‘Aliens with Einstein Heads’: Creative Storytelling Partnersh ...

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Abstract

Pigeons is a Melbourne-based organisation that brings together children from local public schools with authors, artists and individuals from publishing to create shared stories, both written and visual. It is the creative storytelling partnerships cultivated by Pigeons and which are integral to all their projects that form the focus of this paper. In two of their projects Pigeons partner a child writer with a published author to collaborate on telling a story. The ideas for the stories come from the children, and through the exchange of letters the young writers and the authors shape together written and visual stories. The exchange of letters gives the children space to reflect on their writing as well as providing feedback to the authors. The authors use the letters to model their own reflective thinking and to guide the children in the craft of storytelling. The stories feature in two self-published books. Additionally, Pigeons has developed a visual storytelling project ‘This is a Stick Up!’ which partners a final year pre-service teacher with a child to create a visual story. In this project the collaborators exchange ideas through pictorial responses. Inspired by street art, the images are displayed on the side of the school’s water tanks, with the narratives revealing themselves over a period of seven weeks. The final project outlined is Pigeons’ most recent initiative involving a partnership with a Melbourne literary journal to produce a publication in which all major creative decisions have been made by children. This paper explores the genesis of, and the processes and products resulting from, these partnership initiatives.