Learning With One Another: Storytelling, Community, and the Co-Creation of Neuroaffirming Educational Practice

Abstract

This paper examines narrative and storytelling as mechanisms for supporting neuroaffirming educational practice in higher education. As a group of teachers and academic developers working across disciplines in universities in Australia and the UK, we observe that professional development in inclusive teaching does not adequately centre lived experience as a form of knowledge. Staff training often focuses on definitional understandings of disability and surface-level recommendations for inclusive practice, with limited space for the complexity and relational dimensions of neurodivergent experience. While many educators carry powerful stories shaped by neurodivergence, there are few structured opportunities within institutional contexts to articulate, share and collectively interpret these narratives.

Our project explored whether creative and reflective writing could provide a shared language for our knowledge and experiences, and whether storytelling might function as a mode of neuroaffirming practice in its own right. During Academic Writing Month (#AcWriMo), we came together as part of an international ‘creative pedagogies’ project to write and exchange stories of neuroaffirming teaching and learning. Initially, as strangers across geographic and institutional boundaries, we found camaraderie in shared experience. The paper centres four of these narratives, presenting selected extracts alongside engagement with literature on neuroaffirming pedagogy, expressive writing and communities of practice.

We argue that storytelling and freeform writing enable reflective meaning-making that extends beyond conventional professional development models. Writing stories of practice, struggle and growth created space for participants to surface tacit knowledge, interrogate assumptions and reframe experiences that might otherwise remain individualised. In sharing these narratives, participants contributed to a collective archive of experience that educates and empowers. The stories operate not as illustrative anecdotes appended to theory, but as sites of knowledge production that complicate and enrich dominant discourses of inclusion.

In this context, storytelling functions simultaneously as pedagogy and community-building practice. The act of writing and reading each other’s stories fostered relational connections across institutions and national borders, enabling educators to learn with one another rather than merely from one another. This shift from transmission of best practice to co-construction of meaning models a neuroaffirming approach grounded in reciprocity, compassion and attentiveness to difference.

Our unorthodox methodology borrows from the Dadaists sense play. Writing as separately authored pieces, we create a tapestry of voices woven together by a theoretical thread. A practice-based collaborative autoethnography using poetic inquiry to explore academic and neurodivergent lived experience.

By focusing on narrative as both method and outcome, this paper demonstrates how story-based practices can cultivate accessible communities of practice. We suggest that embedding creative, reflective storytelling within academic development initiatives offers a pathway for advancing neuroaffirming education across disciplines, institutions and geographic contexts.