Peer+Education

= Peer Education =

In the Peer Education Community Service Learning group, Crefeld students will choose a topic that they are interested in educating other young people about. Some ideas include: teen dating violence, sexuality education, healthy relationships… or some other topics that the students come up with.

Once the CSL group has decided upon a topic that they feel committed to and engaged with, we will research information about that topic. We will also learn about creating interactive workshops to bring to other schools in our area. The workshops will involve theater and movement as well as information sharing.

**Goals**
 * 1) After choosing a topic, the students in this CSL will **research** about the topic, as well as about other peer education programs. Some of this research will be formal reading and some will be based on interviews of students in our group and of other students we know.
 * 2) Young people teaching other young people is often the best way to get information across, especially if it is about social stuff, or things that go on between teens. We will be **contributing to the common good** by providing interesting, dynamic workshops to other teens about a topic that we care about.
 * 3) In this CSL, students will be educators. It is more **empowering** to have ownership over the workshops than to simply perform something scripted. Students will create the workshop plans, and will facilitate activities and experiences for the workshop participants. They will gain leadership and facilitation tools, as well as lesson planning, feedback and reflection skills.
 * 4) We will solicit feedback from the students we do workshops for. This information will help us improve our workshops. Additionally, we will do a feedback process on the workshops in order to help strengthen our **reflection** skills and improve what we offer.

= What We Ended Up Doing =
 * 1) Students picked topics that effect their lives and are most important them and then researched those topics.
 * 2) In order for the students to do research they drew from their personal experiences, read on the internet, and interviewed other students.
 * 3) After researching the topics, the students then picked a way to represent/display/share what they chose (music, literature, etc.)
 * 4) When the students finished their projects, they were posted on this wiki.
 * 5) __HAVING FUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!__

Topics/Groups
**__Impulse Buying Pets__** Nick Boudreau made this presentation on why you should not impulse buy pets. He feels that this is a good way to prevent environmental issues from released pets. If you follow the guidelines and steps provided in his presentation, it will help you make a better choice when you next walk into a pet store.

Impulse Buying Pets

__**Ageism**__ What is ageism? Ageism is the oppression of people based on their age. In our group's case, we are primarily focused on the oppression of the young. Ageism can be used against everyone because it is based on one's age, no matter how old one may be. The point is not to convince people that age should not be considered in anything. However, the amount of age discrimination that currently exists in unnecessarily high. Age discrimination may become less necessary for the world to function as societies continue to change. Our group's goal is to raise awareness and get people thinking about age in new ways, not to get parents to let their kids do whatever they want.

Our group consists of Gabe P, Takashi, and Chaz.

We chose to create a podcast about discrimination against youth, how it works, and how it can be avoided. The first episode is a general overview to raise awareness about ageism.

media type="file" key="Ageism Podcast Episode 1_ Raising Awareness.mp3" width="223" height="36" or listen to the podcast on podbean: http://ageism.podbean.com/2010/12/08/episode-1-raising-awareness/

The second episode consists of our personal experiences and how society educates children on sex and violence.

http://ageism.podbean.com/2011/04/20/02-personal-stories/


 * __Relationships__ **

a. Poems Matt F wrote a bunch of poems about the many events that guys go through that affect their masculinity. This is a really big issue for guys and sometimes it can destroy guys' lives. There are many stereotypes about guys and their masculinity and these poems are about these stereotypes.

http://virtualreference.wikispaces.com/GuyCode

Allie B wrote a selection of poems about what teens go through in their lives.

http://virtualreference.wikispaces.com/Allie%27sPoems

b. Music The girls in this group made a song about teen dating abuse. (Ironically, this song is really catchy). Teen dating violence occurs all the time. It can effect future relationships for the rest of teens' lives. So...what would you do?

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu3waecbMhc

c. Videos Isaac from the upper school and Amir from the middle school went out and interviewed a bunch of random people and asked them about their thoughts of men being aggressive. They also got opinions from peers that are not in this community service. Their video will be up soon...

Allie B wrote a poem/song for the video section about the "monster within" a teenager.

@http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cU37_RvnpM0

This is a Prezi presentation about how the brain makes its decisions durning the day and how it gets tired after long periods of time. Written by: Eve Dekro Decision Making

Resources
Hope Is Vital: Theater for Community Conflict and Dialogue Theater of the Oppressed Theater Action Project Youth Theater Ensemble, Changing Lives. This is a group of youth that created a play together about teen dating violence and cyber bullying. They perform it all over their area for other teens and college students. [] A resource about youth peer education [|http://www.youthpeer.org]
 * Some additional information about [|Theater of the Oppressed in the classroom], Theater for Social Change, and using [|theater to work through difficult situations]
 * Their blog, [|changinglivesyouth.blogspot.com] has great postings about their work. Check out the February 2010 post with a video about the show.

Information about how to start a peer education program, information about decision making, sex, relationships, STIs, homosexuality: []

Garageband, Audacity, imovie were all technology resources we used to make our final products.

More formal research and data about the effectiveness of peer education []