The police academy students come to us in the midst of their training to become police officers and are thus in the learning mode.
The gender equity training we provide, though, is unllike anything they have heard before, and the workshop format helps elicit their prejudices and preconceived notions, so they can be discussed.
The workshop-interactive format is much more effective for changing ideas than a lecture format, because the participants offer their own ideas for how things are, and how things ought to be, which allows discussion to reach the students at a very personal level.
We are in the police academy every other Friday, and all the facilitators go so we can be in five classrooms simultaneously. Each pair of facilitators leads workshops in three classrooms of about 40 students apiece, so we are providing our Gender Equity training to about 600 students every other Friday.
