across the three projects is evidenced as a set of impact dispositions (values, attitudes, mindsets), conceptualised as Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity, Social-Emotional Wellbeing and Ethical Action. The importance of this empirical research lies in its scale, depth, and focus on pupil experience. It evidences how collective creative pedagogies are actually experienced by learners, not just how they are intended to work. This addresses a major gap in existing research, which often focuses on outcomes, theoretical models or teacher perspectives rather than sustained pupil voice. By examining a collective, creative pedagogical approach, Drama Worldbuilding, the impact paper provides robust evidence of how social and emotional learning, ethical understanding, and collaboration develop through shared imaginative and inquiry-based learning. The research expands the approaches to social and emotional learning to include the term ‘ethical agency’- an understanding of WHY we act and the ability to make responsive decisions in response. Rather than treating these dispositions as add-ons, the evidence shows how they are formed through relationships, dialogue, and joint problem-solving within curriculum learning. This paper offers credible, large-scale evidence that collective creative pedagogies can activate: pupil wellbeing and belonging, communication, empathy, and ethical action, engagement and motivation and curriculum intent. The pedagogical approach and disposition framework have been used across different age phases and disciplines by a range of creative practitioners and makes a unique contribution to understanding collective creativity through the experiences of children and young people. It is being applied Initial Teacher Education through an international project lead by the author.