3. New and Energetic Tactics

“The program utilizes new and energetic tactics to meets its goals and is consistently looking for strategies to improve its education.”

Take it one step further. One of the most effective ways to engage audiences in your education session is by making them interactive. Whether that means having a discussion or doing activities, the audience members will inevitably remember more and enjoy it more, if your session values their presence.

Now, your activities don’t have to be incredibly creative or have large props. In fact, you may not even have to develop new activities. What you can do, is take your activities further than you have before. For example, there is a simple introduction activity where you ask the group to state their name and a corresponding adjective. “Silly Sarah,” could be one. This is a pretty basic exercise, right? Well, what if you had the group write down two names - one had a positive adjective and one had a negative adjective. Everyone shares their positive and then everyone shares their negative. “Stunning Sarah!” and “Stupid Sarah” Then you begin a conversation about insults in relationships, and how name calling can affect a person. You can ask the group how it felt to read aloud their two different names, and how it might feel if name calling was part of a relationship. From here you could go into a conversation about emotional/verbal abuse in comparison with physical abuse. A simple, easy activity that was just taken one step further.

Scope the trends. Currently there is a lot of writing and talk about image work, Theater of the Oppressed, and forum theater. Image work can be enacted by one person or a group, and involves using the participants as “statues” to analyze power and control. Theater of the Oppressed was developed by Augusto Boal and employs the audience to analyze situations through first a critique of body language in different situations and then a critique of the motivation and power behind the players. Forum theater occurs when a group of actors/presenters perform a scenario and then allow the audience to either step into the scene to change the outcome or question the characters after the scenario ends.

Now, these techniques may be above and beyond where you want to go, but they are incredibly effective at mobilizing audiences and bringing in community acclaim. If you are interested in them, I highly encourage you to begin reading into how to implement them in your program. I have coordinated two different programs which utilized Theater of the Oppressed and forum theater and they were fantastic both for the audiences and the educators involved.