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CHAPTER THREE: BRINGING TOGETHER THE ÁRTISTIC AND THE EDUCATIONAL PRAXIS
of Bond’s theory can be identified in the lesson. I will summarise the lesson
first, then look at Davis’s comments and Cooper’s analysis and finally discuss
the questions and dilemmas the lesson offers my research.
Child Abuse Drama
The Child Abuse drama starts with the participants creating a mother and
child image of love, and then a moment of violence from the mother to
the child." The mother in the image is asked while presenting the depiction
why she is doing what she is. This task coherently develops into a drama about
child abuse. The participants are invited to take on the role of trainee Child
Support Officers (CSOs) ina fictional country which has so far fallen behind in
the protection of children, but has now decided to eradicate child abuse. Davis
structures different tasks around building the role, through a combination
of individual, pair and small-group work, using teacher-in-role as well to
bring a strong ideological element in through the language he uses.**° Beside
the roles there is an emphasis on creating spaces, paper-location is used to
create the office. Objects manifesting personal or ideological values are placed
in the office. Davis explains that “the central influence on those in role is
the steady way we are ‘institutionalised’ or rather, through work routines, we
begin to carry out the rules and ways of the institution where we are working
so we may lose sight of what we are doing”.**! This process is broken down
into tasks and exercises that include improvisations as well. Davis explains
that “there is a deliberately lengthy process of protecting into role with
the intention, in a minor key, of imitating the way we tend to become taken
over by ideology and a certain set of attitudes where we no longer continue
questioning fundamental life values”.*” The participants face the question of
taking a child into care and prosecuting the parents through a training task of
piecing together a transcription of a recording of an actual domestic situation,
in which many of the sentences seem to suggest that there is some sort of
violence going on. As the recording is from an actual case within the fiction
the trainees need to decide individually if they recommend prosecution or not
and mark their decision on a sheet of paper. The final event is a drama within
the drama, an improvisation that is prepared through group work in which
those who chose to prosecute plan how to do it in the improvisation, and those
who did not want to prosecute prepare participants to play the immigrant
family that will be prosecuted. The improvisation itself is framed as a video
recording of the CSO’s intervention at the house of the immigrant family and
## Ibid., 107.
450 Ibid., 120.
451 Tbid.
452 Ibid., 121-122.
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