The Samosa Curriculum Support Workshop
Samosa Media Stepney All Saints School Curriculum support workshop April 2022
Samosa Media provided a series of education workshops for year 9 students to help explore build their confidence, public speaking, and language skills.
In April 2022, Samosa Media’s Education Programme Officer, Natalie Marshall, facilitated a series of four workshops, with a group of nine students, designed to support students through building confidence in language, public speaking, and self- expression. The process involved exploring their identity and creating a recorded monologue.
This allowed students to discuss issues, which they were passionate about and provided a creative safe space to do so. Students were able to get out of their comfort zone and connect with themselves by choosing the issues they wanted to explore.
We focused on recording monologues as a platform, for the students to explore a variety of topics. The issues which students identified and passionately discussed in their monologues were the following: Mental health, gender, social media, cultural pressures, bullying and LGBT.
During the process, students were focused on brainstorming, what issues they wanted to explore in their recorded monologue, writing a draft of their monologue and finally performing and filming on the finale day with The Samosa Media’s Film Editor Victor Rios.
The workshops were packed with mini-games that let students re-enact scenes from famous plays such as Frankenstein and Romeo and Juliet. Here students were given a scene and they would have the creative freedom to change the scene and perform it in front of their peers.
This gave students a chance to see how powerful storytelling is and understand the importance of creativity and the arts. The workshops also incorporated mini-games to help with their public speaking and build their confidence.
It was inspiring to do this workshop since the group of year nine students who attended have said they are passionate about acting, storytelling, design, film and spoken word.
Following feedback, students stated that they would like more arts and media-based workshops and explore more acting, film and storytelling. They felt the workshops were fun and helped them understand how important it is to have their voices heard, build their confidence and communication skills.
We asked the students what they learnt from these workshops and here is what they said:
“I feel empowered and accomplished”
“It’s ok to make mistakes because I can try again and be better”
“I gained confidence and understood how powerful it is to have my voice heard. I was able to express myself in the workshops.”
” The workshops gave me a safe space to express my identity and issues and also gives people a chance to express themselves”
“I don’t stutter as much when speaking”
“Confidence and purpose”
” An opportunity to show my spoken word poetry”
“I learned how to emphasise words that I am speaking and how to speak slower when performing so people can actually hear and understand me.
I know that now I am heard and my opinions are important and this helps me know I am seen and I am significant. “
“It helped me realise the amount of things that occurs in the world and people should speak up about it”
Samosa Media is a BAME-led education charity. We produce media and run workshops in schools, colleges, and universities to promote and support diversity across in the curriculum. Samosa Media connects film, spoken word and multi-media artists with young people and uses film, theatre, and journalism to provide creative spaces for young people to explore cultural and social issues.
This educational work has been recognised as a model of good practice for supporting social mobility and community cohesion and challenging extremism, and is now being embedded into schools, colleges, and universities. For more examples, please see www.thesamosa.co.uk/2020/02/18/schools-colleges-and-universities
Samosa Media is supported by The Portal Trust, The Foundation for Future London and The Arts Council.
For further information on this curriculum partnership between Stepney All Saints School and Samosa Media please contact Ms Daly.