We had two main goals: 1) We think adult educators have the need to know better RoD in order to better manage the process of empowerment with their learners, mainly when they use active methods which imply moving emotions. 2) Moreover, adult educators can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the difficulties in managing the emotions and pains perceived in the group of learners, often coming from extreme situations, poverty, racism, war, discrimination, violence. For these reasons RoD can be also a tool to be used within the adult educators teams, to explore the emotions linked to their role and to get a more sustainable balance. Of course there are possibilities to learn RoD in Europe, but the way it is taught is not really clear and effective, as sometimes it results in a bad psychologisation of the individual, while we have to keep a wall between education and therapy, mainly when it is a bad and wild therapy. Moreover, as Paulo Freire said, education cannot be neutral, it should stand on the side of social justice, human rights and no discriminations. In this direction moves TO and also our project. As a whole we wanted to set up an useful toolkit to be used by Adult educators for these purposes.
We both are experts in TO; Artemisszio has a long history of working with TO, especially Forum-Theatre, but they are not trained in RoD, a method which would help them to better understand the internal oppressions in their own and their target groups' minds. Giolli had a big experience in 2005 mainly with a long term experiment held in Rome for a year; in that experience Giolli invented a new adaptation to RoD in order to preserve its educational side against any psychologization. As both organisations work together in other projects the exchange of ideas is continuous and brought to the conviction that there is a blind spot in the adult education practice, related to the internal oppressions: rarely they are taken in account as these are considered a mental health issue and educators do not feel able to manage such situations properly. On the contrary, TO and RoD are simple techniques that do not require a psychotherapeutic background, but a strong educational and emotional sensitivity. Moreover adult educators lead usually under-privileged groups where suffering and strong emotions can be part of daily life. The needs of this project were to provide partners and other Adult educators with useful tools to manage such situations.