HIV/AIDS Prevention Educational Programs for Pre-teens and Teenagers

The socio-economic impacts of HIV/AIDS scourge on communities have been enormous, necessitating the need for governments and other stakeholders such as Non-Governmental organizations to come up with ways that can help mitigate against the virus spreading rate. This is why it is important to come up with prevention educational programs targeting preteens and teenagers.

For this program to be effective in attaining its objective of reducing new infections of HIV/AIDS, it is important to choose the best learning strategy that preteens and teenagers can be able to resonate with and understand the message that is being passed across (Kinsman et al., 2001). The best strategy I would use in this program is the demonstrative teaching strategy. This teaching strategy will be important because it requires the use of visual aids such as posters, flip charts, power point, and actual tools to help students learn and understand what they are being taught. 

The main advantage of this teaching method is that I will be able to use visual representations such as charts, graphs, and pie chart to help the students know the numbers of people infected with HIV/AIDS in the society and this visual representation of the figures can help them get the magnitude of the scourge. I can also use this method to teach the older teenagers of eighteen and nineteen years on safe sex, and the different ways they can practice safe sex such as using a condom. 

This method has many advantages. In their research, Dick, Ferguson, & Ross (2006) state that in regions where preventive HIV/AIDS learning programs that relies on demonstrative teaching strategy have shown a significant reduction in new infections. The main drawback of this teaching method is that it requires the teachers to provide teenagers with HIV prevention tools such as condoms (Kinsman et al., 2001). These condoms can inadvertently encourage teens to start engaging in sexual behaviors and this can jeopardize the main objectives of the project, which was to reduce the rates of new infections.

References

Kinsman, J., Nakiyingi, J., Kamali, A., Carpenter, L., Quigley, M., Pool, R., & Whitworth, J. (2001). Evaluation of a comprehensive school-based AIDS education programme in rural Masaka, Uganda. Health Education Research, 16(1), 85. 

Dick, B., Ferguson, J., & Ross, D. A. (2006). Preventing HIV/AIDS in young people. A systematic review of the evidence from developing countries. Introduction and rationale. World Health Organization Technical Report Series, 938, 1-13.