Anti-racism Creative Delivery workshop
Over the course of two months, Black Books Matter UK and freelance facilitator, Alesha Pryce, hosted four Creative Delivery workshops reaching over 20 school teachers, youth workers and parents that live and work in the London Borough of Hackney. The aims of our bespoke sessions are to enhance educators' practices by providing a range of drama techniques that can be used and adapted to help address the theme of racism with young people.
Three of the workshops were kindly hosted by Sir Thomas Abney Primary School in Hackney with educators and parents coming from all across the borough to develop their thinking around the topic of racism, and learn more about how they can creatively exercise this knowledge with their young people. We were also invited to the Forest Road Young Hackney youth club to facilitate a session with their youth workers, who were all extremely open-minded and happy to share their unique experiences during the session.
“I am very confident and excited to use the skills I learned. The game exercises will be great for our young people, I will use what I have learned in the fun drama techniques to deliver in the same fun way.”
All participants of the workshops engaged in a range of drama exercises including ‘Who am I?’ which is a twist on the well-known ‘Heads up!’ game, the players must guess who they are without mentioning the nine protected characteristics, including age, race and religion. This exercise aims to provide young people with the understanding of how we might judge people based on these nine characteristics and to open up their minds to ‘unconscious bias’.
Youth worker playing ‘Who am I?’
What are some of the key things you will take away from this workshop?
“How to create a safe and open space to discuss identity, race and racism with young people.”
The participants of the workshop also learnt how to facilitate Freeze Frame and Freeze Tag drama exercises, which are games that require young people to consider and create scenarios which could apply to their real-life environment. They will look at the people in the scene and consider the body language, power dynamics and how to overcome and resolve a bad situation. These exercises help to deepen a young person’s understanding of certain types of behaviours (e.g. micro-aggressions) and how they can make other people feel.
20/05/2022
Written by Charly Collier, BBMUK Volunteer
