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Life Onboard |
LAST UPDATE
July 19, 2005
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| site design imagesparkle.com |
| August 22, 2004 |
Informal Education |
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| Participants met the informal educators on Peace Boat |
With 58 languages spoken as a first language, the 1,200 students from the Royal Docks Community School
are representative of the United Kingdom's increasingly multicultural face. The school, located in
the East London borough of Newham, has large minorities from Asia, the Afro-Caribbean and the Indian
sub-continent. This complex environment, created by the UK's shifting demographic, is changing the
face of education too. One important movement tackling the accompanying challenges is informal education,
which focuses on building relationships with students and teaching them how to communicate more effectively. "All
towns in the UK have youth and community centers. And the youth workers there were very successful,
so they decided to try it out in the schools," said Michael Nye, one of the four Royal Docks
informal educators who joined the 46th voyage from Morocco to England. |
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| Michael Nye explaining informal education's philosophy |
Faced with a tight curriculum, large class sizes and extra duties, modern teachers are left with little
extra time for making links with parents or talking to students about things other than class subjects.
According to Nye, this critical role is filled by informal educators who stuff the cracks that students
are falling through and try to reform the system from the inside. Informal educators like Nye are
hired largely on their ability to connect with the school's youth, who range in age from 11 to 16. "Our
role in the school has become very important to help people integrate and work together in a group.
To embrace differences - different opinions, different cultures, different religions and different
beliefs," Nye said. |
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| Izzy Hallett in a discussion group |
Informal education has evolved since its conception in the late 1800's, but its philosophy of working
outside the classroom has not changed. Popular in London since the 1990's, success at schools like
the Royal Docks have helped it spread across the UK. At first, informal educator Izzy Hallett thought
she would be dealing with drug and sex problems, but the reality turned out to be other issues not
as easily seen. "We started to find out that there was a lot of stuff underneath. They didn't
have a good relationship with their mum or sister and they didn't know how talk about that," Hallett
said. Besides being dedicated listeners and helping students realize they are not the first person
to face certain problems, informal educator Lee Faires gets students to take control of their own
life. "It's easy to solve someone's problems, but that doesn't help that person. We find there
is no education in that - a person has to find their own solution and way through their problems," Faires
said. |
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| Lee Faires shows participants a team-building game |
The educators also work with students not attending classes, who are bordering on dropping out. "Here
they're not coming to school, but we were quite surprised to find they won't come to classes, but
they will for this group," Nye said. In fact, Nye reported that attendance for the non-attenders
sessions is close to 99 percent for students who only go to classes 30-40 percent of the time. The
educators don't focus on their attendance like school administrators, but why they aren't attending.
Sometimes this involves taking a risk, such as when they refrained from stopping a tense situation
between two student which threatened to become a fight. "We might be stopping for that split
moment. But they could just arrange to meet after school and beat each other," Faires said. Instead,
another student stepped in to get them to talk to each other. "In my experience in school, when
people can't put in their opinion, they walk away or start a fight," he said. |
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| Participants working in a workshop on an activity called "Eggs Can Fly" |
Informal educators are not just reactionary, they also organize students to do youth work and do team
challenges, in which 20 to 30 students go through a ten-week program together. Originally this challenge
program was only offered to a few students, but the school decided other students could benefit and
now all students ages 13 to 14 attend. "We work on specific issues that come up, their perceptions
of other people and how that effects the way they treat other people," Nye said. The educators
demonstrated to Peace Boat participants some of the role playing and group exercises that help students
build communication and relationship skills to become more successful in new environments. "They
show that you can't always solve things on your own, sometimes you need others' help," Nye said. |
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| Informal Educator Debbie Crossman talking after her presentation |
The educators also brought in professional film makers from an organization called Speak It, which
resulted in "Where is the Love?" - a documentary about one of the world's biggest arms fairs,
held in the shadow of their school. By working on it, the seven 15-year olds discovered that East
London was a victim of massive bombing during World War II. "It was only through doing this project
that they begin discovering the history of their community through talking with elderly residents,
who felt insulted by the arms fair because they directly experienced the bombing," Hallett said. |
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After discovering many students thought they didn't know any asylum seekers or refugees, because the
media paints a certain image of them, the educators launched another project. "Actually there
are many in their own school and through this project they met with them and interviewed them, learning
about their life experience. They were really shocked." Hallett said. One of the students they
interviewed was a Croatian refugee, who said he felt welcomed in Norway, but felt like an outsider
in London even after two years. "They were tackling such difficult political issues, which are
widely misunderstood and ignored. They thought adults wouldn't take them seriously or listen to their
perspective. But through the project they felt they had a voice, they even felt they had a responsibility
to have a voice," Hallett said.
Resources
Informal Education — www.infed.org |
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