Music and song winning over hearts and minds A class act

Geography teacher turned eco-educator Paul Turner (pictured) inspires children to become critical of the world. Sally Gillen finds out what makes him a class act.

STARTING a lesson with a song may be typical in a music or drama lesson, but in geography? Unusual, yes, but Paul Turner believes that with its power to stir emotion, song can provide the ideal introduction to topics such as equality, colonialism and migration.

All are covered in a series of eight lessons he has developed for key stage 3 pupils on the theme of land ownership. Launched online in January, each of the lessons begins with a folk song, and then pupils spend two minutes discussing with a classmate how the song made them feel.

‘Invoking a more human response’ Paul’s aim is to design lessons that target pupils’ hearts, not just their minds.

“Songs appeal to students’ emotions and help invoke a more human response,” he explains. “A lot of teachers have fallen into rote learning, just imparting knowledge, and what I’m trying to do is a counter to that. The lessons I’m developing are designed to generate debate among students and turn them into critical and questioning citizens.

“What drives me as a teacher is wanting to create lessons that are critical of the world, and which are designed to make a better world. It’s not about pupils passively learning some facts, but about opening their eyes to the world around them.”

Inspired by Three Acres and a Cow, a touring show that explores the history of land rights in England through folk song, story and poem, Paul’s eight lessons include debates on some of today’s problems, including the reasons for the housing crisis.

One lesson, Should we be free to roam? encourages pupils to reflect on the fact that, as citizens, they are only allowed to explore eight per cent of the land and three per cent of rivers in England.

It begins with folk singer Ewan MacColl’s Manchester Rambler, with its chorus: “I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way. I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way. I may be a wage slave on Monday. But I am a free man on Sunday.”

Workers’ rights, focusing on trade unions, their role and what they have achieved, are also covered in the scheme of learning, within a lesson that kicks off with Billy Bragg’s song There is Power in a Union.

A songbook including tunes by the likes of Billy Bragg and Commoners Choir has been compiled to accompany the lessons.

Experts and educators in partnership Paul is active in the NEU’s climate change network and was a geography teacher for 15 years before deciding to step away from the classroom two years ago to take up a role as an education lead at environmental charity, Ministry of Eco Education. He wanted to have an impact beyond one school, he says. However, his new role regularly takes him into schools, and, separately, he still finds time to devise lesson plans to share with other educators. He began publishing resources online when he was still teaching, and his lessons on climate change, for example, have proved very popular and been downloaded more than 10,000 times.

“All of the lessons I devised as a teacher, I have always shared on my website,” he says. “It has always felt like a way to increase the value of things I create.”

His approach is to work with experts, who are authors in their field, to design the lessons. The climate change resources, for example, were developed after Paul read How bad are bananas? by renowned scientist Mike Berners-Lee.

Similarly, he devised lessons on land ownership based on a book by Guy Shrubsole, Who Owns England? Paul reads a book and then works with the author to make its content into lessons.

“A lot of authors would love to be more involved in education, and they have materials to support schools using their books and ideas, but don’t know how to go about it,” he says.

“The partnership works because the author is the subject expert, but the thing they are missing is the ability to translate that for a youth audience and teach it. In geography, in particular, teachers are reading books and thinking about how they can bring them to the classroom.

“As teachers, we understand how to translate these ideas into learning activities to make the lessons interesting for young people.” n Visit ministryofeco.org