Schools: Classroom Broadcasts
For schools, community radio is a great teaching tool right across the curriculum and it’s also a way of giving a platform to school activity for the public as a whole,” says Radio Regen Director Phil Korbel.
Radio Regen has sought to get local schools formally on board wherever they broadcast, recognising their integral role in communities. This has not only proved beneficial to pupils and teachers but has also increased listenership.
In each case, the first step is to make contact with school heads and key teachers, explains ALL FM Community Participation Officer David Armes. During 2003, he worked intensively with Levenshulme High School and St Luke’s Primary School and has now formed links with six schools.
Typically four schoolchildren come in to present a 10-minute slot either weekly or fortnightly, that they have prepared with the help of teachers. “They want to talk about their school, their teachers, hobbies, friends, films, music, brothers and sisters. Without prompting from the teachers, some even want to talk about their classes at school, homework, sports days and concerts,” David says.
Some schools, such as Ardwick’s Medlock Primary, choose instead to do one-off broadcasts by incorporating audio elements into existing class-work. As part of a project on war, they listened to Gustav Holst’s Mars, read war poetry and turned it into a 10-minute radio feature.
Three flexible workshops have been designed to get kids from the classroom to the airwaves. The first introduces community radio and gets them to brainstorm about what they’d talk about given ten minutes on air. “I get them to use their voices and make different vocal sounds to teach them about the organs of speech,” David says. “That’s a really good ice breaker – it gets them noisy and talking to each other.”
The second workshop gets down to the nitty-gritty of how you make a radio show – introducing concepts of running orders, scripting, cues and links. At this point the class gets to play around, recording on mini-discs. “You can see it click – the exact moment they ‘get it’ and know what they want to do is when they first hear their voice back and it all makes sense. Before that saying ‘write a script, do a running order’ seems a bit abstract and boring.”
The third workshop finalises the scripts they’ll actually use on their first micro-show – they make test recordings, listen back and give each other feedback. “I try and speak as little as possible and let them join the dots – the whole point is that it’s their radio station.”
“Their first response is ‘brilliant, we’re gonna be on the radio!’ Straight away they’re bright-eyed and excited. The beauty of radio is it’s a ‘cool thing’; it’s not like telling them that they’ve got to write a speech.”
Teachers seem happy too as it can be incorporated into diverse areas of the National Curriculum from English and Media Studies to IT and Music. “Primary schools can make it part of lessons on speaking and listening, citizenship, personal and social education, and engaging with the wider community.” The motivation of classes is often so high it doesn’t generate much extra work for teachers. “The children decide among themselves who’s doing the slot that week. They talk about it in breaks and then go home and write it. All the teacher has to do is bring them together and finalise it.”
And according to Community Participation Manager Cath Bates, involving schools has even boosted the number of listeners at both WFM and ALL FM. “If we have a school involved which has 600 or 700 kids and a couple come in to do a show, everything stops in the school while they’re on air. So all those kids are listening, all their parents, all their relatives – word spreads and widens the listenership.”