UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE) and Belarus Association of UNESCO Clubs came out with a joint initiative targeted at adolescents for development of good practices in building successful future. On November 16, 2017 this initiative was presented at the Ministry of Education of Belarus Republic and at the Minsk City Education Development Institute. It received warm welcome from the professional teachers’ community and was recommended for implementation to all regional Departments of Education to improve the promotion of healthy lifestyle among learners.
UNESCO supported toolkit includes a teacher’s manual and series of educational videos produced jointly with popular Youtube channel Nowchpok (ссылка https://www.youtube.com/user/nowchpok). Their prime target audience are adolescents; the videos address a broad range of critical issues such as healthy lifestyle, HIV prevention and reproductive health. This toolkit has been tested and proved its efficiency as a booster of talking about complex themes with the youngsters. This new good practice has been supported by UNAID regional cooperation programme for HIV prevention in Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Over 50 Belarus experts, school and college teachers, representatives of adolescent friendly centers and youth organizations got familiar this new initiative of UNESCO and Belarus Association of UNESCO clubs and agreed that introduction of innovative toolkits, videos among them, is helpful for building a sincere and open dialogue with adolescents on the most sensitive issues.
Tigran Yepoyan, UNESCO regional advisor on HIV and health education says:
«Together with popular Nowchpok Youtube channel we have created 10 episodes on various top concerns for adolescents: building healthy relations, HIV prevention, fighting back on cyber bulling or drug use among them. Cartoon characters are facing these serious challenges and share their experience of overcoming thus becoming a positive role-model for hundreds of their real life fellows. This total number of views of these episodes on Youtube is close to 2 million. We are happy to see that our joint work with the Belarus Association of UNESCO Clubs is gaining such support within the teachers’ community. Similar work is being done in other CIS countries. Videos and teacher guides are available in Russian, Kyrgyz and Armenian languages».
Nowchpok videos available on Youtube