Peer education on drug prevention. School as a drugfree zone.

Ruslan Gagua

Foto: Tatyana Honzhurova

     During three days two trainers and two volunteers from Club Rovesnik, St. Petersburg, trained  Pinsk social pedagogues, psychologists, other specialists working with teen ages at the secondary schools in Pinsk.

     The aim of the training was to prepare Pinsk specialists to work with peer education on drug prevention program. The idea of the mentioned program is to work with teenagers, which actively stand against drugs, and help them to start organizing drugfree activities with their peers.

     The program looks like a pyramid – the trainers just give the starting push to organize the drug prevention activities to involve more and more people in them.  It will be good to mention here the Chinese proverb “Giving a fish to a hungry man you are giving him food only once, but teaching him fishing you are providing him with food for all his life”.

     More than thirty people participated in the training. The participants were willing to get new methods of teaching, improve their practical skills and get new knowledge. It was evident they enjoyed communicating with trainers and each other.  

     The way mass media highlight the problem of drugs was criticised. The thing is that sometimes information about drugs in mass media assist in advertising drugs, provoke youngsters’ curiosity. For example from newspapers one can learn not only about the kinds of existing drugs, but about the way to make some of them in home conditions, the ways to consume them, the dosage and the places where they can be bought. In TV programs drug dealers are shown as wealthy people having reached footing in society. Also such so-called “club drugs” as ecstasy are being popularised.

     As a result, the age of teenagers involved in drugs is decreased. More and more females start consuming drugs.  Other factors also make drug prevention more complicated.

     At the beginning of the seminar the participants were sharing their expectations and fears. Some of them said they were afraid they would not be able to use the received knowledge in practice.

     Trainers Sergey Yatsyshin and Marina Orlova used new teaching technologies. They combined mini lectures, highlighting different sides of the problem, with psychological games, discussions, opinion sharing. Marina and Sergey showed video, demonstrating the methods of work with teenagers in different conditions, with different organizations – both state and non-governmental ones, in the city and in the countryside camps. The complex approach to drug prevention was said to be the best one.  

     Social pedagogues and psychologists turned into teenagers during the time of the seminar. That way they had a better possibility to check the effectivity of the introduced methods.  Everybody liked it. For example Alla Syrysko, the psychologist of secondary school#15 said: “It’s impossible to teach others effectively if you haven’t tried the methods on yourself”.

     During the seminar the participants experienced quite different feelings. They received a lot of information – much more time than three days would be necessary to think everything over. Olga Agababyan, the teacher of gymnasia #3 said that it would take time to analyse everything she saw and heard.

     There were also some negative sides at the seminar. To the opinion of Tatyana Korogvich, the psychologist of gymnasia #1, the seminar’s program was lacking dynamics, some parts of the training were long and boring. Some participants of the seminar said they did not understand quite well the methods of teaching used at the peer education club “Rovesnik” and added that they need more education on this.

     The majority of social pedagogues and psychologists, who were present at the seminar, considered it to be very effective and useful. Irina Vorobyova, the psychologist, said: “I was happy to participate in this seminar. It was so good I learnt so much about peer education on drug prevention in St. Petersburg. I need this knowledge and I will use them in practice in the nearest future. Now I am thinking about playing role games with parents”.

      The seminar, organized by trainers and volunteers of St. Petersburg club “Rovesnik” is one of the series of activities, organized by NGO Kalegium from Pinsk and the Swedish National Union RNS (For the Drugree Society) in the frame of their joint project on drug prevention. You can always find current information about this project here.