I’m delighted to share some research into White Water Writers peformed by one of our experienced leaders.

The executive summary is:

All of us are subject to dominant narratives. These are ideas of what is normal, accepted behaviour and attitudes. Dominant narratives are culturally constructed and resistant to change. Personal narratives are associated with identity and are constructed by ourselves. If personal narratives disagree with dominant ones, psychological distress may be experienced by the individual. One such dominant narrative is that further and higher education may not be suitable for young, working class people in certain geographic locations. The National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP) funds projects which have the aim of widening participation in further and higher education in areas of low participation. One such NCOP funded project is White Water Writers. This is a project that gives groups of young people the opportunity to collaboratively write and publish a novel in a single week, with the intention of raising aspirations in the writers. The idea being: if I can write a book in a week, what else can I do? Previous research into White Water Writers has shown the project has a positive effect on a number of outcomes including locus of control and well-being. The present study sought to evaluate the efficacy of the project by asking the following questions: What are the main themes that the writers tackle in the novels; how do they reflect on the process and what they learnt from it; can White Water Writers raise aspirations in the writers. It did this by analysing the books for themes, and interviewing the writers and staff members. Two main themes were identified: diversity and connectivity. It was found that culturally constructed, dominant narratives clashed in the books with personal narratives. It was also found that the writers explored aspects of themselves, using fiction as a safe place to experiment with new ideas and to say things they would not ordinarily be comfortable saying as themselves. Moreover, it was found that writers’ confidence was increased by taking part and that they felt more able to achieve other goals in life, including academically.

…and you can read the full paper here.

 

We’ve been doing some experiments on White Water Writers, and we’re proud to release it’s first audio book!

You can listen here.

Wrote this because we’ve been asked a simple question in a funding application wanted to put the reasoning somewhere in case we were asked about it in future.

We’ve got this question (it’s for Children In Need)

Over the duration of your project, how many children and young people in total will benefit from your project?

• Year 1
• Year 2
• Year 3
• Total     

We’re applying for funds to set up 60 supertitle camps in schools over three years. We’ll be starting them something like:

• Year one: start 25 clubs
• Year two: start 20 clubs
• Year three: start 15 clubs.

From the pilot, a healthy club has an average attendance of say 10.  Also, I’m willing to put down the marker that 50% of clubs last more than 10 weeks (our research cut off) and 50% of those stop within a year).  I’m willing to say that clubs that last more than a year (we have to do some work on the restart after the holidays) will continue semi-permanently.

Making the simplifying assumption that all of the new camps for the year start on the same day (these are spherical clubs in a vacuum)

• Year one starts with 25 clubs and ends with 13.
• Year two starts with 33 (20+13) clubs and ends with 16 (10+6)
• Year three starts with 31 clubs and ends with  18 (6+5+7).

We’re going to assume that each club has a healthy attendance at the start of the year and that any child that turns up gets a benefit. So that’s:

• Year one 250 students benefit
• Year two 330 students benefit
• Year three 310 students benefit.

…and the benefit for this group eventually stabilises at 150 students a year, which we can probably push up quite a bit with a small bit more funding (not counting the fact that the project should become seriously self sustaining by that point).

The total is going to be tricky, because it’s not as simple as adding them up.  Hmm.  Oh, wait, no it isn’t because it’s straightforwardly the total number of camps set up multipled by the attendence, so 600.

We’ve submitted a bid (our 9th!) to the Arts Council! Details at https://github.com/eQualityTime/Public/issues/78

Quick post because I found a file in our dropbox that hadn’t been processed properly.

I checked how word count changed over time for 20 white water writers camps over a reasonable period. The camps are all (I think) early secondary school: the outliers are groups with particularly difficult circumstances.  This is what the chart looks like:

(this is all very rough btw, I crunched the numbers in excel and labeled the columns manually with an image editor…)

Raw data is in this file:  Wordcounts.

 

Note, this post would normally appear on the http://flowersforturing.equalitytime.co.uk/ website, but I’m currently, ahem, locked out of that wordpress installation…

So, this is what Alan Turing’s Status looked like on his birthday!

You did this, once again you came together and did this, and you raised £2,100.15 for Special Effect.

Accounting!

Okay, the accounting part:

• We were again approached by a private donor, who, at our advice, sent £1,000 to special effect. We remain staggered by this.
• The Paypal pool raised £1,076.41.
• Bath University sent Joe personally £43.74 (they had those payment details from a previous year)
• Flowers cost £202.63. The receipts are below.
• This leaves £1,917.52 to transfer to Special Effect, of which £1,000 was already sent by the single large donor above.
• The Pay Pal pool was withdrawn to Joe’s Personal Paypal (there doesn’t appear to be another place it can go directly from the pool) and then the relevent amount was donated to Special Effect.
  

That should be sufficient that donors can be sure that their money went to the right place (There’s some more details that are relevent for Charity Govenance, but they can be sorted out shortly)

We’ll be presenting at Communication Matters 2019.

Our abstract is:

Last year Comic Relief gave us £45,000 to make copyright-free resources for AAC.  We made what we thought would work, interviewed some AAC VIPs and then found out that we’d built the wrong thing.  So we made them again. We repeated that process a couple of times and rewrote The Open Voice Factory (our free open source AAC-software) completely from scratch.

In this talk we’ll show you the software and pagesets we made. We’ll talk about the many ways we messed up. We’ll talk out being on the wrong end of fraud, being prepared to bankrupt our own organisation, crying down the phone at regulators, and about how it’s easier to talk to Lee Ridley than it is the RCSLT. This talk is for anyone who wants to share their work, anyone who has written a pageset, and anyone who’s ever been enraged by red tape.

…and we intend to live up to it.