A walk through the bright, lively new-build and its displays on the Sustainable Development Goals, Children’s Rights and Global Citizenship show how the school has made clear links between these key national and international agendas, and the positive impact they can have on children’s school experience.
This campaign has…increased their confidence, fostered an interest and knowledge of rights, responsibilities and politics and helped enhance their literacy skills.
Political literacy
The seeds of this approach were sown in the run up to the Scottish referendum. Principal Teacher Claire Dunphy described the uniquely engaging opportunities offered by the unprecedented national debate to develop children’s critical and political literacy skills. Children in her Primary 7 class were encouraged to explore both sides of the referendum question, and campaigning leaflets from both sides of the debate were used as a basis for whole class reading lessons. Through this, children were encouraged to identify features of campaigning language, persuasive phrases and bias. The children examined speeches made by public figures from both sides and used these to identify rhetorical devices and figurative language. They then used this as a basis for writing their own discursive essays which explored both positions in the referendum, culminating in their own debate prior to the referendum.
Claire says, “There was no such thing as ‘just a reading or writing lesson’. Everything had a purpose.” In her judgement, allowing pupils space for an in-depth exploration of the real world arguments around the referendum, and using these as a basis for planning for meaningful literacy experiences, had a transformative effect on the children’s political literacy.
The Right to an Education
Following the referendum, the school built on this positive experience of skills development in literacy through a real world issue, by planning a whole school exploration of Article 28 of the UNCRC - the Right to an Education. This ranged from P1 exploring ‘People who help us learn’ to a comparison between life St Eunan’s and their partner school in Tanzania. Taking Malala Yousafzai’s address to the UN as their starting point, P7 explored some of the very real world barriers to children’s right to an education. Their literacy experiences then stemmed from this, and were built around the following elements:
- They analysed famous campaigning speeches, such as Barack Obama’s ‘Yes we can’, to explore delivery style and to identify powerful and emotive language
- Personal and guided research was used to explore barriers to education, such as gender inequality and child labour
- Real resources were used wherever possible, such as reciprocal reading built around real world newspaper articles, including from The Times
- Skills development – such as campaigning and speechmaking - was explicitly planned for
- Literacy teaching was undifferentiated as far as possible.
Every child, everywhere
Importantly, in Claire’s view, this approach supported those children who had previously struggled with literacy to make measurable progress. They responded well to the relevance of the real world stimulus and seemed to thrive, a view which appears to be borne out by the end results. The in-depth exploration of global barriers to education led the class to start the ‘Every Child, Everywhere’ campaign. So motivated were the children to take action to right this very palpable wrong that they presented their campaign to the cross party group on Human Rights at the Scottish Parliament, and held a public meeting in George Square to raise awareness of the issue.
Head teacher Anne Docherty said: “This campaign has not only empowered our Primary 7 pupils and made them active citizens in a global sense but it has increased their confidence, fostered an interest and knowledge of rights, responsibilities and politics and helped enhance their literacy skills.”
Giving children the tools to explore the world, and the skills and confidence to question and challenge injustice is transformative education at its best.
Real issues, real learning
The success of the approach was also noted by HMIe. In their January 2015 Inspection report on the school, the inspecting team made specific reference to the rich, real-world literacy experiences happening in the school, commenting, “Children’s writing skills are developing well through the school’s well planned approaches... Real-life, interesting contexts for learning are a strong feature of the school’s curriculum. For example, in relation to their work on children’s right to an education, children in P7 have been learning about the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai. This theme is providing children with very good opportunities to make links across their learning."
This official endorsement of the ways in which a well-planned exploration of real world contexts to impact positively in pupil learning is very welcome, and reinforces something accomplished teachers have long felt; giving children the tools to explore the world, and the skills and confidence to question and challenge injustice is transformative education at its best.
