Hello I am George Stevens and I am a classroom teacher here at Bristol Free School and I'm
gonna talk about my experience of delivering the new Belonging anthology and diversifying
our curriculum. So as a teacher here at Bristol Free School obviously I understand the importance
of delivering a diverse curriculum. Bristol's journey to becoming the modern city that it's
known to be today is an incredibly sensitive topic for many of our pupils because it includes
a history of huge disparities of class, race and gender and the struggles for equality
and because of this it is paramount that our curriculum is delivered with this knowledge
and sensitivity at the fore. To sort of put this into a bit of context at Bristol Free
School, 22% of our pupils are BAME students, 9.61% of our pupils speak English as an additional
language and 14.11% of our students are on the free school meals programme. And we felt
it was important that the texts that we teach not only reflect you know the students that
sit in front of us everyday but also to reflect a broader society in which they exist as citizens,
which is why we did change from the Relationships anthology to Belonging as offered by Edexcel.
Poetry was a really great place for us to start whilst we responded to the demands of
diversifying our curriculum, poetry as a topic provides for discussion of large concepts,
themes and important issues. In discreet segments and therefore a more diverse anthology immediately
provided the opportunity for learning about a variety of cultures, to happen instantaneously.
So the first poem we taught here was 'Jamaican British' and students were immediately seeing
an aspect of culture that they had never seen in English lessons prior to that, so I think
that's fantastic. Running throughout the anthology is a theme of memories, and as a theme, that's
generally speaking quite universal and accessible to all students, they will all have their
own identity, their own history, their own memories that they can bring to the classroom
and yes they may not directly reflect those that the poets speak of, it's still a really
great way to hook students of all abilities and all backgrounds. The Head of Department
here at Bristol Free School actually had an incredibly powerful teaching experience of
'The Émigrée' to some Syrian students who had moved to the UK as a result of the terrible
conflict in their home country. The imagery resonated incredibly strongly with them and
they were actually able to utilise the emotions that were evoked within them to help their
classmates understand their story and their situation, which in turn helped them to understand
the context of the poem. And I think that isolated incident not only cultivates a positive
learning environment, but the social development and growth it promoted is invaluable. As well
as that, the poem 'Island Man' deals with fitting into a new culture which for many
of our pupils can be, you know they can see themselves directly in that. They might have
first-hand experience of that. Not only that, but it's an opportunity for all students to
gain insight as to what many people in Britain experience, which once again develops their
knowledge of a wider society and develops their knowledges of cultures outside of their
own potentially. 'We Refugees' is another great poem that tells a story that can resonate
with every single person, whether it's the students, whether it's us as teachers, and
that's the desire to feel a part of something or accepted which we can all relate to. I
was really curious actually prior to taking part in this to see what my students felt
about diversity in the curriculum and I've put some ideas up that you can see now but
one thing I'm going to highlight is the one that says: 'I learn more from social media
and media in general about cultural sensitivity and diversity than I do frin the school curriculum'
and I think that is incredibly eye opening for us as teachers. It's clear that conversations
about diversity are so much more common in youth culture through social media and online
media than there ever has been before. It seems counterproductive not to utilise that
in the classroom. We have the opportunity now with this anthology to encourage this
sort of dialogue, so I think it's great if we do that. It's clear from this that students
see the importance of promoting and teaching a diverse curriculum, so it's really up to
us to start that. And finally I'm just going to talk a little bit about the workload as
I know that the introduction or the changing of the curriculum can spark sort of fears
and things like that but the poetry is a fantastic starting point when it comes to diversifying
your curriculum, it's the easiest of the literature components arguably to share planning across
the department which is how we at Bristol Free School handled the change really. And
yes it does take time and engagement to accumulate new subject knowledge, it's easily done and
we've developed the skills to do this through other teaching of other texts. There's also
resources available on the Edexcel website, with suggested content and possible comparative
points to other poems, so it's really doable. Which brings me to the end of my little segment
about the Belonging anthology so thank you so much for listening and I hope you feel
encouraged to explore the Belonging anthology because it really is great to teach. Thank
you very much.