Learning Circles in the Southern Region

The Southern region Learning Revolutionaries project is being led in East Sussex by Sarah Johnson. Working on the project in Hampshire are Amanda Burgess and Dahlia Jamil, and in Berkshire Rabena Sharif. As a region, we are very passionate about the project, have many ideas and too little time! We feel that this is a unique opportunity for our learners, new learners and volunteers to meet and learn new skills from each other. We work with many different communities; who altogether speak over 20 languages!

The main focus of the Southern region work is to engage learners from existing ESOL classes and support them in setting up self-organised groups. We are working with our ESOL provision, who include new and settled BME communities in Hove, Southampton, Portsmouth, Slough and Reading. We are focusing on this in particular as we often have requests from learners for more opportunities to meet and talk with native English speakers in an informal way. The informal nature of the Learning Revolutionaries project enables us to do this by bringing together learners who can build on their own skills and learn from the fantastic skills and knowledge of existing volunteers.

Alongside our focus on conversation groups, we are also building on the existing work of the Six Book Challenge; one of our learning circles will concentrate on reading and discussing the books together. We are also working with Asian elders and Asian women’s groups who enjoy learning gentle exercise, hand therapies and discussing local issues and with sheltered housing schemes to extend the availability of reminiscence and arts and craft provision.

We hope that by the end of the project, we will have reached out to people who wanted to be a volunteer and share their skills, but previously did not know how or where to start. We want to help increase self-esteem and confidence in learning situations – so join our revolution!

If you think you could set up a Learning Circle in your local community or workplace please contact Sarah at sjohnson@wea.org.uk or call 07931 341061.