The Imagination Exchange: One Story, Four Imaginations

This webinar introduces The Imagination Exchange, a five-week collaborative storytelling cycle for primary classrooms, created by Charlotte Pearl and supported by The English Association.

Every child begins a story. Each story then passes anonymously through four imaginations before being celebrated aloud and gathered into a shared class anthology. Charlotte will share the model, the educational thinking behind it and the questions being explored through the autumn pilot. She will consider how anonymous, unmarked writing can create greater creative freedom; how reading, listening, imagining and writing grow together through collaborative storytelling; and how one child's imagination can become the spark for another's. Participants will also receive practical templates and prompts that can be adapted for their own classrooms.

In this webinar you will:

• Understand how to run the five-week Imagination Exchange cycle in around 20 minutes a week.
• Explore how anonymity, shared authorship and freedom from marking can support creative freedom, confidence and participation.
• Consider how reading, listening, imagining and writing grow together when children make stories collaboratively.
• Take away practical templates and Story Lenses to adapt for their own classrooms.

Before the webinar, please explore:

• Article coming shortly

After the webinar, you'll receive the recording of the webinar; a list of suggested further reading; and a series of reflection questions/writing prompts to support you in linking the content of the webinar back in to your practice.

Speaker

Charlotte Pearl is the founder of Scoplings and creator of The Imagination Exchange, a collaborative storytelling initiative for primary classrooms supported by The English Association. An author, poet and narrative artist, her book in verse, after-words, became a bestseller at The Notting Hill Bookshop and was selected by The Poetry Book Society. Her wider practice includes Gathered Words, a participatory storytelling project developed across literary, cultural and community spaces, with recent editions at the Notting Hill Literary Festival and Chelsea in Bloom. Through Scoplings, Charlotte explores how imagination, storytelling and creative confidence can be protected and nurtured in childhood, particularly when curriculum time is pressured and technology increasingly shapes how children encounter and create stories. She believes imagination grows through exchange: that one child's imagination can become the spark for another's, and that every child deserves the confidence to find their voice, the skills to share it and the joy of being heard.