Jos:

So these are the ways in which I think media training contributes to holistic sex education.

So first of all, it offers this exciting training an opportunity to young people that they might not get otherwise, such as being given radio tech training for example. That’s not something that you learn in high school. Sometimes, people are privileged enough to have access to cameras or editing software, etc., but not everyone does, and so it’s exciting also to be a part of making video as well, and it’s a learning experience.

So first of all, I think media training just gives them those basic skills which are just great life skills to have. And life skills is, in general, what we were trying to push with the peer educators. We kept saying that some of these situations might never come up for you, or like you might have trouble imagining right now why active listening and communication might be important to you in your role, but think of it as life skill building, and these are…all of these workshops and all this training are contributing to you being a more informed person and just gaining more skills that you can apply to many areas of your life.

So I think media training definitely falls into that, but secondly, I think it lends accessability to sexual education so if you can have a video that you make, and if we can put it up on Youtube and put it on our website or something and you can show it to all your friends, you can screen it your classroom or at your school or where have you, and wherever, then that’s really exciting, and that makes that information or whatever you laid out in your video accessible to whoever sees it.

Radio as well. Anything you say on the radio, it gets broadcast out. Our peer educators who were on the radio, it was broadcast, their show was broadcast, I think, at least two or three times, and might be broadcast again in the future, and then any kind of web-based media training as well. So be it web design or how to create a blog or any kind of web space makes information especially accessible to peers I think. So one thing that we hope to get going is to have peers educators creating a web space of some sort that they can maintain, and contribute to, and really make their own, and tell all of their friends about, and that way they’re preaching the good word.

Miriam:

Why media? Like why not…? Why media? Why not something like watercolors or theater? Like what is the importance of this being like sort of?

Jos:

Media is cool. So when we can say that there’s the media component to this, it makes it more attractive I think to young people. It makes it more interesting to them. They want to learn about how to make a video or how to edit a video what have you or a lot of them do. So I think it makes us more appealing. I think it makes it generally more youth friendly too. Drama, we experimented with a bit in our workshops and some role playing activities and things like that. Based on our evaluations and everything, it wasn’t a great success. So we’re not going to focus on that too much. Media, basically, I think media is something that a lot of youth are interested in and can relate to.