What is peer education?
People are usually willing to listen to the opinions and suggestions of their peers and friends who are similar to their age, knowledge background and hobbies. This is especially true for teenagers. Especially on some sensitive issues, teenagers are often able to listen to or adopt the opinions and suggestions of their peers. Peer education is a way to educate teenagers by using their conformity tendency. Peer education usually begins with targeted training for influential and appealing teenagers (peer educators) so that they can master certain knowledge and skills, and then they will spread their knowledge and skills to the surrounding teenagers, even more widely, in order to achieve the purpose of education.
English name Peer Education. In English terminology, "peer" means "people with the same identity; People belonging to the same social group are equal, especially in terms of age, rank or social status. " While "education" is related to "development" and "training", or to "persuasion" of a given person or thing, or to "knowledge" brought by education (Weber dictionary, 1985).
Peer education originated in Australia and is popular in western countries. After nearly ten years of development, it has become a widely used training method in the field of social development. It can be used not only in the fields of reproductive health and AIDS prevention, but also in the fields of drug control, smoking cessation, anti-alcoholism, gender equality, female capacity building, anti-domestic violence and so on. The training mainly adopts participatory interactive methods such as group discussion, games and role-playing. Participants are mainly peers and friends with similar age, knowledge background and hobbies. In the training of peer education, the emphasis is on attitude discussion and skill training, rather than knowledge transfer. The role of the host is not a teacher, but a guide to the topic discussion, inspiring everyone to make suggestions on topics of common concern. The host focuses on the transmission of correct knowledge and core information, rather than the explanation of knowledge.
Types of peer education
Formal peer education
Each stage of peer education and training is organized according to the plan around specific issues, usually in groups with fixed activities and goals. In a group, peer educators appear as educators.
Informal peer education
This means that peer education is carried out among friends, social groups and networks. Peer educators, as peers, tell their friends what they have learned in the training. These topics are not organized or planned in advance, and can start with a specific problem. The discussion can be held at any suitable time and place, such as lunch time, friends gathering, dormitory and home.
Aids peer education
AIDS peer education is a project promoted by China Red Cross Society to prevent AIDS. It selects suitable candidates among young people and makes them popularize AIDS prevention knowledge. Peer education is a popular way of sex education in some developed countries. By telling their own experiences and understanding, peers can easily arouse their spiritual resonance. Educators believe that it is of practical significance to prevent AIDS and some sexually transmitted diseases from entering the university classroom through this kind of education.
Peer education can be regarded as a form of group cooperative learning. It is a way to educate teenagers by using the positive factors of peer pressure. It emphasizes the early training of those influential and appealing teenagers, so that they can master certain knowledge and skills, and then spread knowledge and skills to the surrounding teenagers through them in various ways. It is widely used in AIDS education at present. For example, the timing of sex education for students for the first time is in the theme teaching of AIDS transmission routes. Senior primary school students are very lacking in sexual knowledge, so it is more appropriate to explain students' incomprehension in straightforward written language. Therefore, it is a more appropriate way to conduct sex education in the form of peer education.
The implementation of peer education mainly includes the following steps. Firstly, the class is randomly divided into several groups, and each group is headed by the above-mentioned peer educators. In the group, each group is given a keynote speech to introduce relevant knowledge. Group discussion, peer educators answer and clarify the sexual knowledge that students in the group don't understand; Secondly, group reports are shared among groups; Finally, the teacher summed it up.
There may be some problems in the implementation of peer education. For example, although some peer educators can boldly express some opinions, they have little influence on other students, mainly as follows: other students in the group did not ask meaningful questions to answer, resulting in long silence; Peer educators didn't really understand their own tasks, didn't start with their main concerns, and just recited some correct but impractical concepts mechanically. In addition, in the process of implementation, it is found that these peer educators can not get the respect, trust and support of other students, mainly because these peer educators are older, have average grades and perform poorly in daily study and life. This suggests that we should consider comprehensively when choosing peer educators, not just the maturity or expressive ability of students. The best way is to let teenagers choose their own peer educators.
Peer education is more suitable for teaching sensitive topics, such as knowledge about sexual transmission in AIDS health education. Through peer education, the effect is better. However, this method needs a lot of students, so different teaching effects brought by different objects, different backgrounds and different regions should be considered in teaching. In order to make the effect of peer education better, we can strengthen the training of students so that they can constantly adapt to and master the methods of peer education.
Xinhuanet Beijing 65438+1October 1 1 (Chen Si Wuqiutan) 19-year-old volunteer and student of the Central University for Nationalities Liu explained the use of condoms while using a banana as a prop. Thirty male and female college students sat around him, staring at his every move, and some students asked questions from time to time.
These college students aged 18 to 22 are talking about love and sex in a relaxed atmosphere.
Topic, understand the knowledge of contraception and AIDS prevention. The students also showed how to deal with sexual harassment and how to refuse their lovers' sexual demands through situational performances.
Such "peer education" is guiding more and more teenagers in China to understand sexual knowledge. Peer education, popular in Britain, America and other countries, is to cultivate influential individuals purposefully and share information, thoughts or behavioral skills with people of the same age, knowledge background and hobbies in order to achieve a certain educational purpose. This kind of education is widely used in social fields such as reproductive health, AIDS publicity and education, drug abuse, suicide, alcoholism, gender discrimination and women's issues.
Since September 2003, the China representative office of Mary Stapp, a non-profit public welfare organization, has cooperated with the Peking University Youth Volunteers Association to carry out peer education on adolescent sexual health in eight universities including the National People's Congress, Peking University and Tsinghua, providing services and information on sexual and reproductive health, and training about 200 student peer educators.
Cui Qi, the project officer of Mary Stephen's China Representative Office, said that "peer education" is characterized by respect, equality, lively form and strong participation. Its core is communication, the purpose is not to teach others anything, but to come up with solutions to problems or change attitudes after mutual discussion. Peer education can take the form of group game discussion or one-on-one chat.
"It is not a lecture, nor an academic discussion, but a game." She said, "Flexible and relaxed games and free and in-depth discussions can enable students to face various challenges from love, sex, life and growth, make safe and responsible decisions on sexual and reproductive health, and spread the information they have learned to other peers in the future."
Zhu Peng, a student of Peking University Foreign Studies University who participated in peer education for the first time, said: "The atmosphere of peer education is very relaxed, and the discussion is not as difficult as before. And I also want to be the host of peer education and communicate with more students. "
Influenced by traditional culture, sex education once made China people "talk about sex". Even today, for most people in China, discussing sex openly is still an embarrassing thing. However, 20 years ago, dating on campus was still "eye-catching" and even forbidden. Two years ago, China University lifted the restrictions on the age and marriage of freshmen. At the beginning of this year, Shandong University took the lead in allowing students to get married and have children.
Liu, chief representative of Maritesp China Representative Office, said that there are currently 200 million teenagers in China. In recent years, the sexual maturity of Chinese teenagers has been advanced, but the related knowledge is still lacking. Teenagers are the most sexually active and vulnerable to AIDS.
She said: "Peer education is a relatively easy way to communicate and be accepted. Although many institutions are doing it, peer education has just started in China. "
19-year-old college students once said: "Our previous sex education was simply blank. Although there are reproductive and physiological courses in high school, the teacher only asks us to read books by ourselves, or skip them altogether. There is no sex education course in universities, so now some college students have a' natural' avoidance of sex-related topics. "
"But peer education allows us to talk about sex openly and healthily among our peers and gain scientific physiological knowledge, rather than the wrong sexual knowledge we get from the internet or novels."
I have changed from an educated person to a peer educator. She communicated her learned sexual knowledge and attitude towards sex with her peers through group discussion or chat.
Peer education and training organized by Peking University Youth Volunteers Association and Maritpu Representative Office in China is actually the training of "peer educators", that is, selecting suitable volunteers from the participants as the host. In the future, the organizer will educate the freshmen from three aspects: adolescent health, mental health and personality improvement. (End)