While undergoing the module children and young people, I did a placement at Winifred Holtby academy in hull, a low aspirations school that had been partnered with York St John. This was put in place to raise awareness to the students about hard hitting subjects that could potentially affect them. Over the course of 6 weeks, I was a part of facilitating drama workshops at the school as an after-school club. This was with students aged 11-14 who enjoyed the arts and being able to perform. The workshops were based around ‘it’s no okay’. A campaign that has been organised by the city of York safeguarding board and the NSPCC. This was put in place to raise awareness of child sexual exploitation. As well as making the students aware of this hard-hitting topic, we wanted to change their opinions about university.
Each week we planned a different workshop based around this topic. The end goal of these workshops being the students creating a performance based on this topic; bringing it to York st john to perform. We worked alongside them to make the performance, giving them as much support as they needed. However, we still wanted to ensure that they took the lead in making it their own. Each week that we facilitated the students, we would end the workshops with feedback. This was to grasp what they would like to take into the next workshop and what did not work so well for them. For example, most of our group wanted to focus mainly on acting, realism drama. It was important that we took on board what they said, they could create something to be proud of that they chose as a group to do. Throughout these workshops, it was important that we used our facilitation skills to ensure the students were comfortable and enjoying themselves. If a problem had arisen, it was important for us as the facilitators to take the right kind of action. We chose to split them up into small groups so that they could work with different students that they would not normally work with; building their confidence to engage with different people. There were a lot of big characters in our group; however, there were still students that were lacking in confidence, so it was important everybody felt comfortable in performing. The students performed their piece in front of the university lecturers, there peers and the facilitators who has been on the children and young people module.
This was one of the most rewarding pieces I have done being a student. Even though I was not in the performance I felt a great sense of achievement that I collaborated with such talented young students; giving them confidence to create a performance of their own. This experience really solidified me wanting to be a drama therapist; I got great satisfaction in seeing a group of young people thrive within the arts and impacting them to go fourth in this area, as well as giving them more awareness on this hard hitting subject that they were focusing on.