Still trapped but dancing

After a Refugee Week which I spectacularly managed to miss most of (due, in no small part, to it being my last week of teaching and therefore an anxious rush of cramming) I managed to get to a lovely Celebrating Sanctuary musical day out in the park.

Having, just the day before, managed to get my Refugleers up and singing in front of our entire department and not only singing, but in tune and in time, I really wanted to support an event specifically run to celebrate the music of refugees. I have seen my students blossoming this year, especially Entry 1 and 2 students who struggle to communicate, singing their hearts out. Music is an under-rated commodity in ESOL teaching. It's a scary thing to have to present as often students don't see the relevance of it. But it can be incredibly liberating whilst also being a wonderful lexical approach to language! I'm sneaky like that - my students should never forget the lovely lexical chunks of Stand By Me!

So the music was success, and more so the dancing that followed. It seemed that the vast majority of the students, as never before, wanted to dance with each other. We usually just have a bit of Kurdish dancing and the rest fade away and leave. But we had every nationality up and moving together.

Much like the Celebrating Sanctuary event in the park. I had expected to be surrounded by middle-eastern faces and families but found myself in amongst the most diverse crowd you could imagine and I watched them all joining together and dancing. One of my students was there - he is still Section 4 (in case you don't know, that means he is a failed asylum seeker and is no longer receiving support, i.e. destitute) and though the ins and outs of his case are unknown to me he seems like the ideal person to be welcomed to our country. In the years he has been here and had nothing from the state he has constantly volunteered for homeless charities, using his chef experience from home to cater for other homeless people. He is the most generous person I have met and he has had it pretty bad for many years. But the music had all the people that had supported him together in that park. And so he danced.

And do you know what's strange? In all the time I've been in a classroom with him, his English has often been difficult to understand; sometimes a little garbled, sometimes confused or backwards. But sitting there in those circumstances he spoke for 2 hours and he was understandable.

I feel like all this comes from the same place; the feeling of empowerment that my students feel when they take over, when it's their turf I'm on, or when it's them on the stage singing to their peers. As ESOL teachers we sometimes forget they are people; they're adults with skills and qualifications and experience well beyond our own and they rarely get to express that to us. In the last week I have been quite privileged and humbled to see who my students are and what they can do. Best lesson of the year for me, I reckon.