Rewilding curriculum: Cultivating affective dispositions for co-agency, collective creativity, and wellbeing with children through drama pedagogy

• Presents a model of Affective Knowledge Co-Creation evidencing how children experience collective creativity. • Conceptualises meta-affect as a theory for understanding how socio-emotional learning is experienced through creative pedagogy. • Presents new empirical understanding on how creative pedagogies (Drama Worldbuilding) activate ethical action. • Presents a model of Dispositions for Creativity and Wellbeing based on empirical research with children. • Provides a heuristic tool for teachers to expand their creative pedagogies repertoire and integrate wellbeing into the curriculum. Research highlights the importance of providing learners with wellbeing literacy providing learners with the tools (competence) to understand and communicate their feelings and experiences and recognise the feelings of others (fostering relatedness). These aspects of learning are felt rather than taught. Whilst global organisations such as OECD Learning Compass 2030 and UNESCO Framework for Action 2030, provide normative discourses on the Global skills, knowledge, and attitudes that should be taught to equip young people to become ‘change agents’, this is yet to be reflected in educational policy in England. Drawing from longitudinal action research undertaken over eighteen months in an English primary school, the paper systematically explores children's affective engagement and meaning-making through drama pedagogy, inquiry, and story-making (Drama Worldbuilding). The concept of co-agency is applied to explore pupil engagement and action within the workshops. The paper responds to a critical need to understand and include pupils’ perspectives of learning through the arts addressing methodological gaps in empirical research into creative learning. The research evidences new ways to recognise and understand how collaborative drama pedagogy activates and distributes relational learning. Drawing from learners' perspectives, the data analysis reveals a set of malleable creativity and wellbeing dispositions (values, attitudes, mindset) that support a deeper articulation of how creative pedagogy works through meta-affect . The data also presents a model of affective knowledge co-creation evidencing how learners experience collective creativity.