Topic: Pathways towards hobbies: Resilience and extracurricular activities for disadvantaged primary school children – David Glynne-Percy
Resources: You can download David’s slides and read our Blog.
Summary: Is there an activity you love to do? Does performing this activity make you feel better about yourself, your life, and the world around you? We know a great deal about the benefits of developing hobbies. Positive psychology is awash with notions of “well-being”, “self-esteem”, “self-actualisation”, “flow”, being in the “zone” or finding one’s “element”. These reports are written from a perspective of a developed hobby, when the activity is mastered. But we know less about how hobbies are initiated, and then crucially sustained, in the embryonic first weeks and months. We know even less about how to trigger and then sustain the engagement of children experiencing adversity in their young lives.
This Resilience Forum will investigate how 20 disadvantaged children discovered a hobby whilst at school. How do those children, battered by adversity and inequality, express a desire to participate? It will reveal stories of not only individual resilience, both child and school practitioner, but how whole school resilience shaped and guided children to follow pathways hitherto unexplored.
Biography: After completing a Masters in Leisure Management I ran a small activity centre in the French Pyrenees for 20 years. Returning to the UK in 2010 I worked in a primary school with children deemed to have barriers to learning and to be “too disruptive” to keep in class. It was during this time I became disillusioned to behavioural programs and interventions offered as a panacea to these “naughty” children, and began to investigate other avenues to improve academic outcomes that could be achieved within a school context. I am currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Brighton.
Who might be most interested: People working in schools, practitioners, academics, students, parents, carers, community workers, volunteers, public sector workers, young people. I would love anyone with a passion to come along!
This session took place on Tuesday 5 December 2017.
The Resilience Forum is for ANYBODY (with a pulse!) involved with or interested in resilience research
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