Peer Education - a manual for practitioners

"Peer Education - a manual for practitioners" is addressed primarily to professionals who work with young people in and out of school and would like to use the peer-education approach in their daily work. Professionals in these fields of work are confronted more and more frequently with sex-education questions in an increasingly multicultural context. This innovative approach in the field of sex education takes account of young people from different cultures and their need for information.

Peer education is not yet a very widely used approach in Germany. In Great Britain and the USA it has gained general acceptance, and it is now increasing in importance in continental Europe. As long ago as 1993the BZgA in collaboration with the WHO/Euro held a conference on peer- involvement approaches, on that occasion in connexion with HIV prevention. This conference provided the impetus for "peer education. an approach by young people for young people on love, sex and contraception", a BZgA model project which ran for several years, and was carried out in collaboration with the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales Berlin (Berlin City Health and Welfare Dept.).
With respect to the European dimension, we still have no binding quality standards; practical guides to the implementation of peer-education projects are almost impossible to find in the specialist literature. Knowledge and experience of effective methods remain as a rule the preserve of those who carry out the programmes. The present manual closes this gap. It describes a concept which has proved its worth in practice; it is being placed at practitioners´ disposal in order to provide them with the necessary material to set the appropriate pedagogical processes in motion.

The manual represents a compilation of the results of six years´ experience with the peer- education approach. Alongside the theoretical background to peer education and the results of the evaluation, the manual contains detailed presentations of four different forms of training for different target groups.

• Intensive and short training courses for implementation in schools and out-of school contexts;
• training for multicultural youth groups for implementation in schools and out of-school contexts;
• training of adult multipliers for the training of the peer educators

At the heart of the manual is a detailed presentation of more than 70 methods, which can be used in various combinations depending on the training variant in question. There is also an extensive literature list and a list of addresses, including details of various peer-education projects in Germany.

This practically-oriented manual is designed to promote networking, communication, a professional exchange of views and flow of information on the subject of peer education Europe-wide. In order to overcome language barriers, this publication is appearing not only in German simultaneously in English too.