Thinking Differently Action Pack
22 May 2018
“This has been fun – it wasn’t really drama like I expected.” (Feedback from a young person)
“I don’t normally like role play, it’s not my thing. I thought this would be awkward and make me feel silly, but I actually really enjoyed it and think my young people will too.” (Feedback from a youth worker)
Drama is such an important and powerful resource for looking at risk-taking behaviours with young people. We can explore different characters and situations, think about ways to stay safe, and reflect on the consequences of our actions, all the while remaining anonymous, and learning from each other and our various experience levels. Work created can then be presented back to audiences, or discussed with other young people in a peer education setting.
After Fast Forward to Thinking Differently last year (2016-2017), we’ve been back out this year with FFTD2; delivering more training on how to use drama in this way.
Working with youth workers, teachers, volunteers and young people themselves, we’ve seen just how beneficial this type of work can be.
Between January and March, we travelled all across Scotland, delivering training sessions and gathering feedback about the materials presented. Together with a team of young volunteers, we then pulled all the resources together into an action pack: a resource you can use with your young people.
This pack can be used as part of a one-off session, as the basis of a series or as drop in/out activities. It has been designed around alcohol, but we believe it’s easily adaptable for other types of risk taking behaviours as well.
It’s full of games: games to get your group talking, games to get them laughing and games to get them working together. Build your group, build their trust in each other. This pack should serve as a resource to start a conversation. If we give young people the space to talk and to discuss and share their ideas there’s no end to the power of their work.
This pack isn’t about education – everything you do will come from the ideas the young people bring to your sessions. That means they have total ownership of their ideas and it’s true peer education as they seek to share their knowledge with each other through creation and storytelling and perhaps even with performances.
So please, use this pack. Let your young people have fun with it and help them make healthier choices.