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The drought is over.....

It’s been quite a while since I wrote up My Diary. I have never been busier than I have over these past two months, mostly with writing projects, so finding a moment to update here has been in the “too hard basket”. However, things are settling down now and I can get back to recording what’s going on more regularly.

There have been two major projects taking my attention. The first is a new initiative that is a world first - "The Essential Educator”. This is a teaching kit for parent educators that provides everything they need for facilitating effective parent education programs. It is in production at the moment and will be available in May. There are details of this comprehensive teaching kits on the website, so click on the link to find out more. As the project gathers pace, we’ll add more specific information about the component parts.

The other project has been the first Birth International Conference for Childbirth Education to be held in Sydney. This event was last weekend at Sydney University and we had a wonderful time, with 160 people participating in Plenary sessions and workshops on a variety of topics. The program has two international guest presenters - Mary Nolan from the UK and Sherokee Ilse from the US and both were sensational. I am delighted that they will both be appearing on our similar program in the UK in July - those who attend are in for a real treat.

We had many other presenters at the Conference, most of whom have been involved in our Graduate Diploma in Childbirth Education. They offered a host of practical teaching tips and activities that the participants can incorporate into their own classes and all the workshops were lively affairs.

Some of the Plenary papers will be available on our website in the next few days and I will let you know when you can access them. The workshops, being based on experiential learning, don’t lend themselves to written outlines that make much sense - you have to be there to understand what they are all about.

A number of the speakers on the Sydney program will be part of the presentation team at the preparing for Birth and Parenthood Conference at Reading University in July. The “Core of Life” team have a wonderful workshop on working with pregnant teens that was highly praised and Julie Clarke will be facilitating several workshops on small groups work.

Bronny Handfield will be showing her fabulous hour long DVD on the media’s interpretation of birth. These clips, taken from many well known television shows explain how women form their views about childbirth (often making it very hard for educators to debunk various myths). Some of it was quite shocking (remember that terrible episode of “ER”?) and a lot of it was very funny - it is a marvellous mix that was entertaining and also illuminating about where community attitudes are formed. I am sure it will be resonate with British audiences as well.

Full details of the UK Conference are now on the web site and I recommend early registration to make sure you get your workshop choices. We already have a long list of people waiting for the details to be posted so they can register, so as they say, “first in, first served”.

Posted by andrea at March 08, 2006 10:20 AM