‘Theatre of the Imagination’ sets out to explore how creative practice may help nurture personal agency and global citizenship in mainstream primary education. Signature pedagogies from art and design are transferred through a series of workshops created to foster design thinking and to cultivate haptic skills. The approach is constructivist in nature and encourages participants to depict lived experiences and generate imaginative ideas by articulating tacit knowledge through drawing, making and storytelling.

Transition design provides a framework for social transformation as it encourages activists to construct a vision of what might be possible in the future and to plan small interventions aimed at bringing about change. Theories of change link transition design to the efforts being made in primary schools to nurture responsible stewardship. I have adopted selected UN global goals to raise awareness of diversity and to help foster learners as socially aware, global citizens. Nurturing empathy and a ‘care-full’ attitude to others contributes to the constructivist epistemology and to a value-laden axiology.

The workshops set out to develop and test a series of creative tools through participatory action research aimed at accelerating learning in mainstream primary education. They are designed to foster personal agency through metacognition, creative ideas through practice, and engagement with global learning through discussion and storytelling. A series of constructivist learning design events produce compelling insights that suggest art and design in mainstream primary education has the potential to make a high impact on the development of cognitive and non-cognitive skills. These findings contest outcomes from the government-funded Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) research and require further investigation at a time when mainstream arts education is under duress.