Guest post: Shirley-Anne Brightman and Yasmin Hanif on The Power of Storytelling and Using Your Own Name

‘They had a tradition in their family, that the night before Eid, they would hear a special story.‘ – The Cave of Gemstones, ‘We Can Be Heroes Project’, St Albert’s. Illustration by Anila Babla

That evening, as Abba tucked Abdullah into bed, he asked, “Would you like to hear one of my dadaji’s old stories from Pakistan?” Abdullah’s eyes lit up. “Yes! Can you tell me the one about the mighty horse?”

– Abdullah’s Bear Needs A Name by Yasmin Hanif and illustrated by Sophie Benmouyal

Storytelling has long been a tradition in many cultures around the world. In older generations in South Asian Pakistani culture, oral storytelling is often the only way stories were shared and passed down.

When I began working with a charming, little school in Glasgow on their ‘We Can Be Heroes’ project helping primary school children to see themselves in the stories they read, I had no idea how central the story of how the project began would be to the project itself, and indeed my unwritten book at that point. In fact, my few years with the schools, saw an ocean of stories; from fiction, non-fiction, memoir to something in between fill the school.

Shirley-Anne Brightman, the pioneer of the project and the Principal Teacher explains how our collaboration came about…

Shirley-Anne’s Story

When I was on playground duty, some of the older pupils came up to me asking for help: “Mrs Brightman, we don’t know enough names, can you help us?” Totally confused, I asked them to explain. They were preparing a Guess the Name of the Teddy fundraising activity and needed 30 names to be chosen by players; so far they had James, Emily and Belinda.

“I don’t understand, what about your name, Zainab? Or yours, Anum? There’s Eesa over there, Mohammed, Zeenat … we have 300 children in the school, what’s wrong with their names?” I asked with slight concern. I feared I knew what their reasons might be.

“You can’t call a teddy those names!” they said in complete sincerity.

“Why not?” I replied, matching their tone as nearly as I could.

It wasn’t the first time we had observed a disregard in our pupils for their own identity. We had seen primary 1 children drawing self-portraits showing themselves with white skin when their own was brown.

Some of the ways we were trying to address the representation was in the reading schemes and class library books we were buying but the books we wanted to buy were hard to find, if not non-existent.

I went to our Headteacher. “We have to do something!” I told her. “It’s not right.”

So, we did.

We worked with the Scottish Black People, People of Colour Writers Network (SBPOC) to find writers who would work with our pupils to write our own stories. That’s when we met Yasmin.

Yasmin’s experience

During phase 1 of the project the children came up with various ideas such as superheroes and secret laboratories (‘The Zedriz’), a shipwreck and being stranded on a remote island (‘Home is Where the Heart Is’) to two sisters being trapped in a cave (‘Cave of Gemstones’). By this stage in our project, the stories the children came up with still reflected what they read themselves or watched on TV or YouTube.

Just the like kids at the school, Abdullah struggles to name his bear, until he hears an old story from his heritage.

It was during phase 3 of the project that I felt the storytelling and imagination of both the school and the community were really captured.

One of the parents of the pupils I was working with told me a real-life story based on her grandparents falling in love in India, and a golden bangle that had been passed down through the generations. She still wore those bangles to this day. This became one of the published stories from the project.

I found that storytelling leaves a legacy, not just a physical one like those bangles but a legacy of confidence, and of empowerment for those pupils that I worked with at the school, and they would be taking that legacy with them into later life.

In the same way, Abdullah gets a teddy bear passed down through the generations from his Abba (or dad) in my debut picture book, Abdullah’s Bear Needs A Name! which was inspired by events from the school. Just the like kids at the school, Abdullah struggles to name his bear, until he hears an old story from his heritage.

The message on both accounts is a powerful one; that your name matters, that your stories matter, that you matter.

Yasmin Hanif

Yasmin is a Scottish writer and educator. She was shortlisted for the Kavya Arts Prize in 2023 for her story which became her debut picture book, Abdullah’s Bear Needs A Name! (Floris, 2025). She was a writer in residence at a primary school and worked on their project to promote diversity and inclusion within children’s writing and publishing, which won the SAMEE Aspiring Writers Award and the Scottish Education Curriculum Innovation Award 2022.

Shirley-Anne Brightman

Shirley-Anne Brightman studied languages at the University of Cambridge and holds an MSc in Social Policy from London School of Economics. She has taught in primary schools and English as a Second Language contexts in four countries. She is currently a Leader of Learning at Glasgow City Council’s Improvement Challenge which aims to close the poverty-related attainment gap.