Rebecca Payne

This week I took part in the BBC School News Day at the PFS Centre in Truro with some year 9 pupils. It was absolutely fantastic! The day started with a quick intro into how to write a news report. The pupils were then given ownership of it. They had to come up with an idea for either a written, audio or visual news report which they could produce either working alone or as a group. They then all produced their own reports. They started off by researching news stories in ‘first news’, the BBC Website, the local Cornish News websites, and on the Internet. They then found something specific that they were interested in and researched it to see if there was a particular angle they could take and come up with ideas about who they could interview, what they could film, any permissions they might need to obtain, for example, to use copyright materials and how this could be avoided, etc. It was really good to see how enthusiastic the pupils were about getting involved and doing it; they all got straight into the task and worked really well together organising themselves into groups. It was the first time I had worked with the year 9s, and I was amazed by how well they behaved. I wondered if perhaps this was a reflection of the fact that they had been given ownership of it themselves and were following their own interests. This was very similar to the Diploma way of working, whereas they are used to having very structured lessons. It turned out that the more confident, and more able, groups decided straight away that they wanted to produce visual reports, whereas the less confident pupils stuck to radio and written reports. Because the centre Managers were running the day and had access to all of the equipment, (for example, a minibus), they ended up taking the groups out who were working on the visual reports, in order to help them with their filming, whilst I stayed with the pupils at the PFS Centre. Therefore, the group that I ended up mainly working with were the less able / less confident group, who were working on producing written and radio reports.

I found this to be an extremely rewarding and amazing experience. The PFS Centre is a funded centre that runs workshops with children that have fallen behind with their literacy and numeracy at school, and the schools recommend them to follow an after school programme at the centre. They use media processes such as animation, photography and poetry walks, journalism, getting them to write a motivational jingle for the football players to listen to before they go onto the pitch, etc, to help them to improve their literacy and numeracy without them knowing about it! Before the School News Day I had read the description on the internet about what they do and thought that it had seemed like a really good idea. However, throughout the day I really picked up on the other benefits that the work at the centre could have on the pupils taking part in it. The table of pupils that I worked with all started out the day really self conscious and seemed quite nervous about what they had to do. Gradually as the day went on each one of them gradually increased in confidence, and it was amazing to see how quickly they started to relax and ‘bloom.’ I was a bit unsure of how to work some of the equipment myself, but seeing how wary they were of it made me really just get stuck in. It was good to have to do this, and made me realise how good I have become at pretending that I know what I’ m doing! One pupil had significantly lower literacy skills than the others there. He was really self conscious about it. He had to do a phone interview as part of the written report that he was producing. At first he wouldn’ t do it. In the end I persuaded him that I would phone up and brief the person being interviewed, so that they were prepared to speak to him, and then pass them over to him so that he could read out his pre-prepared questions. Having done this, his sense of pride in his own work seemed to double, and he actually started to show it to people proudly.

I also worked with a pupil who, I realised as the day went on, would not ask for help when he got stuck. This meant that, if he came across something he was unsure of, he would just stop working. After a bit of bossiness (!), he ended up interviewing the PFS staff, his classmates, an environmental scientist on the phone, and producing a fantastic radio report which he edited his-self. Then at the end of the day, he volunteered to go on BBC Radio Cornwall, where he talked about the days’ experiences on live radio! It was such a rewarding feeling to have been part of the process which helped him to overcome his barriers to learning due to his lack of self confidence. The whole days’ experiences made me really reflect on how powerful creative and media processes can be in terms of, not just academic, but also social and emotional development, and reminded me of why I wanted to do the job in the first place! In my interview for the course I remembered talking about exactly this as the reason why I wanted to go into Teaching, and then here I was at the end of a day of seeing that in it’ s most exaggerated form. It was great!