Intergenerational community projects in local primary schools: an ongoing successful Kamishibai story!

Posted on 8 April 2025

In October 2021, Géraldine Enjelvin, Yumi Nixon and Ulrike Wray (The Kamishibai (紙芝居) team) recruited their first student volunteers via the University’s Handshake platform and introduced them to Kamishibai via master-classes.

Kamishibai is a Japanese form of storytelling using large picture cards, inserted into a wooden theatre (butai) then pulled out one by one. This user-friendly tool offers an integrated approach to literacy, oracy, drama and visual art.

These first trainees collaboratively produced “The rainbow fish” (both storyline and picture cards) and presented it to primary school pupils. They undoubtedly enjoyed the experience: doesn’t a picture speak louder than words?

Image: Volunteers telling their own kamishibai story about making friends (February 2022).

Since then, new Kamishibai volunteers have been recruited every year, enabling local school children to learn a few words in a foreign language and about countries they may never go to. Each Kamishibai storyteller (katarite) is tasked by the Kamishibai team to writing a story in English, based on cultural aspects of the countries they/their parents originate from, therefore incorporating some Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Indonesian and/or Spanish words; they must also design their own colourful picture cards (using painting, collage, drawing, feathers, etc).

Image: Volunteers telling their own kamishibai story about a panda encouraging humans to respect the environment so as to protect endangered species (February 2023).

Image: Volunteers telling their own kamishibai story about two dragons’ strained, then reinvigorated, friendship (February 2023)

Image: Volunteer performing his own kamishibai story about telling the truth, helping others, not “judging a book by its cover” and taking care of others’ property (March 2024).

The latest installment in this successful Kamishibai story gave two groups of Year 3 school children (and their teachers) the opportunity to learn the history of Chinese characters and ask lots of questions about China- which both volunteers were delighted to answer.

Image: Volunteers performing their own kamishibai story about the history of Chinese characters (March 2025).

Given everyone’s face at the end of these yearly Outreach multicultural performances, and our 2025 volunteers’ feedback after the event, Kamishibai and volunteering are undoubtedly a winning combination for all parties involved!

“On 28 March, we had a wonderful experience visiting a primary school in the UK as Chinese international students. [We] truly appreciated the opportunity to share [our] heritage. This experience deepened [our] understanding of cultural exchange and strengthened [our] confidence in cross-cultural communication.” - The Kamishibai team (Géraldine Enjelvin, Yumi Nixon and Ulrike Wray)