Contemporary urban schools are often sites of profound social, linguistic, cultural and religious diversity. In these environments, teachers are increasingly called upon to cultivate pedagogical approaches that not only acknowledge the heterogeneity of their classrooms but also enable children to navigate, question, and make meaning from the complex realities they inhabit and experience daily. This paper explores these issues by asking: What pedagogic principles and practices are most effective for (a) teaching in highly socially diverse schools and (b) enabling students to grapple with the complex, yet crucially important concepts of belonging, identity, and diversity? 

Pedagogically, issues of diversity have long been taken up in the field of education, prominently within the bodies of knowledge associated with Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT) and Intercultural Education (IE). The former has been influential in foregrounding students’ cultural identities and ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll et al. 1992) as critical learning resources to be integrated in curricula and pedagogy, arguing that representation and identity affirmation enhance engagement, belonging and achievement (Gay, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2014). IE, while sharing many of CRT’s features, also emphasises the importance of communication across cultural differences and the development of ‘intercultural competence’ (Otten, 2003; Deardorff, 2006) – skills increasingly viewed as essential for social cohesion. Yet as valuable as these approaches have been, the realities of highly diverse urban schools increasingly expose their limitations. We argue, first, that neither seems to adequately ‘break down’ cultural barriers and tap into the immense possibilities of diverse education settings; and, second, that neither sufficiently enables children and young people to explore and grapple with the vexing questions of difference that shape their everyday experiences: questions involving fairness, identity, discrimination and marginalization, belonging, and conviviality. 

We propose to address these limitations through the concept of ‘living diversity’ (Gholami & Costantini, 2025) and its pedagogic possibilities, which we explore in this paper. These informed and were honed by our project “Does Birmingham Belong to Me?”, carried out in collaboration with The Play House (TPH) theatre in education, and six primary schools in Birmingham, UK, between 2023-2025 with funding from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Through this project, we sought to support primary-school children in exploring questions of belonging, identity, and diversity through immersive, drama-led approaches, that could re-signify and engage diversity not as a set of pre-defined cultural traits or competencies to be acquired, but as a dynamic, and relational lived reality. 

Through immersive drama-led classroom practice and iterative cycles of data collection, analysis and evaluation, we have identified four overarching principles for a living diversity pedagogy. These are:

1. Embodied, dialogical and collaborative learning
2.  Local-global connections: recognising the transnationality of belonging and self-making
3. Community-engagement 
4. Art/drama-led methods 

We collaborated with facilitators from TPH and six primary schools in Birmingham, UK, between 2023 and 2025. In total, we worked with 309 primary school children from Years 3, 4 and 5, and 13 teachers. Our programme consisted of weekly immersive drama-led sessions, each lasting approximatively 1.5 hours. The sessions were co-facilitated by two TPH practitioners and classroom teachers. An academic researcher was also present during the sessions to conduct participatory observation and collect further data, which also fed into the project evaluation. The structure of the sessions evolved over time: in the academic year 2023-2024, the team implemented a year-long project that was then revised as a 12-week scheme of work. Despite this variation, the overall aim remained consistent – to engage pupils in exploring the lived experiences of local community members through storytelling and drama-led approaches, and to prompt reflection on Birmingham as a city, encouraging them to start questioning their sense of place and belonging within it. Data were collected by the UoB research team to evaluate the project and answer our research questions. Evaluation drew on an adaptation of the Kirkpatrick four-level evaluation model (Kirkpatrick & Kirkpatrick, 2006). We employed short mini-feedback sessions with children, extensive in-class participatory observations, as well as interviews and feedback meetings with teachers, deputy heads and TPH partners. While the Kirkpatrick model provided a systematic framework for data generation and offered a structured and immediate system for project reporting and evaluation, we, researchers, decided to re-analyse the data through an inductive and iterative thematic analysis process, conducted in different stages. We began by engaging with the data from each school separately. For every session within a given school, we identified and labelled meaningful units of data that captured participants’ experiences, reactions and perspectives to the activities carried out. Once all sessions in a school had been coded, we brought these codes together and examined them collectively, looking for overlaps, relationships and areas where codes could be merged or refined. This allowed us to develop a set of themes that represented the particular dynamics within each school. Following this, we undertook a cross-case comparison across all six schools. By looking for similarities and differences across schools, we were able to move beyond the particularities of individual contexts to identify broader patterns. The final stage of analysis involved refining and abstracting these cross-school patterns into a set of higher-order themes.

Our central contribution in this paper lies in the articulation of four pedagogical principles which emerged inductively from our classroom practice and empirical data. As mentioned, these are: 1) Embodied, dialogical and collaborative learning; 2) Local-global connections: recognising the transnationality of belonging and self-making; 3) Community-engagement; and 4) Art/drama-led methods. While each principle resonates with established scholarship, their significance emerges from how they converge, interact and gain meaning within the epistemic orientation of living diversity. Together, they create pedagogical conditions in which the lived, affective and relational dimensions of children’s diverse experiences are not only acknowledged but activated as sources of shared knowledge and co-creation. These four pedagogical principles have enabled us to work with the epistemic richness of pupils’ lived worlds, positioning children as experts of their lives and active producers of meaning. Rather than displacing formal curriculum knowledge, what we propose is a pedagogy that can expand the epistemic boundaries of the classroom so that lived, experiential, and emergent knowledges can coexist and generate new understandings.

Deardorff, D.K. 2006. Identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. Journal of Studies in International Education 10: 241–266. Gay, G. (2018). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers college press. Gholami, R., & Costantini, G. (2025). Educating for Living Diversity: ‘Migrant’identities, belonging and community‐centred pedagogies for social justice. British Educational Research Journal, 51(1), 25-48. https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.4063 Kirkpatrick, D., & Kirkpatrick, J. (2006). Evaluating training programs: The four levels. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Ladson-Billings, G. (2014). Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0: aka the remix. Harvard educational review, 84(1), 74-84. Moll, L. C.; Amanti, C.; Neff, D. & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of Kneolwdge for Teaching: Using a Qualitative Approach to Connect Homes and Classrooms. Theory into Practice, XXXI(2). Otten, M. (2003). Intercultural learning and diversity in higher education. Journal of Studies in International Education 7: 12–26.