On the 25th of February we – Ellie Alexander
and Jessica Kerr –, two sixth years and Ms Jordan attended a youth conference
in Glasgow at the Scottish Youth Theatre. The conference’s aim was to promote
equality and diversity through peer learning throughout Scottish Schools. We
made our way through to Glasgow on the 8:30am train excited about what the day
was going to entail. At 10:00am we were welcomed to the
event – this included the agenda and vision of the day. An extremely inspiring
speech was then made by a pupil who attends Kyle Academy from the South
Ayrshire. He spoke about his personal experiences and the schools experiences
in tackling the issues of inequality and promoting diversity throughout their
school and community.
After the welcome, we made our way
to the first activity. This was the ‘Cinderella’ workshop. This was about
rights being denied then deeper into that – barriers to learning. The workshop
was led by four fourth year boys. Firstly they spoke about their school’s
visions and values and how they have improved them over the last few years.
Within the workshop, we took part in two separate activities. The first was the
barriers to learning. The boys spoke for a little while about what things could
be barriers to learning under the four categories – personal, social, physical
and emotional. We were given numerous statements with a barrier to learning on
them and we had to put them into the correct category. For us we found this a
beneficial task as it make us think about things that could be stopping our
peers’ learning that had never crossed our minds before. After that, we had to
draw our own barriers to learning. It was interesting to see everyone’s
different barriers and how they cope with them. We then moved onto the second
activity which was to do with rights being denied. This is where Cinderella
came into it; we had to decide the rights she had been denied in her story. The
boys gave us sheets and we had to mark next to all the rights which she had
been deprived of. It was peculiar to think about Cinderella in that context, but it was 100% accurate!
The second workshop we went to that
Alex and Alice also both came to, was the Mentors in Violence Prevention
Programme – MVP. All four of us found this session extremely interesting. It
started with an exercise where we shut our eyes imagining the woman we loved
most being attacked – horrible. The leaders told us then to close our eyes
again and imagine the same scenario but with someone standing watching, not
intervening to help this woman. The strong message behind this exercise is
silence is the biggest violence, it is possible to help people just by shouting
“GET OFF!” or if necessary calling the police. The workshop split into males
and females, while we were moved to the males to give a girls perspective and
two boys went over to the girls group for the same reason. In the
groups we discussed different types of violence, we then focused into one –
pornographic pictures. The special MVP leaders of the group informally but
thoroughly talked through what we could do in the situation. This was extremely
beneficial for us as we had our eyes opened entirely about consequences of our
own actions on other people’s lives. We were very inspired by the MVP
presentation and it has resulted in us trying to get a MVP group started at
CCHS.
Lunch was then provided for us and
we all chatted excitedly about the day so far. After lunch we were all
separated into different coloured groups. In this we were met with other pupils
from different schools. We had to deal with an issue in society today and
create a 2 minute presentation on how it can be tackled in the schools and
communities.
Overall, the day was full of
information to bring back to school. We got ideas from other schools on things
we could do to promote our visions and values and to make our school, on the
whole, more equal and diverse. It was an extremely beneficial day out and we
would like to thank Ms Jordan for taking us through and Mrs MacKinnon for
letting us miss a day of school to attend!
By Ellie Alexander 4K1 and Jessica
Kerr 4K2
