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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. + 122 +
