Teaching Cornish in schools
The problems: Persuading schools to take up Cornish. ‘Taster sessions’
Problems with persuading the school to take up Cornish. Most teachers are trained out of the region and tend not to be well informed about Cornish history. Cornish has no formal status within the curriculum. Unless a head teacher is supportive, classroom teachers have difficulty introducing Cornish.
The problems with taster sessions: ‘Taster sessions’ reinforce the idea that Cornish can be addressed in passing. i.e they can come across as ‘tokenistic’. They can also reinforce the idea that Cornish is a curiosity and has little relevance to the day to day experiences of people living in Cornwall today.
We look to persuade Head teachers: That learning any language is a well understood route to improving children’s cognitive development and, by introducing Cornish, a school is engaging with the idea of ‘a sense of place’. This goes down well with inspectors and is therefore is something valuable to the school.
For the classroom teachers we offer: CPD (training sessions on Cornish language history, pronunciation and grammar). Ready made resources. Trained people to work with them in schools (community educators).
We WILL do taster sessions if that is the only opportunity available to us. However: We emphasise cultural and linguistic history. Place names etc. Modern usage. Inclusivity ( anyone can learn a language)
Cornish, however, does suffer from an image problem in schools. That is to say most school children, if they are aware of the language, think that most speakers (still) look like this: A role for the Gorsedh?
Recommend
More recommend
