‘Enter into the imaginative wild!’: navigating playful pathways of enquiry with the ‘immersive learning collective’

Across many education systems globally, policy pressures and accountability frameworks have narrowed opportunities for creative and arts-based learning, limiting teachers' capacity to develop innovative literacy pedagogies. This paper examines how collaborative, arts-informed professional learning can support the development of affective and effective literacy practices in primary classrooms within these constraints. During a longitudinal study of the Immersive Learning Collective (2019–2023), teachers from 18 primary schools in London worked alongside artists from Punchdrunk Enrichment to explore immersive and playful approaches to support learning and teacher development. Across the project, teachers and children engaged in storytelling, immersive play and drama pedagogies that fostered relational, embodied and multimodal literacy practices. Through this study, we developed a new model of teacher action research, ‘Playful Pathways of Enquiry’, which conceptualises professional learning as an exploratory and affective process shaped by questions relating the process and outcomes but also teachers' sense of purpose, time, place and communities. This model demonstrates how playful and immersive approaches to teacher development can support educators to reimagine literacy practices and foster meaningful engagement with reading, writing, spoken language/oracy and narrative—informed by their developing their professional imaginations, creative identities and ‘immersive style’.