manual: women workers' rights and gender equality - International ...

• Interviewing
• Negotiating
• Taking part in a meeting.
Compared with other training methods, role plays can offer particular benefits. Role plays:
• Offer a very active training method and can be an eye-opener, especially for those, who play
• Develop the skills of workshop participants (e.g. preparing and presenting an argument)
• Help build the confidence of participants
• Can be useful as situations can be acted out to identify how (not) to deal with particular issues
• Can provide insights into patterns of behaviour, and how people relate to each other
To increase the likelihood of role plays being used successfully, you should give consideration to
the following points:
• Workshop participants should know what the aims of the role play are
• You can pre select players or ask for volunteers. People should not be pressurized to play
• They need to understand clearly what they are being asked to do, and their own particular role
• Individual roles should be kept simple and brief, emphasizing the main issues under
consideration. Players can improvise as they see fit
• The role play should build upon the experience of participants, i.e. it is usually easier for
women to play women and for men to take the role of men. However, there will be times when
participants are deliberately given a role, or placed in a situation, which is new to them. It can
be very useful for both sexes to play the role of the opposite sex
• Adequate time must be allowed for participants to prepare their roles
• Usually some participants will be given the role of observers, to witness and report back on the
role play as a whole
• Stop the role play when the actors start repeating themselves and no new points are coming up
Case studies or stories
Case studies involve a story, a detailed description of an event, a situation, or a problem and ways
to deal with it. Part of their value lies in the fact that the stories look at situations of ‘others’ without
participants feeling they have to take a personal stance. This means that sensitive issues can be
introduced into a training while nobody feels they have a position to immediately defend or attack.
It should be kept in mind that the case studies must be relevant to the subject matter and aims of
the course in which they are being used. Case studies can be based upon real events or life
situations. Do not make long and detailed case studies. If you wish the workshop participants to
look at an issue in some depth, then use the problems and experience of the participants
themselves.
Evaluation
Feedback should be obtained from participants on the relevance and usefulness of each
awareness raising session or training workshop. This is usually done through an evaluation with a
view to:
• identify whether the workshop is meeting the aims
• consider the suitability of the workshop content and structure
• judge the relevance and usefulness of materials used during the workshop
• assess the adequacy of the organizational and administrative arrangements.
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