Manor Community College
Our most successful enrichment activity has been inviting Baba Brinkman in to work with our year seven and eight students, to support their study of Chaucer. Baba is an inspirational rap artist, who really brought the Canterbury Tales to life, using rap and poetry to tell the story of the Knight’s Tale . Students had the opportunity to write their own rap, based on a character from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales and these have been displayed in the College and in our local library.
Another successful activity this year was our link with Cambridge University Anthropology Department. We took a group of year seven students to the museum of Anthropology, where they met with staff and looked at some examples of Aboriginal art and poetry. Students then wrote responses to what they had seen and these were displayed in the museum.
Students now have the opportunity to comment on the schemes of work they are being taught; we invite them to one department meeting per term, where they give us their feedback and reflections on the content and pedagogy used. This has proved invaluable for moving the department forward and for fostering genuine engagement amongst the students. We are also proud of our commitment to different curriculum pathways within English, and now have students in year eleven studying for an ‘AS’ level in English at the end of the year. These students took their English Literature exam in year ten and we know that by teaching them the AS course, their aspirations have been raised.
Manor Community College is a mixed comprehensive school, based in Cambridge.