Chapter 10: ‘Story Creators, Being Human and Minimal Risk’: A Collaborative Inclusion Project for University Students and Pupils in the Liverpool City Region (LCR) With Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND)

This chapter examines the research process used in a collaborative inclusion project with five university student interns from different disciplines, including Creative Writing, English and Early Childhood Studies. The student interns worked alongside Year 7 pupils with special educational needs and disabilities in a local specialist high school to produce individual story books with a focus on the richness and differences of being human. Creative methodologies were employed to capture the perspectives of the children during the story-making process, with the pupils utilising class iPads and MacBooks to capture and create their own valued interpretations of images of themselves. These creative methodologies resonate with photovoice methods (Rose, 2016), increasingly employed in qualitative research. The design was consciously considered to introduce meaningful elements of control by the children and enable their voices to be centre stage in the research process. This method also naturally aligns with the Mosaic approach (Clark, 2017), which is a creative framework for understanding children’s perspectives. The insights offered by the research approach adopted, speaks to the Freirean notion of what it means to be human; brought alive in dialogue and encounters with others and mediated by the world around us.