The students from the Mansfield Centre thoroughly enjoyed the
poetry event. These students are on the Entry to Employment
programme which is a short programme designed to engage students
with learning to help them either move on to employment or further
education. The students study Literacy, Numeracy, ICT,
Employability Skills and Personal and Social development to help
them build the necessary confidence and skills to progress on to
their chosen career path. Students are mainly referred to E2E by
Connections and have either an academic or social barrier and are
at an academic level below level 2.
The poetry event helped the learners to feel
valued by being allowed to see the archives which they found
interesting. This also lead to them taking interest in the First
World War and built their confidence to ask questions and link the
feelings of soldiers in WW1 to soldiers today and helped them
empathise with the suffering war causes. As a literacy tutor , I
watched them grow in confidence in their writing as they found they
were able to express their emotions and ideas. The standard of
their creativity was high and acted as a motivator to help them
learn their basic skills such as spelling and punctuation, which
they were then happy to go on to develop in order to finish a poem
ready for publication.
Many of the learners were surprised at how
well they did and have gone on to write lots more poems, which they
constantly bring in to show me. Meeting a published poet helped the
learners see that poetry and ‘English’ can be fun. From the meeting
of the poet to the end celebration we held some informal sessions
where the learners gave up their own time to come in and have fun
with words, rapping, rhyming and practising presenting their poems
for the performance. These sessions were well attended which showed
how inspirational the library sessions had been as this is a very
hard client group to engage with a history of low attendance in
educational settings; with many not attending school for extremely
long periods.
The end celebration was fantastic and the
learners rose to what was a very difficult challenge for some. Many
presented their poems including three students who had a key
objective to speak in front of a group to build confidence as they
were particularly shy and a learner who has a statement for a
communication barrier also decided on the day that he too wanted to
go on stage which was for me the greatest achievement of all. The
event was also enjoyed by parents and key workers from the college
who were amazed at the confidence that had grown withn the young
people involved.
As a tutor it was one of the best and
worthwhile events that I have been involved with as I watched
students grow in confidence which spread over into their studies
and leisure time as many have taken up a genuine interest in
writing which they never had before.
Alison Preston
Literacy Tutor at the Mansfield Centre.
Many of Peterborough’s most popular cultural and sporting
facilities are part of Vivacity, an independent,
not-for-profit organisation with charitable status.
Find out more about
the trust on the Vivacity website.