Treading softly in the enchanted forest: exploring the integration of iPads in a participatory theatre education programme. Pedagogies: An Iternational Journal.

Existing research on the use of technology in participatory theatre in education has paid little attention to the moment-to-moment unfolding that characterises the liveliness at the heart of such practice. In this conceptual article, we show how a sociomaterialist perspective can illuminate the contingent co-emergence of people, things and technologies that produces this liveliness of events. Perspectives drawn from actor-network theory are used to illuminate one example of the integration of technology in participatory theatre in an educational context. The concepts of mutability, disruption, maintenance, potentialities and multiplicities are developed as an explanatory framework for future research and practice in these and similar forms of educational activity.

Re‐imagining Home was a collective immersive story response for children ages 7–12 years during Covid curated by artists from The Story Makers Company. This experience focused on connecting children in new ways through the processes of drama and storying. This paper explores the nuanced responses that children and artists negotiated online/offline story spaces as they lived through these experiences. ARTography (Irwin, 2013) is used as a form of practitioner inquiry from three of the eight artists perspectives, to critically examine the tensions of embedding our affective offline practices online. This includes exploring the rhizomatic ways in which children engaged both online/offline through the artefacts that they shared. The ways in which these hybrid story spaces reflected our affective experiences are explored as the ‘richness of the meanwhile’ (Bogost in Facer 2019, p. 7), described as ‘the dense network of activity going on at any one time’. These shared ‘fragmentary’ stories are explored as a critical pedagogy of hope, considering how the Story Weave offered new possibilities for reimagining future educator practices in troubled times.