Working with the Latymer Girls

LOG 1

On the second week of this project, a small group of girls from the all girls PRU called Latymer joined our session with the young learners from Bridge. This was a particularly challenging session as they were not very cooperative and ended up being quite disruptive to the session. One of them would occasionally join in and that would sometimes cause the other two to verbally express their unhappiness. At the end of this session, we spoke to the Latymer girls in their small group once all the others had left, and asked them what they were passionate about, and good at. They showed a particular interest in singing, acting and writing. We said that we could work with them to create a song and they seemed quite enthusiastic about that.

LOG 2

This week the Latymer girls all turned up with two extra girls with them. We had split off into groups so all the girls came with Mason, Rhiannon and I. We started off by trying to get them to write down particular words that coincided with how they were feeling at the time. They were not too cooperative with us at this point which did actually make it very difficult to produce anything positive. When we asked about writing lyrics for music, a lot of the things they were producing was quiet explicit and we tried to steer them in the direction of that if they were to make it explicit, it had to be something positive. We looked at the idea of talking about how badly females are represented in modern rap music and street culture and how they are objectified. The girls ended up writing a first verse to the song during this session so ended up being quite productive. We managed this by doing a spider diagram/mind map where the girls would write down things that affect them on a daily basis

LOG 3

This week, we were back down to 3 girls in the group. This was better as we could focus a bit more when there are less distractions. I was working particularly closely with Taniqua. She was very good at coming up with lyrics and but was sometimes held back by the 2 other girls, particularly because she was younger than them and what they thought sometimes affected how she would behave. She would always be at the piano with me and always engaged at other times however.

This was the last week that the latymer girls came to attend a session with us as certain altercations occurred which meant they couldn't come back. We did however perform their song in the final showcase.