New Cross-sector Lab podcast episode: Hywel Roberts on botheredness, storytelling and engaging every learner

ASDAN has released a new episode of the Cross-sector lab podcast, featuring a conversation between ASDAN's Director of Education and Impact, Gareth Reynolds, and Hywel Roberts, teacher, writer and author of Botheredness: Stories, Stance and Pedagogy. Gareth hosts this episode in place of ASDAN CEO Melissa Farnham. 

When a young person seems disengaged, does the barrier sit with the learner or with the learning we have created for them? 

In the latest episode, Gareth and Hywel explore what it takes to build learning that young people feel genuinely part of, and how practitioners can help every learner leave education feeling capable, curious and hopeful. 

Storytelling that makes learning matter 

Hywel's starting point is simple. If the content feels distant, the learner stays distant from it. 

He describes teaching a class of young children about rivers by inventing one. A village on a bend in the river, waste washing down from the city, and a pink river dolphin caught in the nets. The children wanted to save the dolphin, so they had to deal with the river. "How do you get kids bothered about rivers if they haven't got a bed?" he asks. 

Every story has people, a place and a problem, and Hywel explains how teachers can borrow that structure at any age or level, scaling it up into project work with older learners. He is just as interested in stance, which is about where the adult positions themselves in the room, physically and mentally. In practice that means neither racing through 28 slides nor rearranging the furniture into a Tudor court, but choosing what this group of learners needs right now. 

Getting every learner into the room 

Hywel remembers a Year 6 boy who would not come through the classroom door. He did not push. He kept catching the boy's eye and nodding while he got on with the other 30 children. The boy came in, and by the end of the session he had written two sides of A4. "You can't teach warmth, I don't think, but what you can do is model it," Hywel says. 

Asked what new teachers should take into the profession, he offers professional imagination, being a warm demander and noticing joy. The warm demander comes from the work of Judith Kleinfeld, and combines high expectations with high relational practice. Hywel also has a challenge for trusts: get the colleagues who are not child-facing, in finance and data, into classrooms to see what the numbers are actually for. 

There is an ASDAN thread running through the conversation too. Hywel taught ASDAN with a Year 10 group early in his career and still remembers the independence it gave those learners. For him, it all comes back to building stronger bridges between the child and the content. 

Listen to Hywel Roberts: botheredness, storytelling and engaging every learner on Spotify, or watch it on YouTube.

Hywel also runs Implementing Botheredness with Dr James Mannion, author of Making Change Stick. It is six live online sessions, 4.30 to 5.30pm, starting on Tuesday 3 November, at £97 per person with bulk rates for groups. Booking closes on Monday 2 November, and full details are on the Making Change Stick website.

About the Cross-sector lab 

ASDAN's Cross-sector lab brings together voices from education, policy, research, business and communities to explore ideas, challenge existing approaches and consider how we can shape a more inclusive and equitable future for education.