Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told: On language, making, and multilingual storytelling

In an increasingly diverse world, the ability to honour and celebrate linguistic variety has never been more important. That’s precisely the aim of Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told — a project I lead at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with the Maker{Futures} team. This project invites schools and libraries to reimagine storytelling through the lens of multilingualism and creative, maker-centred engagement, and holds exciting opportunities for heritage language education.

A fresh take on storytelling: Language meets making

At the heart of Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told is the belief that storytelling doesn't need to be confined to a single language or traditional format, and that children should be encouraged to bring their home/heritage languages into public spaces. The project brings multilingual families into libraries and schools, empowering them to tell stories using all their languages — through playful, hands-on making and digital, stop motion animation. Combining intergenerational storytelling with makerspace techniques (like cardboard scenery building, engineering movable characters, circuit-based effects, and simple coding for animation), Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told encourages families to represent their cultural narratives in dynamic, multimodal ways.

Supporting educators with free resources

Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told isn’t just a set of one-off workshops — it’s built to be an enduring resource for educators, which can be easily adaptable for heritage language schools. The project website, launched in January 2025 ahead of International Mother Language Day, is now a rich portal full of free resources to support schools (including heritage language schools) and libraries in running their own multilingual makerspace storytelling sessions. These include session plans, video tutorials, templates, skill cards, and guides for shaping characters, settings, and narratives.

Launch success and the telling of stories

The project launched with a well-attended webinar on January 21, 2025, attracting participation from over 100 educators worldwide, eager to learn how to incorporate multilingual storytelling into their educational settings. Since then, schools and libraries have used the resources to help children tell stories in their home or heritage languages — sometimes using traditional fairytales, sometimes using sayings as springboards for stories. In the image below, a family used their saying “if you don’t stop talking, you’ll wake up a parrot” as inspiration. Other families simply wove in personal likes and hobbies, such as stories about footballers.

Goals that go beyond the classroom

The project’s ambitions span multiple dimensions:

• Valuing all familial languages: The project supports children in using their full linguistic repertoires rather than defaulting to dominant or school languages.
• Embedding multilingualism: By normalising multiple languages in school and library contexts, Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told hopes to influence cultural attitudes towards linguistic diversity over the long term.
• Empowering educators: Through hands-on tools and instruction, teachers and librarians are equipped to facilitate inclusive, creative practices.

Real stories in real spaces

While the project continues to evolve, early phases reflect vibrant engagement: families crafting cardboard characters, coding simple animations using the Octostudio app, creating stop motion animations through photographs, and recording voiceovers in heritage languages to bring stories to life. Not only do these activities foster creativity and technical fluency, but they also affirm children's identities by honoring the stories they carry and the languages they speak. The tools are simple to use, enabling heritage language schools to integrate them. At the most basic level, cardboard, felt tip pens, a pair of scissors, and some split pins are enough to create a cardboard character that can be animated, and Stop Motion apps abound, with many of them free. Whether as a classroom activity of a homework, the Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told project can facilitate meaningful and creative engagement with the heritage language — heritage language schools could even organise an internal storytelling competition, or ask older children to create stories for younger ones. The possibilities are genuinely endless, only boundaried by imagination. Where vocabulary difficulties arise, the project provides an incentive to build knowledge of new words, so the story can be shared, positioning parents and teachers as knowledgeable facilitators in the storytelling.

Ready to get involved?

You can find all materials on the Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told website — if you do use them, do let me know, as I would love to share your and your students’ efforts more widely!

If you'd like help integrating Traditional Tales, Untraditionally Told resources into your setting, just let me know — I’ll be happy to help where I can. You can reach me at s.little@sheffield.ac.uk.