Less Fearful, More Active: The Psycho-social School Project
Breaktime at Zafer Primary School, İzmit.
Photograph by Rana Mullan © UNICEF Turkey 2001
Introduction
In addition to school teachers, Turkey has a number of school counsellors per province who are co-ordinated by the General Directorate of Special Education and Counselling Services (GDSECS), at central level, and the provincial Guidance and Research Centres (GRCs) of MONE. Consultants had to design a project that would be effective in reaching up to a quarter of a million children -- a challenge not only by dint of the number of children involved but also because of the intrinsic problem of their distribution over a large geographical area. It was decided to adopt the cascade model of training as being the fastest, most efficient course to take in implementing the project. A core group of experts would train a larger group of counsellors who would then debrief the teachers who would subsequently offer the intervention to the children.
At the beginning of September, consultants from the Center for Crisis Psychology in Bergen, Norway held the first seminar on trauma psychology and debriefing techniques in Ankara. Eighty-five academicians from the universities of Ankara, Gazi, Hacettepe and Kocaeli attended along with executives from MONE. Sessions lasted up to three hours and the meetings were also used as a medium to identify those teachers who needed extra psychological support. Consultations with local authorities in the Marmara region followed and, with the supervision and support of MONE and UNICEF, a National Expert Team (NET) was formed. The NET consisted of sixty-two counsellors, psychologists and psychiatrists, divided into project groups of eight, each group being responsible for the support of an affected province.
The fully illustrated text of Less Fearful, More Active is also available for download in print-ready pdf format. [PDF 1.25MB]
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