Living heritage in the classroom

As a starting point, we propose a bounded storytelling module of four to eight weeks in one or two classes, built around bilingual folktales from Nordic Tales — reading, listening, and structured conversation. The final shape, length, and age group are decided together with you.

Expected participation: one or two engaged teachers, a class that works with the stories as part of ordinary teaching, and two or three short feedback sessions with our team along the way.

What Arfur provides: full access at no cost for the duration of the pilot through a school code on the device — children need no account, email or name — an onboarding session for teachers, “Talk together” questions after every story, conversation guides for the class developed together with you during the pilot, and a direct line to the people building the product.

The pilot is designed to support goals schools already have: reading engagement and listening comprehension, work with language in bilingual and multilingual classrooms, and cultural competence — understanding one's own heritage and meeting others' with curiosity.

The pedagogical rationale is deliberate: shared stories create shared attention. Arfur's approach to attention, identity, and learning is informed by the iOSE framework, which our Chief Education Officer, a clinical psychologist, shaped through clinical work rather than in a lab. Stories are an occasion for conversation between children and adults — not a screen that replaces it.

Four things a class will notice from the first lesson. Nothing autoplays, and every session has a clear end. Each story is built to be read aloud and talked about together. The heritage language and the language of school can sit side by side, so multilingual pupils bring their home language into the room as an asset. And each story ends with a short quiz and cultural notes, not a prompt to keep going.

These are not features added for a pilot. They follow from the iOSE framework behind Arfur's design, and they are what the pilot measures: shared attention, conversation and retelling, with short, child-appropriate methods and teachers and parents as informants. Arfur does not screen, diagnose or measure children clinically, and we publish only results that exist.

A pilot is not a purchase commitment, and it is not a marketing exercise. You can stop at any point, your feedback changes the product, and we will not use your school's name publicly without written agreement.

Arfur is built privacy-first: no ads, no data selling, personal data handled under GDPR with the apps' databases in the EU (Frankfurt); where a processor sits outside the EEA, for example the e-mail service and sign-in for Filipino Tales, the transfer is covered by EU standard contractual clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Products designed for children treat parental consent and child protection as design constraints.

Before any classroom use, we prepare and agree on child-data and safeguarding documentation with each pilot school, so that roles, data flows, and consent are settled in writing first.