Immersive story worlds as participatory research arenas with children

: storyknowing, agency and intra-textual co-creation

Abstract

Recent immersive theatre practices being developed in the UK invite children to believe that a book story has come to life and is really happening to them within their school. The thrill of being able to act within a story motivates children’s embodied agency to physically explore a set installation and acts of creative writing performed during the experience that allow children to co-create the narrative alongside adult practitioners. These acts are fictionalised into the narrative frame of the children as heroic story writers, offering new perspectives on how child co-creation of adult narratives can be enabled intra-textually within the bounds of the adult-initiated story, rather than extra-textually after it has finished as is the case with fan fiction. This intra-textual co-creation interestingly raises questions about the nature and limits of the children’s critical agency, their ability to understand the workings of fictional devices upon them, during their immersion in such a hyper-real fictional aesthetic. Drawing on theories of children’s literature and participatory performance, this thesis argues that it is the way these experiences uncannily overlay real and fictional temporalities that enables the child participants’ critical agency within them. The potential of this uncanniness to draw children’s attention to the interplays of child-adult agencies that structure their participation suggests immersive story worlds as useful participatory research arenas with children into how we engage with each other through stories. They allow child participants to make visible the hidden mental processes of their story engagement that have been so elusive to research in a way that is both engaging and consensual. A case study of the participatory, practice-based research project, Storyhaven, an originally written immersive experience for 7–13-year-olds, staged at a UK primary school with 30 school children, reveals its participants switching back and forth between immersed and critical stances or even adopting them simultaneously, challenging theories of children’s literature that view such stances as mutually exclusive.

Date of Award	16 Apr 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Kate Pullinger (Supervisor), Catherine Butler (Supervisor) & Katja Krebs (Supervisor)