Graphic Novel Authors in Residence at Holyrood Secondary
The project!
We’ve just finished our residency at Holyrood Secondary, and the project has gone way beyond our expectations! We were hired by Glasgow Life/Glasgow Libraries back in September to deliver a 20 week long residency with pupils from the Roma community in Govanhill in Glasgow. They worked really hard at creating comics and drawings with our guidance and encouragement and made huge improvements in their reading and writing. Their confidence was also greatly improved. These kids had not long arrived in Britain and some of them could barely read, write or speak English and were thrown into a big school and were trying to keep up. We compiled their work into a finished book and they all received a copy at the celebration event.
On TV and in the newspaper !
What we didn’t expect was for the community and the media to take such an interest! From a single Facebook post which attracted a lot of attention we ended up on STV News at 6 with Ian Lebeter of Glasgow Life talking about the project. You can see the clip here: https://stv.tv/news/west-central/1432618-school-uses-graphic-novels-to-teach-immigrant-pupils/
The National newspaper also featured the work in an article you can read here: https://www.thenational.scot/news/17618286.holyrood-secondary-pupils-gain-confidence-with-metaphrog-project
Big thanks!
We would like to say special thanks to Ian Lebeter at Glasgow Life for providing us with this opportunity and to the excellent librarian Fiona Kindness for her initial vision of the project and continuous help and support throughout. The project would not have been such a success without the support of the EAL department, Ms. McLaughlin, Mrs. McKellar and Mrs. Cooper, and also Mrs. McPhee the Principal Teacher Primary. We would also like to say thank you to the Cordia Linguistics interpreters, for helping with communication and with building reading confidence. Above all, thank you to all the young participants for all their hard work, creativity and enthusiasm. They should be very proud of the work they produced.
