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This article examines findings from a Scottish Social Innovation Fund project carried out in an after‐school club known as The Studio. Researchers worked alongside artists to engage young people situated within their communities to challenge xenophobic discourses through the creation of positive narratives developed through story and arts‐based activities. The work used the “deep hang out theory” to generate a complex account of how the participants mediated the cultural tools surrounding them to produce a community text. Through engaging in an arts‐based process, the young writers and illustrators developed a sense of belonging within their communities, taking an active, engaged stance as literacy producers of texts that challenged xenophobic discourses. The lessons learned in this informal space are of relevance across contexts where young people wish to engage in creating positive narratives of community cohesion.

This impetus for this thesis emerged from empirical observations of children’s responses to literature on the theme of migration. While the children were able to show compassion for characters in texts, they were not able to transform their hopes for human flourishing into action. By focusing on the role of the teacher, this thesis explores how to support educators working with children’s literature to recognise its potential to evoke change. The thesis has been framed using Levitas’ utopian method, which manifests itself archaeologically, ontologically and architecturally. The ontological mode establishes that any future action should be based on human flourishing and directed towards an ‘imperative of mutual care’ (Geras, 1998: 60). Archaeologically, the work of multicultural, social justice and critical pedagogues has been examined in order to architecturally create a set of lenses which facilitate utopian thinking. Such thinking enables the identification of resources of hope within children’s literature, which could be used to ignite the future hopes and desires of school communities so that they may engage in transformed ways of thinking and acting regarding persecution, conflict, violence and human rights. The methodological approach was underpinned by utopian thinking. It allowed for the creation of a transformative space, where the teachers involved in the research could explore (using drama and storytelling) their own vulnerabilities and capacities to care in order to develop a stance regarding their praxis. This aesthetic process was enabled by creating a community of inquiry which supported the teachers to prepare, execute, exhibit and reflect (Thompson, 2015) on how they would select and use children’s literature in their classrooms to generate narratives of change. The narratives emerging from the early years teachers explored the importance of names and the need to create multilingual classrooms that invite children to incorporate their funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart and Moll, 2014) into the learning process. The narratives emerging from the secondary school teachers focused on displacement and the creation of welcoming spaces for new arrival children in the city of Glasgow. Through the cyclical nature of utopian thinking these narratives can be viewed as further resources of hope, providing cultural, material and conceptual tools for pre-figuring transformative ways of being that allow school communities to challenge the impact of living in times of crisis.

Xenophobic discourse surrounding migration, resulting in marginalisation of the other, is on the rise. This article tracks the formation of a professional community of teacher inquirers who wanted to challenge the prevalent negative discourse by generating narratives of change. Using narrative inquiry methods to capture ‘stories of experience’ told in response to artefacts of value, the community of inquiry revealed through their storytelling the value of excavating knowledge connected to language, culture and identity. This personal knowledge evoked care and empowered the teachers to confidently select and use children’s literature alongside creative response strategies to re-imagine their classrooms as spaces to welcome refugee and new-arrival children. The article argues that communities of inquiry provide potential ways forward for educators to pre-figure ‘an imperative of mutual care’.

The work presented in this article arose from a small-scale project in the west of Scotland and was funded by the University of Glasgow. Three researchers and a visiting scholar worked with two local educators to examine the impact of using internationally available Arabic picturebooks for language and literacy learners in multilingual classrooms.