Everyone Is From Somewhere

Over the coming weeks I will be in thirteen primary schools across the Causeway Coast and Glens, working with children from P4 up to P7 as part of the borough council's diversity education programme.

It is the biggest piece of schools work Humanitas Initiative has taken on, and I have been building it for months. Here is what happens in the room.

We start with one word

Hola.

I ask them to say it back to me. Then I ask them to say it louder. Then louder again, until a room of eight year olds is shouting hello in Spanish before morning break.

There is a reason I begin this way. A new word in your mouth is a small act of courage, and once a room has done one brave thing together, everything after it comes easier. By the time we sit down, they have already crossed something.

Then we look at some photographs

I show them pictures of people they do not know and I ask them to guess. What does this person do. What are they like. What do you think their life is.

And then I tell them who the person is, and what they have done, and the room goes very quiet, because the answer is almost never what they guessed.

I am careful about which photographs I use. The surprise has to be about the assumptions we make from a face, an age, a job, a pair of hands. It must never be about where somebody is from or what they look like, because there may well be a child sitting in that room who looks like the photograph, and I will not do that to a child.

Then we play a game that goes wrong on purpose

One sentence, whispered around a circle.

What comes out at the other end is never what went in. The children find this hilarious, and then they work out what it means, usually faster than adults do. Something true got passed along, changed a little each time by somebody who was sure they had heard it right, and arrived as something else entirely.

Most of what people believe about each other arrives the same way.

Then we stand up

I read out a list of ordinary things. Stand up if this has happened to you.

Children look around the room and discover who else is standing. A child who thought they were the only one finds out they are one of six. A child who thought they had nothing in common with the person two desks away watches that person stand up at the same moment they do.

Nobody has to explain anything. The standing does the work.

Then we make a plan

This is the part I care about most.

I ask them to imagine somebody new arriving in their class next week. Not from somewhere far away necessarily, just new. What would you actually do.

They start with the easy answers. Be nice to them. Be their friend. And then I push a bit, because be nice is not a plan, it is a feeling. What would you do first. Who would show them where the toilets are. Who would sit beside them at lunch, and what if two of you both want to and the new person is overwhelmed.

By the end they have made something real, and specific, and theirs. And the next time a child walks into their classroom not knowing anybody, somebody in that room will already know what to do.

Then we dance

Because you cannot talk about my country and stay in your chair, and because a room full of children laughing is a good place to leave them.

Why it is worth doing

Children do not need persuading that other people are interesting. They arrive curious. The openness is already there.

The work is keeping it safe while they grow, so that in ten or twenty years, when they meet somebody whose name they cannot pronounce, they lean in rather than look away.

That is the whole job, and I get to do it thirteen times this autumn.

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