Make it interactive: Just sitting and listening to someone speak for an extended time with or without a PowerPoint presentation can remind participants more of school. But peace education can be daring and much more engaging to have a better learning experience! Involve participants in ways that you can think of.
Break hierarchies: By creating an atmosphere of everyone being equal, you make people who usually might not feel heard or seen feel like their opinions are valid. And you create the basis for a more meaningful eye-to-eye exchange in discussions between participants.
Be creative: Surprise the participants. By doing something weird or unexpected, you might not only make participants laugh, but they might also talk and think about your activity afterwards. Make (non-offensive) jokes, use teaching methods that might be really unusual for them.
Plan the activity for your target groups: Who are the people who will attend your activity? What educational background, age and other specifics do they have? How is their relation to each other, do they know each other already well or are they really unfamiliar and insecure in the group? Which words and language do they maybe understand and which maybe not? What are the best methods to reach learning specifically with this group? These are important questions to ask yourself while creating a concept.
Peer education is great: You know what is really fun and creates an immediate connection with your target group? If the person facilitating the activity belongs to a similar group as the participants. E.g. it is more interesting if an activity is meant for teenagers, it is more interesting if the facilitator is a teenager themselves. Think of how you can include the target group itself in your facilitation, e.g. by having a co-facilitator from the target group if you yourself are not part of it.
Build your activity like a story: It is fun to attend an educational activity that has an excitement to it: You start off like an adventure, not necessarily knowing where the activity will lead you. Tension is built up and a high point, maybe a conflict, is reached, only for the tension to be released and for there to be an ending that is engaging and makes you want to save the activity as a valuable memory.
