As part of Kent’s continued commitment to our Sanctuary work, Dr Rachel Gregory Fox, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow writes about her recent series of workshops for students from Kent Refugee Action Network (KRAN) which focused on storytelling.
‘In answer to the theme of this year’s Refugee Week, ‘Community as a Superpower’, we invited students to the University of Kent campus to explore the many ways that we tell stories about community, through drama, art, and poetry, and the ways that crafting and telling stories can help us to build spaces of community.
KRAN is a registered charity organisation which has supported young unaccompanied refugees and asylum seekers in Kent since 2003. Amongst numerous mentoring and advocacy schemes, KRAN’s Learning for Life education programme supports young asylum seekers to develop their English language, and equips them with knowledge, skills, and strategies to help them navigate everyday life in the UK, and to transition to college and other vocational pathways.
The workshops represent one branch of my research project into modes of storytelling about and amongst refugee and migratory communities, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Part of the intent for these workshops was to work directly with the communities who my research focuses on, and to exalt the process of learning as a valuable research and pedagogical outcome unto itself. Organised with input from Nigel Pantling, the director of KRAN’s Learning for Life programme, the workshops sought to support the learning and social journeys of their students. The KRAN teaching team, and University of Kent PhD candidates Arcin Celikesmer and Vicky Sharples, worked alongside myself, Nigel, and invited instructors and creatives, to create a space of engaged and community-driven learning for students.
The first workshop, headed by Emma Willatts (Gulbenkian), energised students coming together from KRAN’s Canterbury and Folkestone hubs for the first time, and built towards the creation (in small groups) of tableaux and short performances of moments of friendship, community, and celebration. There was dancing, custom handshakes, a convincingly staged boxing match, and a marriage ceremony performed, amongst many other examples.
The following week, artist Dan Thompson guided students in collaging maps of their world—maps shaped not just by place and language, but by the things that ground us, such as our hobbies, conscience, and beliefs, as well as our aspirations. Shoulder-to-shoulder, students got busy tearing and sticking paper and stencilling words, to create maps of their shared roots, values, and hopes.
The third, and final, workshop was led by Dr Kat Lewis. After unveiling the maps the students had made the previous week, students set out to craft poems founded on the things that make us who we are. Throughout, Kat emphasised the importance of each student and their values to the world around them, even when that world can feel alienating and hostile. The poems the students wrote, and which some performed, were delivered with honesty, imagination, openness, humour, and confidence. Their poems represented a celebratory culmination of three days hard work, which focused not just on student learning, but also on creating a safe and sociable community space where they were able to explore the value of their own, and each other’s, stories.
Throughout, I was impressed by the creativity of KRAN’s students, and moved by their stories. It has been a privilege and a joy to work with KRAN in the organisation and facilitation of these workshops and to be able to support a part of these young people’s learning journey.’
