Psychodrama, Playback Theatre & Lifelong Learning in Action research

The volume presents the results of a European Grundtvig project, which involved numerous national and international associations in the pursuit of the common objectives to help unemployed people [ARPsIC (Romania), Kasvunpaikka Oy e Soumen Tarinateatteriverkkoyhdistys (Finland), OAGG/PD (Austria), Save Pazinimo Ir Realizavimo Studija (Lithuania), AIPSIM e Humus (Italy)], within the LLP, the European Grundtvig Program (EGP) focuses on problems related to adults and the ageing population, specifically on education and “alternative education streams”. The Grundtvig program provides adults with opportunities to improve their knowledge and skills, keeping them mentally agile and potentially more employable, also supporting the institutions and organizations delivering these services, in addition to teachers and staff. The main objective of this project was to teach the TG active techniques of psychodrama and playback theatre. These techniques are effective in increasing the FB’s creativity and relationship skills enhancing their coping strategies before an ever changing world in the midst of an economic crisis. Taking on the perspective of “research-action”, the SPD project also intended to monitor the potential changes that the use of this training approach produced in the TG. The TG thus served a double function: on the one hand, the TG were pupils learning to change their own behaviour thanks to the use of active techniques, and on the other hand, the TG were educators /teachers learning to use active techniques that they will later employ with those who suffer social failure. This required that participants mobilize their own feelings of failure, in order to identify with those with whom they work. This approach permitted us to investigate at the end of the training what was the perceived effectiveness of the use of the active techniques. The make-up of the TG in the pre-test, in the post-test and in the “common/shared” pre-test/post-test is described in Table 1 (see table1 )and highlights the female prevalence of the participants.