Context

“The pupils are the experts and they need to be given the chance to shine” Ellie Clarke, Class Teacher and Head of English

“It didn’t feel like work, it felt like helping” Year 8 participant

Queensbridge School is a small comprehensive secondary school in Birmingham where boys significantly outnumber girls. It has a mixed intake, with 25 per cent of students with SEN, 49 per cent whose first language is not English and 13 per cent newly arrived in the UK. Overall, 17 languages are spoken by students at the school. 

Queensbridge has specialist status in visual and performing arts and is one of only 30 Schools of Creativity in the country. Many students do not prioritise the written word and so the school works hard to engage them with everyday narratives, stories and reading for pleasure and has an open attitude to trying out new projects. 

The project aimed primarily at trying to engage boys who were reluctant readers and writers; however, the teachers were also interested in engaging generally reluctant children - those with little experience of (and confidence with) play and exploration. The project gave those children chances to imagine and question, and respond creatively to stimulus and find English to be a more dynamic subject than perhaps they had experienced before. 

The project was devised in partnership between Queensbridge School and Chris Meade and Toby Jones of if:book London.

Aims & principles

The main aim of the project was to engage the interest of a group of year 8 reluctant writers (predominantly boys).
If:book wanted to explore how email, video, instant messaging and blogging might help stimulate young writers to develop and expand a narrative. The school also was keen to involve their reluctant writers in a dynamic and fun writing project that would make them collaborate creatively as a group, providing an alternative to usual English lessons.

Both school and if:book wanted to see what kind of writing might emerge from pupils being presented with a ‘real’ scenario, reinforced by the use of new technology . 
The partners wanted to find out whether students’ creative writing would be enhanced by direct communication with outsiders involved in devising the project story - a new way of bringing a creative writer into the school. 

Queensbridge wanted to investigate ways they could change the delivery of English by using new media technologies, such as blogging and live skype chats, which were familiar to their students.

Queensbridge also wanted to improve the social coherence of the group as a whole.

Summary

FOUND was a six week project in which a mixed class of 12 and 13 year olds would create an ongoing, interactive, dialogic story with the project facilitators. The story would centre on a weekly communication from Dr Tobias C Meade-Jones at “The Hauser Institute”, a (fictional) organisation that initiated the story. These communications were in the form of letters, films and skype text sessions that responded to the children’s writing and also shaped the narrative of the project.

Tobias requested the help of a class at Queensbridge School to help him understand a 12 year old boy with no language who had been found living alone in a cellar of a large house, the theory being that the class may be able to ask the right questions of the boy. Furthermore, by sharing their experience of ‘what it is to be 12 in the West Midlands right now’ they might be able to equip the boy for re-entry into the world.

The story inspired issues, mysteries and suggestions for further work that could be addressed both in class and independently via internet research and weblog reading and writing. It also encouraged the children to tell their own stories and investigate language.

For the most part, the children engaged with the facilitators and wrote independently with minimal input from teachers. The evolving and responsive structure of the project enabled children to practice writing in a live scenario and real context - rather than having lessons on writing emails and contributing to weblogs, they were writing directly to Beny, the found boy, and being part of an organic evolving story.

At the end of the project the class were informed that the Hauser Institute and Beny, the boy they had been writing to, were fictional. However, interestingly, although the majority of the class accepted this, the group also continued to participate in maintaining a legacy of activities for Beny, talking about him and even holding a party for his birthday. 

As a result of the project the children:

• Asked to be allowed to write independently at home
• Created personal writing in a variety of forms
• Used and responded to a range of new media and new technologies
• Directly participated in creating a character’s identity through language
• Experimented with formal and informal registers in writing
• Declared a heightened level of enthusiasm for writing

In Practice

The project leaders devised the following situation that they envisaged would quickly engage the class:

“Somewhere in the West Midlands a scientist, Tobias, is called out to examine a mysterious boy who has been discovered living alone in the cellar of a large house.
Dr Tobias C. Jones-Meade (usually shortened to just Tobias) runs the (fictional) Hauser Institute. The Institute is dedicated to research into “forgetfulness, recollection and identity loss”.
On examination the boy appears to be of mixed race and approximately twelve years old. It is not clear how long he has been living alone but he has not been imprisoned against his will. He wanders freely upstairs but chooses to live downstairs in the cellar of this fully furnished and abandoned house.
The boy is silent. He seems to be able to read but cannot write coherently. When he does write the text seems haunted by his experiences but they are as yet unclear.
Tobias takes the boy into his care and attempts to discover his story….”

The sequence of events

In week one of the project the class received a letter from the Hauser Institute which outlined the story. The letter told them that they had been chosen to help Tobias after he contacted a friend of his, Tim Boyes, head teacher of Queensbridge School (the actual head at the school).
It was the detail of Toby’s letter that fascinated the class. “On first inspection the boy appeared to be approximately twelve years old, with dark hair and light brown skin. The boy was almost entirely silent save a few grunts, sighs and inarticulate murmurs. He appeared to have been living alone in the house for a long time, months if not years. His nails were abnormally long to the point of curling back in on themselves. However, he was reasonably clean with long hair down past his shoulders. As I mentioned, the boy is able to write and read which he does with great enthusiasm and insistence. The text is full of urgency and has a desperate quality that I find hard to get out of my own head.”
With the headmaster’s agreement Tobias began to email questions to the class about their likes and dislikes, their hopes and fears. The class were then invited to send their written, photographed and filmed responses to these questions direct to the Hauser Institute weblog: http://www.hauserfound.blogspot.com. Every week the class received news of the boy’s development and education and also began to hear from the boy himself.
The boy asked the class for cool expressions to use - and then used this in communicating with them. He asked for their stories, jokes, advice on hair care and tips on how to be 12. The responses, which were posted on the Hauser Institute weblog, were witty, touching and always generous. Asma, who teachers say is usually silent in class, sent this touching note.

Hiya!
you know, its really cool being 12.you go through sooo much.i mean, its your last year of being a kid…enjoy it while you can. the times go really fast. emotions really count. its a part of life. its up to you to feel happy or sad, no-one’s gonna tell you what to feel. but there’s obviously a bad side of being 12. my parents are all like “you’re big, you have much more responsibility then you had from when you were a kid!” SORRY, i think im writing a bit too much!
bye!
P.S
i hope i hear from you soon!

The class chatted with Tobias and the boy - and each other - with an ease and intimacy that made the facilitators think they were suspending disbelief rather than being fooled, but staff at Queensbridge reported back that the class were convinced by the story.

From week one it was clear that the story had been set up very well. The class had no problems identifying with the boy and his situation. So the facilitators found that they had to find a way of broadening the story and so began to plant clues undermining the veracity of Tobias, the narrator.
As this approach developed, the story became centred on Tobias. The facilitators began to leak details into the story of Tobias’s past via the weblog. The boy, whose grammar and vocabulary was improving thanks to the class’s input, began to write poems to the class with mysterious allusions (place names, veiled events and characters). The class seized upon these details and plundered the net for further information about the story.

The if:book facilitators planted clues that might eventually reveal that the boy was a fiction created by the professor to sublimate the loss of his pregnant wife in an earthquake 12 years earlier. This meta-narrative helped them deepen the story, but also enriched the breadth of the class’s reading, writing and research.

Responding to real events

Because of the unforeseen circumstance of the distressing discovery of a family locked in a basement in Austria - the situation of the boy found living alone in a cellar was too similar to the real life situation. As a result of this the facilitators decided to shift the focus of the story back onto its eccentric narrator, Tobias. They introduced a housekeeper, Brenda, into the story, who was played by an actress. Unbeknownst to Tobias, Brenda contacted the class to inform them of the emerging relationship between the boy and the Professor.

In this sense, the FOUND project was very responsive both to the input of the children and also to the larger context of current events. This allowed the project to evolve in an organic fashion and, for future similar projects, means that any FOUND project would be dependent on the school and social context it was made in, as well as the creative input of the children. This aspect of responsiveness was what made the project both exciting and unpredictable.

Partnerships

The project was run in partnership with if:book London (http://www.futureofthebook.org.uk and http://bookfutures.blogspot.com ), Queensbridge School and funded by Booktrust, an arts charity. The facilitators of the project were Chris Meade, Director of if:book London and Toby Jones, actor and writer. 

Outcomes

“This was such a powerful project for developing a strong sense of togetherness between teacher and class. The power of the project was that the classroom was extended into the corridors, playground and pupils’ homes. There was a buzz around the whole school. Pupils would bound into lessons asking ‘Has anything happened? ‘Have we heard from him?’ Ellie Clarke, Class Teacher

Toby writes: “I think that the project was a success in many ways. Over the course of six weeks the story engaged the class and their contributions to the Hauser website were funny, informative and sometimes poignant. From my own perspective I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the class’s imaginative responses to the emerging story.”

Writing for pleasure at home

The class set up Googlemail accounts and asked to be able to access the weblog at home, reading updates and posting responses online. The formerly reluctant writers were now asking to write for pleasure at home and enjoying telling their own stories to Beny and each other.

In any future project it would be good to encourage other ways of responding as well as writing and find ways of getting the class to upload films, music and images into the story.

Personal writing

if:book had originally imagined that the main focus of student writing in the project would be following the clues given to them by an outside agency and putting together pieces of a puzzle to make a story. However, as the project developed, the school and the if:book facilitators found that a valuable aspect of the project for the children was the opportunity for personal writing - submitting funny stories, introducing Beny to slang and informal language and writing about their own personal experiences. 
In the process of the project the children:

• Told / retold jokes and funny stories
• Wrote about personal experiences
• Responded to formal letters on a weblog
• Wrote in response to film clips
• Investigated slang and informal language

As the project developed, if:book started to envisage an expanding website dedicated to the FOUND story with the central narrative of the boy’s “education and development”. From this centre the childrens’ research, blogging, images, questions, new story strands etc., could interweave. 

Reality - the suspension of disbelief

At the end of the six weeks, Toby and Chris, the project facilitators, visited the class to tell them that Beny did not exist, that Tobias was actually an actor and the Hauser Institute was a fabrication. By this time pupils had written their own versions of the story from the point of view of Tobias and the boy, showing a quality and empathy that impressed their teachers. 

Reactions to this revelation from the children were strong: real anger and genuine sympathy too, plus a frank recognition of how much they’d enjoyed the whole process.
The group is still addressing the questions of reality and identity as a consequence of having undertaken the project. The teachers thought it was a very positive thing to have the if:book facilitators come in at the end of the project and talk with the children and approach those issues. 

“Notably one or two of the group still think the boy is real ... even though they now know it was a made up project - they seem to be able to hold that all in their heads…I think they will be tussling with issues of reality for a long time - and that is a very positive thing - in English and far beyond” - Jo Klaces, Creative Agent, Queensbridge School
The project definitely did bring a very disparate and quite disaffected group together in a very positive way. The group is far more cohesive now than they were, and much more excited about English. Importantly, the sense of belief that was engendered in the fictional identity of Beny, the boy at the centre of the project, also encouraged playfulness and imagination in the group, and it was this important embracing of play that helped make the group relate to each other and interact, as well as be open to new possibilities for writing.

Reflections

The school was anxious about pupils not believing in the story at the outset - and even more anxious about them feeling in some way tricked or duped at the end. However, they felt that the partners handled the unfolding of the story so sensitively and transparently that the pupils felt even more privileged and honoured to have been involved than they did at the beginning of the project. 
The school are lucky to have a technician in school who supported the project who was on hand during lessons to smooth over any technological cracks - which could have been considerable had she not been involved! 

The school felt the partnership worked extraordinarily well -communication was key and they were able to discuss progress after each session with the pupils, and if:book would adapt materials accordingly. The fact they visited for a whole session and took the pupils really seriously was a great climax to the project. 

Resources

The main resources the school used were those provided by if:book via their correspondence with the class. Had the project gone on longer they might have used film extracts (other characters in the story. These were prepared and ready, with actors ready to portray new characters, but the project ran out of time).
The use of blogging (weblogs) and Googlemail expanded the project way beyond the classroom - the children could use these technologies to send questions and comments to the Hauser Institute in their own time.
“it certainly enhanced excitement and did make it all feel real and contemporary, as though we were actually doing something in their language,” Jo Klaces, Creative Agent at Queensbridge School

The project weblog can be viewed on http://www.hauserfound.blogspot.com/ and weblogs can be set up for free at http://www.blogger.com 

Download this PDF to see letters from the Hauser Institute to the children as used in the project, samples of the children’s feedback to the project and the questionnaire from the Hauser Institute to the children.

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