Why I Respect has been developed in response to an idea put forward by the UNITY steering group of peer educators. The project aims to encourage young people to explore the diversity of their own communities and promote cultural understanding and respect for others.
Our aim is to run workshops with different groups around Bristol from schools to youth groups, actively encouraging young people to get out into their communities and engage with different groups.
The Pilot: Fairfield School
Our pilot project is taking place at Fairfield school where a team of peer educators from UNITY will work with Year 9 students. Students will work with the peer educators to investigate ideas of cultural identity in their local area (EC1) and create a 5-minute video celebrating cultural diversity.
The finished film will be shown at the schools Bristol: DiveEC1ty event in March and will be used as an educational resource for workshops and assemblies given by the Year 9 students at Fairfield's feeder primary schools.
Session 1
This first session was all about getting to know the young people and allowing our peer educators Claire and Oneil to get a feel for the project and their involvement. We played lots of icebreaker games to get the young people to feel relaxed and help us find out more about them. One of the best activities was the Heritage Flag. We asked each group to draw a flag and draw or write in each corner:
- Something you like doing
- Something that represents who you are
- Something that represents where you live
- Something that is important to your family
We had some great discussion around these points and it led the group to find out more about the people they see at school everyday.
The 'First Impressions' Activity was the most popular though. We asked the young people to answer a series of questions about the peer educators and UNITY staff based only on their first impressions of us. The questions ranged from how old we were to what music we liked and how rich we were! On some aspects they seemed to have us pretty well sussed out but other things were way off and it served as a great tool to show them how wrong their first impressions and assumptions about people can sometimes be.
What our Peer Educators thought:
'I felt it went very well. The main thing is that the kids enjoy themselves. They learnt that you can't judge a book by its cover.' Oneil, 22
'I was impressed with the kids behaviour and how thy responded to us. They were coming up with lots of ideas.' Claire, 24
What the students thought:
Overall it was a fantastic first session, filled with energy, ideas and enthusiasm and we can't wait to go back next week!
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