Your World Your Say Schools Conference

On Monday 29th March we attended the Your world Your Say schools conference at BAWA in South Gloucestershire. The event was attended by lots of organisations with the aim of empowering year 8 students to discuss local and global issues and take action in their own schools. We ran 4 half hour workshops in the morning with 50 students from schools all over Bristol, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset.

We had two new volunteers supporting the activities, Izzy and Huria and hopefully they’ll be working with us on more projects over the next few months. We ran the UNITY Flag and First Impressions activities which went down really well with students and teachers alike and we hope to have made some new links for project work with other schools in the future.

Here’s what the students learnt and enjoyed:

'You can't judge people by the way they look.'

'Don't judge a book by it's cover'

 'Everyone's different'

'I learnt about not judging people and giving people chances.'

'Very interactive'

'It helped me to think about myself'

'It was brilliant and I would love to do it again!'

What the teachers thought:

'There's a lot about my students I teach that I nevet get chance to ask/ know about.'

'Very good. Proof of the difficulties with identity.' 

'Friendly and interactive session.'

'Great workshop!'

What our peer educators thought:

"The session went great, I really enjoyed myself. The young people were really enjoyable to work with and Ina and Steph were really great." - Izzy, 17

"I learnt a lot of stuff during the session and enjoyed myself a lot." - Huria, 19

 

Why I Respect: Fairfield School Session 2

This session was great fun as we started off by playing games to get them thinking about their likes and dislikes and also learning each other’s names. Oneil then led a heritage game where the young people had to describe what they thought the heritage of the person next to them was and whether they thought they were born in the UK. This led to some interesting discussion on why they had formed these opinions, some based on surnames and others based on hair and eye colour.


To follow up this activity we got everyone to put stickers on a world map on the countries their family is connected to. This helped them to visualise the diversity of their group.

After looking at their own heritage and cultures we gave them time to plan what cultures they would like to focus on for their project. Each group put forward their ideas and the peer educators facilitated a democratic voting system to give the young people real ownership of the project. The final topic choices were edited several times until the whole group was happy with the direction they were going to take. The students also discussed things they would like to find out about these cultures. The peer educators were fantastic at making sure they considered all the practical elements such as how they could interview people from these communities and ensuring they kept in mind the time frame of the project.

This week we introduced another peer educator to the team, Shagia so it was her turn to sit in the hot seat for the 'First Impressions' activity. The young people were still way off on a few topics but it also led them to ask other questions about religion and travel as well as other topics which shows they are really thinking about all the elements that make up a persons identity.

What the students thought:
'I enjoyed the word association and learning about different cultures.'

'I learnt alot about different cultures.'

'Awesome, best ever!'
 
What the Peer Educators thought:
'I feel this session went very well and the kids felt they had a lot of control over the ideas which was what we want.' Oneil, 22

'At first I was really quiet but then managed to speak to everyone. The whole experience was really good and getting to know everyone. I really enjoyed working with the kids on this project and I hope it goes well in future sessions.' Shagia, 19