Road safety classes for children
Doing road safety education differently
Ana-Maria Cononovici, 09.11.2021, 14:00
Casualties caused by road traffic accidents still
place Romania at the top of the table, according to a recent survey carried by
the European Union in 2019. Also, Romania is at the bottom of the table as regards
the number of persons who can give first aid. Reason enough for the Association
for Education Development and Youth involvement, EDIT, to create programs aimed
at boosting awareness-raising attitudes among youngsters, and not only among them.
And that is how several initiatives have
emerged, to that effect. To begin with, one such successful initiative is The Road
Safety Class, which reached high-schools and secondary schools, under a rather
off-the-beaten- track form.
EDIT president Liviu Zorila:
There is also an interesting
job that we do, and which is somehow tailored to suit today’s needs: we always
have a special guest on the premises in high-schools. The guest is oftentimes an
influencer, or a star enjoying a lot of respect from them and who always turns
up pro bono, in the support of what we do. As a rule, they’re people with whom
we’ve worked before, who know us, are aware of what we do, and support our
activities through their presence on such occasions. And the people we had
range from stand-up comedy artists to actors, anchor men, singers, vloggers and
suchlike. We turn up, that’s all right, yet for a child, we are somebody who comes
over and does a course for them, the very moment we begin the discussion we
start off by placing ourselves on an equal footing with the school or with the
Education Ministry. But the very moment we show up and present those modules in
a non-formal manner, with no classical teaching style but in a practice-centred
style, including human interaction and questions, and answers, we do that in a
pleasant way, and for the final part we bring a star they can only follow on
Instagram and Facebook or only watch them on the telly, and the star shows up
and, from her own experience, spins the yarn of all sorts of accidents they’d
been through, all sorts of nasty moments she had in the traffic, by doing that,
we think the impact we have is much greater.
Those ideas have been brought together in a program
run along a couple of years, under the heading Safe Romania. EDIT president Liviu Zorilă once again.
We have launched that national
road safety program, Safe Romania. And it has two directions, road safety and
first aid. If, for the road safety education direction, we’ve had a six-year-long experience, through this project, the Traffic Education Class, we so much
wanted to do something about the first aid side. We’ve been doing that in
high-schools, already, teaching this module, where we offer first-aid courses,
the Emergency Situations Inspectorate trainers are young people, people who
have a way with words, who take pedagogy courses themselves, I think, they
surely know how keep the public on the boil and present those techniques.
Also stemming from the urge to tackle training
in a friendlier manner, the first-aid campaign was also carried with the help
of stars.
Liviu Zorila:
We started off from the
idea that we need to do something about the first aid area as well, so showing
up in one of the high-schools was Serban Pavlu himself, who is an acclaimed film,
theatre and television actor, he too participated in the class and learned how
to provide first aid and that very moment an idea crossed my mind, we’d seen such
a campaign in England, carried just like that, featuring one of their popular
actors, so I thought what it would be like if, in Romania, we did something similar.
And that’s how, from one clip we made, initially, we managed to make seven clips,
and from one star alone we succeeded to have nine stars and, practically, Playing
Tig for Life, I think it is one of the very few online first-aid campaigns in
our country, it is a campaign we carried together with the Emergency
Situations Department.
The outcome of all that?
Liviu Zorilă:
The seven clips present
separate methods of providing first aid, from hands-only CPR, the cardiac
massage to the rhythm of a tune, Stayin’ Alive, after you’ve called 112, to what you should do if you get a broken arm, if you get cut, if you get
burned, all sorts of such activities. The clips are short, one and a half, maybe
two minutes long, they’ve been made with a lot of humour and a wee bit of
education, but education is in disguise, somehow, behind the humour, because we
know our beneficiaries. Romanians react to humour, first of all. So we have
some funny clips, including very some very useful pieces of information you can
learn something from, once you’ve watched them. So it takes you one and a half
minute to laugh and, in the end, to get something out of it as well.
As for the members of the teaching staff, they also
wanted to participate in such classes.
Liviu Zorilă:
As a result of the campaign, we started providing activities
physically. That is, sometime ago we went to a couple of high-schools in
Bucharest to provide first-aid courses to the teaching staff, in the teachers’ common
room. And that was crucial, and teachers told us they needed something like
that, as many times they had to cope with various such cases at school, when
pupils got a burn, or a broken leg or arm, they got cut and the teachers didn’t
know what to do in such a case. And, as we ourselves were saying in this
campaign of ours, Playing Tig for Life, it is of utmost importance to be able
to intervene.
In the hopes we’ve created a much safer
environment in all respects, to all those who want to be extremely well
informed, we recommend the clips presented as part of the Playing Tig for Life
campaign.
(Translation By Eugen Nasta)
