Embedding Drama Pedagogy for Wellbeing Literacy: Children's Dispositions for Collective Creativity and Ethical Action

ABSTRACT

Attainment‐focused policy often reduces literacy to measurable outcomes, overlooking the communicative, embodied and relational practices through which meaning is made. This paper examines how drama pedagogy can expand literacy as a collective practice that supports wellbeing, belonging and democratic participation. Drawing on bell hooks' concept of engaged pedagogy and the emerging concept of wellbeing literacy, the paper analyses comparative findings from two longitudinal collaborative action research projects across 15 primary schools involving more than 4000 pupils. The curriculum approach, conceptualised as Drama Worldbuilding pedagogy, combines story‐making, dialogic inquiry and collective problem‐solving. Foregrounding both pupil and teacher voices, the findings show how children developed self‐awareness, compassion, confidence and communicative agency. The paper argues that wellbeing literacy is cultivated through embodied, relational and ethical participation within teaching communities. These insights are conceptualised as the Eight Dispositions for Collective Creativity, Wellbeing and Ethical Action, a framework for understanding how wellbeing literacy emerges through collaborative meaning‐making. The findings extend wellbeing literacy research by demonstrating how creative pedagogies support collective wellbeing and democratic participation, while highlighting the importance of professional learning communities in sustaining pedagogical change. In doing so, the paper argues for a shift from literacy as performance towards literacy as relational, embodied and democratic practice.