Human Rights, Story Writes – SLIF funded project

Category: Blog, SLG Scotland

Two East Dunbartonshire secondary school librarians – Pamela McLean (St Ninian’s High School) and Traci Davidson (Boclair Academy) – share their hopes of how their SLIF-funded project Human Rights, Story Writes will benefit librarians and teachers across Scotland.

Why we need training in diverse storytelling and anti-racism

Librarians are perfectly placed to connect people through conversations and stories. But we know from talking to each other (and to teachers) that there is a lack of confidence in having conversations with pupils around diversity, representation and anti-racism.

How powerful would it be if these conversations could happen in the classroom or the library, because staff have the confidence after training to have them?

We also know that storytelling is a powerful tool in education: it promotes empathy, oracy skills, listening, and learning about the world. In fact, one of the key powers of storytelling is that it is can inspire further conversations and foster a safe space to share lived experiences, swap perspectives and help us feel represented.

But if our story pool is limited, the narrative around a group of people is too often reduced to a single story, as Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie argues so compellingly in her TED talk on The Danger of a Single Story.

How powerful would it be to have the tools to discover and tell a range of diverse stories, and give our pupils the same opportunity?

These questions drove our bid to run the Human Rights, Story Writes project, which aims to increase staff confidence in having these conversations and sharing these stories.

Because while librarians are perfectly placed to connect people through conversations and stories, we are also perfectly placed to change people’s perspectives through conversations and stories. This project aims to do just that.

Human Rights, Story Writes

After receiving funding from the School Library Improvement Fund, we commissioned bespoke training on diverse storytelling from Storytelling Schools, and on anti-racism from the West of Scotland Regional Equality Council. This was delivered to librarians and teachers from across East Dunbartonshire’s secondary schools in May 2023, and the vast majority of attendees reported an increase in confidence in the areas of diverse storytelling and in beginning the anti-racist conversation in their schools. Here’s what one participant had to say:

“The training was a fantastic experience. The storytelling workshop has provided a great number of high-quality strategies for sharing and learning stories which will be fantastic to use with our pupils. The presenter was engaging, enthusiastic and supportive as we learned a new skill which I cannot wait to use! The anti-racism training was informative and detailed and has provided positive avenues for developing resources and relationships with a wider community. There were a huge array of resources made available and ample opportunity for questions or discussion. Extremely enjoyable.”

Sharing the training

We always knew we wanted to share these resources with the wider school library community in Scotland, and so we asked our trainers to distil their methods and resources into hyperlinked PDFs. Education Scotland have generously allowed these resources to be made available on their Glow School Libraries PLC, and we hope these resources will be useful to you in what you’re planning for the coming year. Our colleagues in East Dunbartonshire have plans to use them in P7 transition visits, storytelling cafes and anti-racist clubs, but these resources are not prescriptive, and we’d love to hear how you benefit from them.

You can access the resources by following this linkor by clicking on the ‘Professional Learning‘ section on the PLC homepage, and then the ‘Health and Wellbeing‘ tab. PLC Homepage – National School Libraries PLC – Home (sharepoint.com)

If you can’t access the Glow resource, please contact pmclean@st-ninians.e-dunbarton.sch.uk or tdavidson@boclair.e-dunbarton.sch.uk for a copy of the PDFs.