Expanding Horizons Campaign continued...
After agreeing with the learners that the intervention would aim to expand their thinking about the opportunities available to them and that they accessed, the student explored the campaign idea further with the learners. She presented the class with a box, symbolizing Lavender Hill and asked the learners to identify all the occupations that they knew to occur in Lavender Hill. They wrote down all of the occupations that they could identify on slips of paper. These were then placed inside the box. In this phase learners identified occupations such as street soccer; playing arcade games at a games shop and dominoes. Thereafter, learners were asked to identify occupations that occurred outside of Lavender Hill – that is, those occupations that they thought were “outside the box”. This was a powerful comparison as it invited them to use their imaginations to think creatively about possible occupations without the constraint of considering if they wanted to engage these. Occupations identified as occurring outside of Lavender Hill included dance classes; surfing and cycling. The student then facilitated a reflective session with the class, applying the thinking environment principles (Kline, 1999) to discuss:
- The differences between occupations inside and outside of the box
- Their views of the reasons behind the occupations selected within and outside the box.
They were then invited to consider which occupations from outside of the box, they would like to try participating in. The student selected four occupations for the learners to choose between, these were: ballet, surfing, bicycling and hip-hop dancing. These occupations were selected since they were ones that were familiar to learners, but many had not considered engaging on them or thought that they would be unable to participate. The aspect of giving the learners the control over which occupations they participated in was key to allowing them to exercise their agency.
The student sought out and initiated contact with strategic partners to create the opportunity for students to participate in their chosen occupation. For example, she negotiated with a local surfing development programme for learners to have free surfing lessons. These services were all accessible and close to Lavender Hill, again challenging the learners thinking that these were not readily available to people such as them.
Of the class of 40 learners, 28 learners fully partcipated in the campaign. The rest only attended the preparation or reflection phases due to playing truant, or being absent on the day of the action phase. On the days of the action phases, the learners received refreshments. The student had budgeted for these refreshments in her campaign budget. Transport was also arranged using the school and community’s resources – the learners assisted in organising the resources.
During the reflection sessions, the learners got a chance to reflect on the photos that they had taken during their activity (Wang et al., 2004), and then a chance to reflect on their experience – eg. saying how they felt at that point in their participation in the occupation and reflecting on the value of what they had done. The student then used these reflections to draw out various learnings. Learning that came forth during the campaign is captured in the following quotes from the learners (some translated from Afrikaans):
- "Ek het geleer ek kan doen wat ek gedink het ek kan nie doen nie" – I learnt that I can do what I thought I could not do
- "Ek kan dit doen as ek probeer en in myslef glo" - We can do it if we just try and believe in ourselves
- Even if you are scared or nervous, then you must just try, you can do it
- The individuals fell off their bikes and then indicated that it was still worth the bike trip – the good parts outweighed the bad parts.
- "dit het die seuns en die meisies saam gebring – ons het almal saam gestaan" - "it brought the girls and boys together- we stood together as one"
These reflections were captured on a cardboard structure (representing their activity), that they had made during the design and initial implementation phases of the campaign. The student also laminated two posters with some of the photos (chosen by the learners), and key learnings on. These were pasted up in their classroom.
