Rufus Read

Designing and running the Borderscapes workshops was an incredibly rewarding and insightful experience. My area of research focused on language, belonging, and wellbeing.

The workshop aimed to explore how language can foster a sense of belonging and remove cultural barriers, providing the students with an opportunity to engage with different cultural perspectives through interactive activities. I chose to focus my workshop designs on specific words and phrases that can encourage wellbeing, as well as explore different types of music in different languages from across the globe.

One of the most fascinating elements of running these workshops was seeing how different schools and pupils received them. Schools that we visited further in the suburbs in areas such as Formby tended to have a less diverse linguistic palette with most students’ only knowing certain words from two main languages: Spanish and French.

However, schools that were more central in Liverpool displayed pupils with a much wider understanding of languages from a less euro-centric viewpoint. Since my area of the project did have a focus on how the environment could be worked into linguistics and wellbeing, my final workshop which worked with an “Eco-Club” was incredibly well-received. Students helped me develop a different perspective in this respect, and came to the workshop with a very mature and developed outlook on how language can help to foster a sense of belonging.

In the future, the workshops could be improved through carefully examining the feedback taken in the initial research. After each session, I asked students to spend 10 minutes answering some feedback questions, which we then collected to help improve any future experiences.

What I learned just during the course of the workshops I did complete was that the students highly valued the music listening segment; this suggests that in the future, more of a focus could be placed on encouraging students to not only listen to more non-English music, but also to bring their own favourite songs to future sessions. By taking in a wider palette of music, students reported feeling more encouraged to start learning phrases that could help improve wellbeing in these languages.

In my opinion, the main tip that I could give to teachers from my experience running the workshops is to embrace the flexibility of each exercise. I chose to run the workshops in a more informal manner, and this led to much more active participation and engagement with activities such as sticking post-it notes on a world map to show where your favourite language originates. By encouraging students to give their own opinions, I was able to not only see an increase in engagement from the other pupils but also much more enjoyment from the students who shared their ideas. This then led to a much greater pool of feedback once our sessions were complete!