Dear facilitator, Welcome back to Drillosophy: a new educational video series combining contemporary music culture with social science to help young people think more critically about their world. It aims to be fun, authentic and — most importantly — transformative for its audience. Drillosophy has been borne-out of two things. First is an urgent recognition that COVID-19 and the lockdown of Spring/Summer 2020 has placed a growing strain on educators’ ability to teach, connect with and care for teenagers stuck at home. This is especially true for professionals working with young people from low-income or cramped households, those who do not have access to a laptop, and those who are already disillusioned with, or feel excluded from, school life. Second is our broader, long-term motivation to leverage cutting-edge digital technology, a deep-rooted understanding of youth culture and applied social science to affect change in the British education system. Drillosophy resources are neither exhaustive or the finished product. But we hope they will empower you to have a meaningful, co-investigative dialogue with young people — during this difficult time, and beyond. We are aware that, at present, episodes, resources and their references are male-dominated. We are actively trying to catch and hold the attention of the hardest-to-reach boys and young men for legitimate reasons (e.g. their disproportionate rates of exclusion from school and incarceration). But we are working on making our work more gender-inclusive. Please watch this space. Contact us on
[email protected] if you have any questions, feedback or means of supporting us.