I continued working on Family Child today. In the morning I did a little more editing of my lesson plan and added in a tricky moral dilemma to demonstrate different ways to make decisions. I also wrote up a two page long revised sales pitch for the programme. It includes details of what and how Family Child teaches, information about Safe Ground and learning outcomes of the course. I also started putting together some quotes about a similar programme that was run as a trial in schools. Here are a couple from the student evaluation forms:
‘Drama gives us confidence and expresses the message or moral of the story in a different way’
‘They (prisoners) can put their own feelings into the drama’
‘It was an eye opener to see what prisoners feel and that they aren’t all bad’
I ordered a slightly more complicated sandwich at lunch today. I still didn’t quite make the six ingredients but at least no one complained that the food wasn’t coming fast enough! I finished organising the quotes after lunch. Maybe a few could be used to promote Family Child in the future.
Then I started working on a sales pitch for a potential half-day workshop to be run in secondary schools to educate students about prisons, the criminal justice system and the work of Safe Ground. I think most students have a rather stereotypical view of what prisons are like and why someone might go i.e. ‘bad people end up in prison where it is horrible so they are punished’. I probably had some similar thoughts until a couple of days ago. I think it would be really great if Safe Ground could launch a programme to encourage discussion rather than bland statements when it comes to the prison system. However, having written a short introduction to this workshop, I’m still struggling to come up with a name for it. So far it’s been called X. Safe Ground’s programmes seem to start with an F, so…. Maybe I’ll leave that to the experts!