Drummond Community High School is a hub of multinational, multicultural and multilingual activity in Edinburgh. Here, Birgit Harris (Community Education Manager) tells us about the school’s Cultural Peer Project, which has gone from strength to strength over recent years.
Making a new start in a new country, without the support network of family and friends, can be daunting. Especially if you have come to live in Edinburgh with little English and must study hard to get it up to scratch and understand the beautiful Scots language.
This is where the Cultural Peer Project comes in, bringing local people together with ESOL (English speakers of other languages) learners.
The Project is an informal conversation class where native speakers of English and ESOL learners learn and talk together, sharing their cultures and languages through a jointly decided programme of activities.
The current peer group, aged from early 20s to 80, talked about their respective upbringings, home, family and school lives. Our ESOL members would tell the group why they had come to live in Scotland, how they found making it their new home, and the experiences they were having in the process.
Saki from Japan demonstrated a Japanese Tea Ceremony to the group. Edu, a Spanish chef, taught the group to make Tapas. Laura, a forester from Spain, gave a great introduction to the trees in the Royal Botanic Garden.
The group visited many local museums with guided tours, a café ceilidh, played skittles at the Sheep’s Heid, visited the Scottish Parliament (including First Minister’s Question Time), had a Thai and Chinese cookery class, and visited Edinburgh Castle.
One of our local members organised a visit to the Mansfield Traquair Centre with her husband, who is a trustee there and gave the guided tour. The whole group was invited to a party afterwards in their lovely home.
Participants in the Project were acknowledged with certificates and loud audience applause at Drummond’s Celebration of Achievement and Prize Giving Ceremony last week.
