DIFFERENT NOTIONS OF GOOD PEER EDUCATION PRACTICE

Rick Flowers

Brief presentation to a seminar convened by the AIDS Council of NSW on 9th August, 2001

I am going to present two specific arguments. The first is that I think there should be more studies that compare peer education to other community health education strategies. The second argument is that I think there is a narrow focus in evaluation mostly on the behavioural impact of peer education initiatives and not enough attention paid to the detail of practice. I will use these specific arguments to make a more general point to understand good practice in peer education it is helpful to highlight different forms and traditions rather than common ones.

FIRST ARGUMENT

Is it possible that a peer education program achieves good measurable outcomes and outcomes that are considered worthwhile ..eg. has reduced risk-taking behaviours yet another community health education strategy may have achieved even better outcomes? Yes, it is. It is one thing to conduct an evaluation where the behaviour and learning of one group of people who participated in a peer education activity is compared to a group of people who did not participate and to show that the peer education intervention led to behaviour change. It is another thing to know if a series of lectures, or a community theatre project, or quilt making project, or an outdoor education activity, may have been equally effective interventions.

Why do organisations and educators choose peer education vs other strategies? I suspect that if one collected answers from a wide range of organisations and people it would be possible to identify two broad and different sets of reasons. There will be those who select peer education because they see it the most effective way to gain access, and convey messages, to a target group; and those who select peer education because they see it as a good way to facilitate a participatory process of learning. I will call these two approaches - behaviourist and participatory.

I am interested in research and evaluation that would compare peer education to other strategies because I think it would encourage sharper and more explicit thinking about the values and assumptions that underpin competing approaches to peer education. Imagine if you were asked to justify why you didn't send more money on a theatre group, or a marketing company to produce lots of posters and brochures? It'd be good if you could be clear about defining your version of peer education and what sort of learning and change you value.

Let's focus on the concept and role of the peer to highlight the difference between the behaviourist and participatory notions of peer education.

Who is a peer? Is a peer someone from the same target group who is chosen to be a facilitator? Is a peer a collaborator,? Is a peer a fellow learner? Should peers be included in the planning of the learning or simply in the delivery?

Are the peers chosen because they can better sell messages? Peer education that draws on behavioural theories asserts that people make changes not because of scientific facts and figures but because of the subjective judgement of close, trusted peers who have adopted changes and who act as persuasive role models for change. Here it would be quite possible to have a highly structured, prescribed curriculum that is pre-planned by experts and the peer educators are simply engaged to 'sell' the message devised by the experts.

So, if you're evaluating behaviourist peer education you might usefully compare it to a traditional social marketing campaign. The notion of good practice in behaviourist peer education is shaped by a concern about how effectively messages are being communicated. A peer educator is judged : Are they effective and credible communicators who have inside knowledge of the intended audience and use appropriate language and terminology as well as non-verbal gestures to allow their peers to feel comfortable when talking about issues? If I was employing a campaign co-ordinator in a marketing and advertising company I'd be looking for the same qualities. Do they know their intended audience, can they get inside their head.

I'd suggest it ain't enough to say that a peer education program achieved an increase in knowledge, awareness and behaviour change. I'd also ask, was it necessarily more effective than a traditional social marketing campaign.

A behaviourist peer education approach is a vertical intervention strategy. A participatory peer education approach is a horizontal strategy.

The notion of good practice in a participatory peer education approach is concerned less with the ability to communicate messages but more with the ability to facilitate a process of collaborative learning. By collaborative learning I am not referring simply to people working in a group together, I am talking about a process where people generate knowledge as much from their own experiences and analysis as with the help of external resources. There is a belief that the best learning is not that which is pre-packaged but that which is experiential etc.

Imagine a participatory peer education initiative where the participants are initially resistant, fatalistic, they feel powerless to influence change. A skilled peer facilitator works with them and negotiates some activities where they discuss and explore issues. Over time they develop their own analysis of the issues, agree on some resolutions for action and further learning. Imagine that an evaluation revealed that they had indeed gained much useful knowledge and some positive behaviour changes were made. I'd suggest that this sort of evaluation is not enough. I would want to know, what might have been achieved with an alternative education strategy. Given that the aim was the empower people who initially may have felt powerless, that the aim was to support people to learn by planning and doing together, the aim was to support people to develop their own local knowledge. I'd be asking would a community arts project have achieved more.

SECOND ARGUMENT

All this leads to my second argument. We need less research and evaluation about the outcomes of peer education and more research about the nitty gritty of practice. I am struck by the literature about peer education that is so dry and descriptive. Where are the stories and accounts of learning as perceived by the participants? What do we know about the relationship between the facilitators and participants? Were the facilitators perceived as authoritarian, nurturing, smothering, indecisive, vague etc etc? Were the participants resistant, compliant, aggravating, self-motivated, etc etc?

It is this sort of detail that will tell us more about the nature of good practice than broad impact statements. It is this sort of detail that will provide insights about different notions of good practice.

I was recently reading a study of art teachers in schools. It is worrying that many kids continue to have negative learning experiences with their art teachers. Why? This study looked at the way teachers talked to the young people, the way they explained things, demonstrated things. In other words the detail of the way they interacted with the kids. The study revealed that many teachers saw themselves as facilitators rather than as instructors but the way they practiced was, in fact, quite didactic.

I wonder how many peer educators see themselves as facilitators but are perceived by the participants more as instructors. If we want to know we've got to find out what actually happens.

RICK FLOWERS is currently Director of the Centre for Popular Education at the University of Technology, Sydney and Program Director of Masters degrees in the Faculty of Education. UTS is internationally renowned for the strength and the considerable size of its research and teaching programs in community education. The Centre for Popular Education fosters and undertakes research in environmental education and advocacy, cultural action, health education and community development, the pedagogy and politics of working with young people, and community leadership.

Centre for Popular Education
University of Technology, Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway 2007
www.cpe.uts.edu.au
Tel: 02-9514 3843