Rainbows, weeds, and time machines: how our Story Hubs support student creativity.

Rainbow light streams in from a sunny window; colours are cast on a large white table that stretches out in the middle of the room, chairs lining its sides. A magic wand hangs in a glass case from the ceiling, a relic from a distant land. The walls are painted in pastels; a door stands locked in the corner, with feathers peeking out from its edges. You might think this is some conference room of a fairy-tale land, but it is one of our first-ever Story Hubs.

100 Story Building’s Story Hubs program is a whole-school and community pilot program aimed at developing curious, confident and engaged learners. Throughout the three-year pilot program, we have been working with communities across Melbourne’s west to design and build purpose-built hubs in schools and community organisations, creating physical spaces where creative learning can be more effectively facilitated. 

Story Hubs are modelled on 100 Story Building’s very tall (or very deep?) building, which uses the physical space of our building as inspiration for stories, creative thinking, and creative risk-taking. At 100 Story Building, students tell stories about the creatures and characters who might live in the 99 levels under the trapdoor; they might name a planet on our Galaxy Map and imagine life in outer space, or they might rifle through our ‘Lost and Found’ box of strange objects and tell us stories about where they came from or how they might be used. 

Like 100 Story Building, each Story Hub is a ‘third space’ that is distinct and feels different to students’ regular classroom environments. These purpose-built spaces are designed specifically to inspire creativity, and to allow students and teachers to develop their skills in collaboration and creativity while also having ownership of the space itself within their school or community.

When we co-design Story Hubs with students, we need to consider several elements in order to make the space as successful as possible. Firstly, spaces need to be site-specific, meaning they work with what is already there. Then, the space is designed according to our “Three Ps”: Practical, Plausible and Potential. Let’s dig into these four principles. 

Site-specific

Each Story Hub has features unique to that space. Alongside students and teachers, we look for ways in which the space’s existing features can be used to inspire new narratives, and connect to the larger school and community environment. At Sunshine Primary School, students decided that the strange door in the corner that goes to nowhere is actually a portal to another world, powered by feathers! Responding in a site-specific way allows us to use the space to form the basis of the co-design, and offer productive creative constrictions and inspirations for story-making and creativity.

Practical

When co-designing with students, it’s important to help them remember that the space has to be practical. At its core, a Story Hub is a creative space where people need to be able to teach, write, run workshops and get things done. The room needs to be able to hold desks, chairs, storage, whiteboards, and all the other tools required for creative work. The furniture should be usable and durable and needs to work for the size and shape of the space. Ultimately, whatever we put in the room needs to help it fulfil its purpose - to inspire and support students’ creative learning - and not be too distracting, difficult to use, or flimsy. 

Plausible

When creating a Story Hub, we need students to buy into the premise of the space. Often, this requires the suspension of disbelief, because elements of the space are tied to imaginary worlds, magical premises, or otherwise strange and unusual occurrences. When crafting the stories that attach to the space, it’s important that teachers are able to defend the fictional explanations of these to students. At Meadows Primary School, the whole school participated in the story creation led by the Year 3/4 students. They stumbled upon the fact that the school appears to be the focal point of interdimensional activity. So the students devised a control room for their Story Hub to capture, monitor and manage all interdimensional exploration. While the dials on their control panel don’t create visible effects, there are many plausible explanations for that, including the effect that control has on another world!

Potential 

In addition to the space (and its fictional explanations) being plausible, they also have to be full of potential. A Story Hub is designed to inspire stories, so there has to be gaps and possibilities intentionally built into the narrative of the space for students to fill in. This allows for the story to grow and change, with each child (and class, teacher, and generation of students) able to add details onto the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of the space. At Copperfield College, the first thing you notice in the Story Hub is a large iron door. Where does it lead? What is behind it? It’s rumoured to be where the last-of-it’s-kind dragon sleeps, but no one has ever seen it. Could there be something else there?

How do Story Hubs facilitate creative learning?

‘When students participate in the design of the space themselves, their voice and values are embedded into the physical space, reinforcing student ownership, involvement, and participation in the learning process.’ (Kallio, J. (2017). “The built pedagogy of K-12 personalized learning programs as designed opportunities for student voice and choice,” in Transitions: Inhabiting Innovative Learning Environments.) 

When students co-design a Story Hub, they see their input, ideas and decisions being put into action. This process increases students’ ownership over the space, which allows them to become creative experts in the Story Hub right from the start. In turn, this helps foster student agency and encourages them to take responsibility for their creative learning because their voice and values are being celebrated and embodied in the environment that surrounds them. 

It also helps teachers adopt a slightly different mindset when they are in the Story Hub: in the two years following the space build, we work alongside teachers to build their capacity in creative facilitation. This allows them to step slightly outside the role of ‘expert teacher,’ and take on a more collaborative and creative facilitative role with students, which helps build creative safety and increase students’ confidence, engagement, and sense of belonging.

This term we’ve delivered 12 hours of professional learning across three schools and one community partner through the Story Hubs pilot. Next term we will begin co-design of a fourth Story Hub with two schools in Geelong - Whittington Primary School and St Leonards Primary School. We’re excited to share more about this pilot as the year progresses!

To learn more about the Story Hubs pilot and the impact it has been having on schools in Melbourne’s west, download our 2019 and 2020 Learning Reports.

Interested in booking a school workshop or Professional Learning session with 100 Story Building? Contact us here.