A Typical Session
IMAGINE...You're in a school, or perhaps a pupil referral unit for excluded children; twenty or thirty enrapt young people in a circle:
Jo, a senior Learning Through Action facilitator, leads the dialogue with the students, getting them focused on the issue - bullying, drinking, drugs awareness, healthy eating, sex and relationships, teenage pregnancy, moving up from primary to secondary school, violence, racism, vandalism, citizenship - whatever.
There's an expectant buzz in the air; Jo introduces a short simulation, role-played by Lucy and Phil, two of LTA's 'gap-year' presenters; the students split into groups to explore their reactions to the role playing, they research background information from artefacts and material provided, with support from Phil, Jo and Lucy, who sit in on their groups; then Lucy and Phil prepare for 'hot-seat' questioning, in their roles; Jo gets the session going, challenges opinions, encourages students to justify their views and to challenge one another's.
Being 18, Lucy and Phil are closer to the age of the students, who lose their usual reluctance to speak their minds, even some who in a routine lesson may rarely share anything; the students offer perceptive comments, often surprising their teachers; in the exchanges, myths are corrected, factual misunderstandings are revealed and put right; all the students become involved.
Asked at the end of a session what they thought of it, students volunteer that they learned more in a couple of hours than they might otherwise have covered in weeks and, what's more, "We really enjoyed it!".
After one Learning Through Action workshop a 14 year-old student 'talked'' with his Mum - "for the first time in four years" she told us. She said her son was really 'turned on' by the fact that there was no 'preaching' - he'd told her our approach to relationship issues "was really, really real" and that he "learned more in the session than anything else so far."
