Some of the Community Ambassadors from Flora Stevenson filmed themselves to record their opinions in the following vox pops.
Human Dignity
– Simon (See the flower that Simon is describing below)
– Jamie
Trust
– Mina and Manhoor
– Baxter
– Jamie and Simon
Empathy
– Mina
Kindness
– Zack
– Mina and Sophia
– Jamie
Relationships Between Adults and Children
– Jamie
– Zack
– Baxter
Thank you to all of the children who shared their views on camera (and to all those who chose not to!)
Our whole class of Community Ambassadors from Flora Stevenson travelled to Moray House, Edinburgh University to deliver a workshop to MSc and PhD Childhood Studies students.
Community Ambassadors shared their work and views from their Community Ambassadors Programme in Edinburgh (CAPE), guiding the adults through a number of activities designed to help them consider and discuss children’s human rights and how they can adopt a children’s rights approach to their thinking and practice.
Together the students and Community Ambassadors considered the programme themes of Human Dignity, trust, empathy and kindness and discussed how children have identified these themes as being the values they need and want from adults when seeking advice or support.
We’d like to thank our friends from Edinburgh University for making this workshop such a positive experience for our Community Ambassadors and for their pledges to children, some of which we include here.
I, Fatima, from MSc Childhood Studies, University of Edinburgh, hereby pledge to make the world a better place for children by loving, caring and respecting them.
I pledge to try to treat my students with empathy, kindness, trust and dignity. To encourage those students to do the same when they become teachers. To use those four words to focus my reflections on my teaching and my actions as a teacher and a parent.
– Judith MacKinlay – Teaching Fellow (Primary Education) & Mum
To see all of the students pledges on what they will do to make children’s lives healthy, happy and safe you can visit our “Adult Pledges” page on this blog.
Following their workshop with the CP Ambassadors from Flora Stevenson, adult participants made the following pledges:
“I promise to always listen to what children tell me and take their problems seriously.”
– PC Iain Collins
“I Darren Campbell do pledge to treat young people with Dignity, Empathy, Kindness and Respect.”
– PC 4753E
“I promise to listen to children (and adults) and try to do my best to help them in any way I can.”
– Tara Adam
Community Ambassadors from Flora Stevenson play host to a team of Police School-Link Officers, taking part in their first adult workshop.
The Community Ambassadors guided participating adults through a number of activities, including Sandy’s Story and the Ginormous Dice Game, which are designed to showcase the children’s work and their learning attained through the programme. Importantly, the children were able to ask some difficult questions that required thoughtful responses from the adults.
Our Ambassadors finished by asking the adult participants to make a pledge to them. This pledge requires adults to think about what they will do to make children’s lives healthier, happier and safer, at home, at school and in their communities.
A big thank you to all of the adults who took part and played such a positive role in making the workshops meaningful and relevant for our Ambassadors.
Remember, we’ll be back to check up on your pledges…
Our Community Ambassadors in Flora Stevenson’s have been reflecting and thinking about the work we have been doing together in the programme.
To help with this Ambassadors have been provided with Community Ambassadors Passports and individually they have been thinking about the themes of Human Dignity, Empathy, Trust and Kindness and placing their thoughts and messages into their passports.
In our passport we’re beginning to think about the important messages we want to send to adults and about the workshops we are going to develop so that we can ask adults what we want them to Think – Feel & Do when we ask them for support.
You can see what our passports look like here;
Our message to adults is; If you or anyone you know would like to take part in a workshop with our Ambassadors please leave Graeme and Beth a message in the comments session below. All welcome!
Comments;
“Children’s Parliament is my favourite thing at school right now! All of these things – Human Dignity, Empathy, Trust, Kindness wrap into each other. There would be no human dignity without empathy, trust and kindness in the world.” Mina
“Human Dignity is about everyone being equal and their voices being equal.” Kain
“I feel like I understand trust and empathy and I’m quite emotional because I understand life more.” Olivia
Last week the Community Ambassadors helped to rewrite Sandy’s Story. The Ambassadors listened to the story and then thought about the difficulties Sandy faced, their suggested changes included giving him his own room and a friendly school where everyone was kind.
We read through the Ambassadors’ new story and found examples of trust, empathy, kindness and human dignity. To help us understand what these mean for other children we watched the videos that the Children’s Parliament Investigates Bullying Project had made.
Watch a short film about Trust: https://youtu.be/X4ntEFpR_80
Watch a short film about empathy: https://youtu.be/U-7lgaBn86M
Watch a short film about kindness: https://youtu.be/NZPf86NcTJ4
Watch a short film about human dignity: https://youtu.be/cY0WbfXWOqM
Look what we found in P7 classroom – Dignometers proudly displayed with the Class Charter. Hope these serve as great reminders of the importance of human dignity being central to children’s human rights discussions.
In today’s session with our Flora Stevenson CAPE teams we looked at Trust and what this means to us.
We began by thinking about the adults we feel we can trust to make our communities feel healthy happy and safe.
We thought that family and friends would be the people we would ask for help. It was more difficult to think about adults we “trust” outside of family. It would have to be someone we knew well and liked.
Then we thought about what we need adults to THINK – FEEL and DO so that we trust them.
“Adults need to care about children and think about what they can do to help”
“Some adults might be scared and think Oh no! I don’t know what I can do to help. I might make things worse”
“If you’ve asked an adult for help and they haven’t listened or told you not to be silly you’ll never ask them again”
Our question for adults is: Can we trust you to do what you say?
In this session, our Community Ambassadors listened to a story about Sandy. Sandy is a fictional character, a 10-year-old boy who experiences challenges at home, in his community and in school.
Our Ambassadors explored the concept of empathy through hearing Sandy’s Story. Empathy is when you are able to see things from somebody else’s perspective. By putting ourselves in others’ shoes and feeling what someone else is feeling, we can better understand how our choices impact on other people.
Ambassadors listened to Sandy’s story and afterwards explored ways that the story could be better for Sandy. To read Sandy’s Story for yourself please click the link:
CP Investigates (Sandy’s Story)
The pictures are from our Sandy’s Story in Freeze Frames activity…
In next weeks session our Ambassadors will look at the positive suggestions that they made on how Sandy’s life could be made better.
We will be looking for examples of Kindness, Trust, Empathy and Human Dignity in Sandy’s new Story.
Children’s Parliament are back in Flora Stevenson.
Graeme, Colin and Beth visited with P7 to work on a brand new project called Community Ambassadors Programme in Edinburgh (CAPE).
Together, we looked at the experiences children can have that remove their human dignity and the experiences which can build children’s dignity and feelings of self-worth.
Our definition of Human Dignity is;
We put our feelings and experiences on our “Dignometers” some of which are posted here. We hope you enjoy them 😀
Our questions for adults from this session are; What does human dignity mean to you and, as a child, can you remember an experience which left you feeling small, put down or sad?
Another great session with our Community Ambassadors at Flora Stevenson’s Primary.
We talked about our Community which we described as “All the people who live in a particular area or place“. We thought about all the places where we love to be, as well as those that could be better or feel safer.
Everyone was given a map and we drew all the places that we feel safe and happy and the places it doesn’t feel safe; we thought about why these places feel this way. Have a look at our maps. We hope you enjoy them.
As Community Ambassadors we want to help adults understand what they can do help us feel included. We want adults to listen to us when they are thinking about ways to make our communities healthy, happy and safe places for us to live, play and grow up.
Our question to adults is; Is your Community a space where children can live, play and grow up in safety?
