Out with NW again when an intriguing thing happened while filming their secret new dance moves. A group of local boys had seen us and approached us to find out what was going on. We explained the project and even mentioned the Letters to Our Neighbours which were right next to us and found out that none of them had read the letters. We also discovered who may have been taking down some of the letters on the drive. Some of the lads wondered what was the point of the letters.
So we thought we would go and read a letter and see what the point was. The amazing thing was that we asked one of the boys to read out a small section of the letter to give everyone an idea of what the letter contained. A young lad stepped forward and slowly and beautifully read out the whole letter. We had a discussion about why that neighbor had written the letters, the motivation etc. On this day this group of boys responded to the letter and it was a really lovely experience to be part of that.
The group must have stayed with us for over 40 mins and they were in no rush to move on – I think they were genuinely interested and engaged.
I mentioned this to a friend and showed the image above and he commented that ‘this could be social pedagogy’ .