Last week, we did our first session of the “Sharing Our Stories” afterschool club with a secondary school. Overall, I think that it went quite well, and the children were enthusiastic and engaged. To start with, we played some quick games to warmup and learn everyone’s names. We then split into smaller discussion groups, where I asked the kids about their favourite movies/TV shows and what they liked about them, in order to discuss a larger question – what makes a good story?  Although the discussion went well for the most part, I didn’t get onto talking about some of the questions that were more directly related to stories, as I found it a bit difficult to guide the conversation at times. I’d like to work on being more assertive/confident in future sessions. However, I think that on the whole, the session was a success, and it was a great opportunity to put our plan for the club into practice and get to know the school that we were working in.

We also continued writing our research proposal this week, alongside making notes for our literature review. This allowed us to further define our research scope and find information from secondary sources which will be valuable for our project. We will be further exploring how we will go about acquiring primary data next week, but we have begun to map our stakeholders, and discuss how we will be engaging with them (interviews, surveys etc.)

So far, I think that Laidlaw has really allowed me to develop my leadership and communication skills by pushing me out of my comfort zone, by organising an activity that is completely new to me.