At OpenView Education our mission is to equip students with the skills and knowledge they need to live health, happy confident and successful lives.
The approach used in our workshops for schools draws on theatre and performance techniques to teach the important topics and subjects in a memorable and positive way.
For OpenView Education, theatre and performance is the medium we use to deliver important content to the students we work with. Our focus is on providing the highest possible standard of education during the time we have with the students.
Making our content relevant and relatable for students…
Because we deliver internet safety training and workshops for students and anti bullying workshops for schools, its essential that our school workshops are relatable and relevant to our audience.
To achieve this, we base our anti bullying workshops on scenarios and situations that students are most likely to encounter. For example, students are very likely to see cyber-bullying happening to someone they know, it’s also very easy to become passively involved with cyber-bullying. We highlight this exact experience so that students have the opportunity to reflect on how they can best respond if they were in that situation.
Our internet safety workshops are tailored to contain content that is most relevant to the school and students that we are working with. Before the workshops are delivered we have a conversation with each school to discuss the specific challenges and concerns they have within their school community. This approach has helped us to create workshops that are current, relatable and relevant to schools and their students.
In all of our school workshops we want students to connect what they learn during the session with their life in and outside of school. If internet safety education is overly broad, or delivered without specific reference to platforms that young people are actually using, students could be less likely to relate the key messages to their own online experiences.
This is equally relevant for our anti bullying workshops, we represent bullying situations to the students in a way that they are most likely to see or experience. For example, we show that bullying can often happen within friendship groups and can start with small actions and gradually get worse over time.
We’ve found using theatre as a medium for delivering this message has been very effective. We’ll be visiting thousands of students throughout November for Anti-Bullying Week 2019 Change Start With Us. Find out how you can get involved here.
