Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

making free sanitary towels available through schools. • Lesson 4 –How do we create change? Working in groups, students choose from a range of awareness-raising campaigns relating to gender, ethnicity, the pay gap, diversity in English literature or period poverty. They then get to decide how to conduct their campaign – should they opt for social mediamessaging? Write to MPs? Mount a protest? • Lesson 5 –What do we plan to change? Each group delivers a presentation that details their campaign strategy, explaining what they’ve chosen to do, their reasoning, and why the issue is an important one. The lesson concludes with a classroom vote on which of the presentations was the most convincing and powerful. How are you expecting schools to go about teaching those lessons? We deliberately built inclusive teaching methods into all five of the lessons, which include working on tasks in small groups of up to four, and rotating the groups’ leadership roles from one lesson to the next. These strategies afford students the space and opportunity to speak freely, try out different ideas and gather feedback from peers, prior to taking part in an all-class discussion. The use of counter- narratives, meanwhile, is intended to disrupt existing power dynamics by showing how disadvantaged women have been able to create political change, in ways that may inspire girls today to harbour similar ambitions of their own. Is G-EPIC conceived as an intervention primarily for disadvantaged students, or could potentially benefit all students? The intervention can be rolled out in any school, but we targeted it primarily at schools in challenging areas and disadvantaged girls, since they have the biggest need. We wanted to check find out if it would work for those who needed it most. You could certainly run the G-EPIC lessons in very different contexts, and observe similar boosts confidence levels among the least disadvantaged cohorts – but those settings will likely be running similar classes and projects of their own already. Were there any moments or discoveries during the project’s development and trialling process that surprised you? In the pilot phase, we were alarmed to observe that some boys were still undermining girls during the delivery of presentations in lesson 5. That prompted us to add a set of behavioural expectations to the intervention and do more to reward active listening. Participants now hear specific messages at the start about the importance of listening respectfully to their peers, noting down any questions they wish to ask and putting their hands up only after presentations have ended. Where does the G-EPIC project now go fromhere? So far, we’ve produced a freely downloadable toolkit for teachers, a student resource book and a PowerPoint presentation. We’ve also been recruiting teachers to deliver the intervention in UK schools, and have made plans to hand over all responsibility for long-termmaintenance and distribution of the G-EPIC materials to the Association of Citizenship Teachers. The research has been done – it’s now just a case of getting this knowledge out into the field. The G-EPIC toolkits for teachers can be downloaded from g-epic.eu/toolkits VOTES AT 16 With 16-year-olds soon able to vote in elections, what impact will that have on adolescents’ level of interest and engagement in politics? Professor Hoskins shares her thoughts... In the absence of any extra efforts aimed at supporting young people’s political education and citizenship education up to 16, the most likely outcome will be a further increase in inequalities. It will only be those teens from the most politically engaged families and advantaged backgrounds who actually turn up at the ballot box. The ultimate aim of providing inclusive citizenship education within schools is to give disadvantaged students the chance to develop similar levels of awareness and engagement, so that it’s not just ‘elite’ 16- to 18-year-olds who make up the youth vote. It will be great for adolescents to have the vote at 16, but they’ll all need the knowledge, skills and confidence in themselves to know that their vote can make a difference. 25 teachwire.net/secondary P S H E