Our Boys Talk workshops were guided by three key principles: conscientisation, pouvoir-savoir, and manaakitanga (you can read more about this in our Shifting the Line report).

In the workshops, we aimed to engage boys and young men in ways that respected their views and knowledge, and valued their contributions. From this starting point, the workshops provided a space for sharing new ideas and information, and inviting participants to turn a questioning gaze onto the world around them. This ‘problem-posing’ approach steers clear of telling participants what to think. Instead, it presents the social world as an object to be looked at afresh, rather than a set of norms and values that we all take for granted as ‘just the ways things are’. This process, along with the provision of some new ideas and information, we believe, can spark the kind of change that is necessary for people to move beyond the influence of limiting and potentially harmful gender norms. Of course, lasting change requires more than one workshop! We are keen to develop the model into an extended programme, and evaluate how it works over time.

You can find out more about the nuts and bolts of how we ran the workshops in our Boys Talk Workshop Guide. Please share this guide freely – we hope others will find it useful if they want to run their own similar workshops, adapting it for particular groups of boys and young men, and updating and finessing the exercises and examples to fit their own purposes.