“Bridge to School” project at Weston Secondary School, Spring 2023
Funded and organised by Southampton VRU
We were approached early 2023 by members of the Southampton VRU in partnership with Weston Secondary to run a short series of workshops, with the intention of re-engaging around 10 of the lowest attending young people who are also most interested in photography.
The second aspect to the selection of the young people here were those most at risk of also being perpetrators of knife crime.
We had run many workshops similar to this in the past, but there were several additional challenges; the young people were already unengaged from school lessons, they were having their day changed up with our sessions, and our teaching was being held in a multi-function room normally reserved for storage and quiet study.
Additionally, we often only had limited spaces to make photographs in; inside the small room, around the building in the small woodland area and in several areas of the school grounds.
Despite these challenges, we were able to produce some excellent results with the limited resources available to the young people. As well as using photography, we tried to incorporate collage, mixed media, blackout poetry and creative writing into the results.
Many of the young people had never used a DSLR camera before, and were quite interested in the learning how to use all the various features of the cameras, how to edit images and how the printing process worked.
Throughout the sessions we tried to always making printing physical results out so the young people had something to take home and share with others as well.
While attendance throughout the workshops was up and down each week, the ones that did return multiple times seemed to enjoy making work throughout the school; whether it was the surrounding landscape, abstract images of their school or using props inside the room to make a diorama, they all got a good understanding of what a professional camera can be capable of. And hopefully, this will have led at least some of them to me more enthused and engaged with the rest of their school lessons!
