ATTSVE Year 5 Gender Training – January 23 – 27, 2019
In the last days of January 2019, once again, Adama city in Ethiopia was the host for a gender training session organized by the ATTSVE project. The participants were instructors of four Agriculture Technical Vocational Education and Training (ATVET) colleges from Nedjo, Maichew, Wolaita Soddo, and Woreta. Fifteen people, including ATVETs Gender Focal Persons and Language Club Coordinators, came together in a Four-and-Half-day workshop to share experience, put in practice their campus-based gender promoting activities, and give/receive feedback to/from their colleagues. Two professors from McGill University’s Faculty of Education (Prof. Claudia Mitchell & Dr. Lisa Starr), ATTSVE project’s coordinator in Canada (Sadaf Farookhi), ATTSVE project’s Gender Officer (Eleni Negash), and a PhD Candidate from McGill Faculty of Education (Hani Sadati) facilitated the sessions throughout the workshop.
On day one and half of the day two, Hani Sadati, with Kirubel Girma, of Dedicated 5 (D5) game design team, administered a Participatory Game Design workshop with a focus on addressing campus-based sexual and gender-based violence. In this workshop, the ATVET instructors learned about concepts of game-based learning, saw samples of serious games, became familiar with main elements/steps of game-creating process, made a sample of a board game, developed scenarios for SGBV issues and solutions, and contributed to designing the scenarios of a serious game, which aims to combat SGBV in ATVET colleges.
In the second half of day two, Dr. Lisa Starr highlighted the role of Gender and Language clubs in ATTSVE project, their previous and current status, and articulated the plans for the future. She also described the schedule and activities for the rest of the workshop sessions.
Regarding the importance of sustainability in building instructors’ capacities, specifically at the time that the ATTSVE project is on its last year, this training session mostly was dedicated to developing instructors’ skills and proficiency in implementing and running campus-based activities to promote gender equity in ATVET colleges. In so doing, members of each ATVET selected a couple of working topics and specific types of activities to design and run workshops, called “Gender and Language in Practice”. They were supposed to plan the A to Z of an half-day-long workshop, including even the icebreakers and energizer activities.
Photovoice, Role Play, and Drawing were samples of the activities that participants selected to work. These workshops were followed by feedback sessions, where instructors from other ATVETs as well as facilitators commented on the given designed workshop. This experience provided an opportunity for ATVET instructors to practice what they had learned during the previous sessions of training in ATTSVE project.
On Saturday, January 26, which was the 4th day of the training sessions, Participatory Visual Methods Guide & Gender-Based
Violence Toolkit was launched and hard copies of it were distributed among the participants.
The last day of the training sessions (Sunday, January 27) was devoted to Conference Planning by Dr. Lisa Starr and Dr. Claudia Mitchell and Closing Presentation by Eleni Negash. In the conference planning session, ATVET instructors discussed and planned for The Second National ATVET conference, which was held in Adama from Monday, January 28 to Wednesday, January 30.
