School Partnership Collaboration

Deirdre, Ginni and I met with Priya Clarke, the Schools Partnership Officer, to discuss whether the School of Psychology and Education and Community Partnerships could collaborate. Priya arranges for local schools to come and visit UEL as part as what was previously known as the Aim Higher Initiative. This was a government programme set up to try and engage and motivate local children to want to enter higher education. This programme is no longer funded but UEL continue to invite schoolchildren to the campus as part of a programme to build skills and raise aspirations. To find out more information see   http://www.uel.ac.uk/partnerships/index.htm.

Priya arranges for 10 primary school visits and 30 secondary school visits per year. Priya may also be able to establish a relationship between the researcher and the school, so that the researcher could go into school to collect data. Additionally, a summer school is held at UEL for a week during September from 10am till 2.30pm. Priya was very keen to enter into a relationship with the School of Psychology whereby we supply interesting and exciting workshops for the children and in return we are able to collect data for our studies.  A typical visit usually involves a University Workshop which Priya will run, a Campus Workshop which often the school of education runs and a Subject Workshop, which is where we come in. It would be a good idea if we could set up some activity workshops that could be used on a regular basis over the coming years. Each workshop requires a Duty Manager who will need to be on campus but is not required to be at the workshop and a couple of staff members, postgrads or students (who are CRB which Priya can arrange) who can run the workshops whilst data is being collected.

Priya spoke to Ginni, Deirdre and I in detail to discover what our individual data collection needs were. She is more than happy to speak to any other researchers who would like to be involved with this project or would like to collect data from children. Her email is p.clarke@uel.ac.uk. 

Ideas that I have had are: letting the children watch a film? in the Virtual Reality Suite; showing them some clips of cognitive paradigms such as counting the no. of times a team bounces a basketball whilst the monkey runs across the court, upside down faces etc; plastic brains to show the water content or even to reinact some of the classic studies (not Milgram or Zimbardo obviously) but maybe Asch and get some of the children to act as confederates. Anyway, as you can see I’m in need of some good ideas so if you would like to get more involved or just suggest activities please get in contact.

Thanks

Paula