Culture on the doorstep: Co-creating place-based learning to build the cultural capital of children and young people

Dr Briony Thomas, School of Mechanical Engineering & School of Design (joint)

Responsive Mode

The recent Ofsted requirement for schools to demonstrate how they develop the cultural capital of every child enables schools to have agency in defining the cultural capital that their children need, and approaches to embedding this within their curriculum.  However, there are mixed understandings of cultural capital and of the opportunities for enriching this through place-based learning.

An interdisciplinary team, from arts, education, and community-based planning, are collaborating with Leeds Cultural Education Partnership to explore the relationships between place, creative learning, and what this means for cultural capital in the school curricula. In partnership with two primary schools, we will co-create creative place-based activities that embrace the people, places, cultures, and knowledge held within their communities that draws on relevant resources provided by the local cultural education infrastructure. We will develop shared understandings of cultural capital across the collaborating schools, communities, and cultural organisations, and articulate how it might be used to enrich the education of children and young people.

Our work provides an opportunity for meaningful curriculum innovation, one that enables schools to consider creativity and culture within place-based learning across their curriculum as a means of valuing and embedding the lived worlds of young people.