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The Priscila Method brings together four different methodologies: Theatre of the Oppressed, Deep Democracy, Critical Incident Methodology, and Spatial Assemblages. These methods have proven their effectiveness in fostering inclusive learning environments through the development of skills, resilience, and a culture of peace at the individual, group, and community levels.
What is Deep Democracy?
“Deep Democracy is a psycho-social-political paradigm and methodology. The term Deep Democracy was developed by Arnold Mindell in 1988. It is defined as an attitude and a principle.
Attitude: Deep Democracy is an attitude that focuses on the awareness of voices that are both central and marginal. This type of awareness can be focused on groups, organizations, one’s own inner experiences, people in conflict, etc. Allowing oneself to take seriously seemingly unimportant events and feelings can often bring unexpected solutions to both group and inner conflicts.
Principle: Unlike “classical” democracy, which focuses on majority rule, Deep Democracy suggests that all voices, states of awareness, and frameworks of reality are important. Deep Democracy also suggests that the information carried within these voices, awarenesses, and frameworks are all needed to understand the complete process of the system. The meaning of this information appears when the various frameworks and voices are relating to each other. Deep Democracy is a process of relationship, not a state-oriented still picture, or a set of policies.
Numerous attempts to implement Deep Democracy are occurring simultaneously throughout the world. Just as conventional democracy strives to include all people in a political process, Deep Democracy furthers this by striving to foster a deeper level of dialogue and inclusivity that is open to including not only all people in the sense of the right to vote but is also open to allowing space for various and competing views, tensions, feelings, and styles of communication in a way that supports awareness of relative rank, power, and privilege and the ways in which these tend to marginalize various views, individuals, and groups…
… Deep democracy is a principle that tries to include all experiences. If you speak freely about a political opponent, and bring out your opinion, and marginalize the part in you that realizes that your opponent is also a person and has many dimensions, you have censored yourself and have not used a deeper freedom of speech. Free speech and the freedom of press are important, but without Deep Democracy, they can become an abusive and tyrannical force, that is not relating to the emotional and social realities and total experiences of the people they are reporting about… Deep Democracy also embraces an openness to emotions and personal experiences, which tend to get excluded from conflict and rational public discourse. Deep Democracy has crossed over into many fields and has been picked up by many authors, some using it as defined by Mindell, some use only particular aspects of it, as it is often the case with crossovers… [Deep Democracy strives] to accommodate the different groups and not have a win-lose [situation] where the winner takes all.
… One of the primary concerns of Deep Democracy is the use, maintenance, and awareness of metaskills (Arnold Mindell, 1992, p. 49). The concept of openness to diversity and dialogue between various views doesn’t mean that the facilitator is a pushover—that is only one metaskill (although it often reflects a lack of awareness). Facilitators must also at times practice, embody, and express other metaskills such as toughness, anger, intractability, love, detachment, concern for the well-being of the others, and a genuine desire to achieve consensus. Some of the metaskills in that list are organic responses. However, when a facilitator uses her internal organic responses to better
inform her intervention, that is a metaskill. This is the reason why the human development—the internal psychological and spiritual growth and inner peace—of the facilitator is so important.
[Deep Democracy] is applied to conflict resolution, post-conflict recovery and violence prevention, working with youth, elders, NGOs, government organisations and international organisations, dealing with the legacy of war, tyranny and violence, and the need to rebuild relationships and community. Some of the places this work has taken place… include Israel-Palestine, Ireland, UK, Kenya, South Africa, Russia, Croatia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Greece, Spain, India, USA, Japan, Burma, the Philippines and more.”
What is Theatre of the Oppressed?
The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) was developed in the seventies by Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal, and has been one of the main tools of participatory communication and popular education movements in Latin America. Unlike many social aspects of the theatre, the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) is a political theatre. It is a collaborative encounter for emancipation. Based on the epistemology of Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, TO uses theatre games to de-mechanize our perceptions, making us aware of our cultural filters by making explicit and re-enacting our own conflicts and experiences. The bringing to life on stage of individual issues and subsequent extrapolation to the experiences of the group, TO allows to search and create alternatives to conflicts that often prove difficult to resolve from an individual position.
Foto by @angelcristi La Xixa. Forum Theatre Event in Barcelona
Forum Theatre is the basic tool within Theatre of the Oppressed. Forum Theatre seeks to work towards the staging of conflicts, so that the audience can propose alternatives and try them out on stage. The methodology puts the audience and the actors and actresses on the same level to transform the audience into spect-actors, generating debate and joint problematization. Through Forum Theatre we can rehearse real life situations and conflicts, to prepare us to understand, reflect and confront these conflicts in real life. It turns thought into action.
The aim of Forum Theatre is to reflect, discuss and generate awareness among participants in order to find alternatives to conflict. In particular, the piece aims to create a dialogue that enables people to raise awareness about inequalities and social structures to find ways to face them in real life. The structure of Forum Theatre is based on presenting a short play which is stopped at the moment of maximum conflict. After the facilitator stops the play, he or she invites viewers to open the debate and to go on stage to replace the protagonists in order to change the situation. The facilitator provides data to feed the debate, engages the audience and asks questions to generate reflection about our behaviours in order to change our attitudes. Thus the participants in the audience through their performances on stage with the other actors, can intervene in the play and offer their thoughts, desires, strategies and solutions. The scene is reinterpreted as often as the different interventions proposed by the audience. Each alternative proposed is discussed and analysed to explore the feasibility of the proposed solution.
Theatre of the Oppressed has been used for decades and all around the world as tool for education, community building and resilience, reconciliation processes in conflict areas, group conflict prevention and resolution, awareness raising, addressing trauma – particularly through its Rainbow of Desire method – among other relevant strategies for inclusion and social cohesion
What is Critical Incident Methodology?
There is an urgent need to incorporate skills and abilities of coexistence in diversity and intercultural communication competences in adult training to ensure the effective implementation of the rights of all people, the full participation life-long learning, particularly among learners who are most vulnerable or at risk of social exclusion. Addressing diversity in training gains relevance in situations of vulnerability (refugees, migrants, ethnic minorities, etc.). Diversity needs to be addressed in an intersectional perspective with attention to cultural diversity, body, gender, age, sexuality, health, socioeconomic and family situation, among other areas to fully understand the impact of education on learners' well-being.
To explore the diversity, we use "cultural shocks" as a research tool, based on the Critical Incident Methodology developed by Margalit Cohen-Emerique. The concept of "cultural shock" or critical incident has been used in many definitions and perspectives, so let's clarify how we understand it. "A culture shock is an interaction between a person or object from a different culture which happens at a specific time and space, and which causes negative or positive cognitive and emotional reactions, a sense of loss of reference points, a negative representation of others, and a feeling of lack of approval that can lead to anxiety and anger.” (Cohen-Emerique, 1999)
Culture shock can incite prejudice: in some situations cultural clashes can come from witnessing a behaviour that breaks a valuable rule (e.g. someone finishes his/her meal with a noisy burp). The interpretation of this situation is almost automatic, "How rude!" In other situations, we can make mistakes which break cultural rules and we feel ashamed and guilty (“we should have known better"). In most of these situations it is very easy to end up with a negative judgement toward others or toward ourselves. One reason is because these situations are often unpleasant, and rather than stopping to understand them, we try to end them as quickly as we can. Judging is a good way to do it, so that we do not investigate or try to understand each other because to our understanding they just happen to be rude, sexist, authoritarian, etc.
The cultural clashes can reinforce stereotypes, but also have the ability to become a powerful source of learning; provided we do not obey our needs to end the situation and quickly forget it, but we have to reflect on what are the elements behind it. In addition, exploring the most frequent subjects of culture shock - or a critical incident - helps to reveal sensitive areas, which are of certain importance and cultural areas susceptible of becoming a source of tension, and a possible source of conflict.
There are two possible risks when we focus on diversity:
1) Having a limited interpretation of culture / diversity which only focuses, for example, on ethnicity, religion or nationality (and thereby hiding other factors such as economics).
2) Increase or essentialise these differences and stigmatise those who are different.
The fear of not being politically correct or culturally sensitive can have an adverse effect. When there are real cultural differences, fear does not allow us to be able to learn the real meaning of what we have seen, and thus we continue to be ignorant and unprepared to address difficult situations. In fact, this idea corresponds to a kind of "ethnocentrism" sometimes called "universalism," which denies the existence of important cultural differences. So how can we solve the contradiction of not making cultural differences larger than they are without denying the possibility of the real differences?
The critical incident methodology proposes suspending the theoretical debate and changing the registry to focus on the level of practice, hence providing a passage between these two
approaches. It proposes a strategy to uncover the assumed set of cultural norms, values and behaviours that people have when meetings with others. The increase in negative emotional turmoil bordering the intercultural misunderstanding helps us to be more aware of our own culture, and invites us to explore frameworks of cultural references in a more objective manner to open a margin for negotiation where prejudice has a lower paper.
What are Spatial Assemblages?
Spatial Assemblages is a method used for participatory practices of artistic hybridization. Starting from discarded objects found or brought by citizens, heterogeneous people, coordinated by artists and craftsmen, intervene on the objects transforming them into collages. In a second phase, these collages become the modules with which spatial assemblages – Assemplaces – are built, i.e. devices installed in public space, equipped to give rise to shows, workshops, image atlases as well as to become playful-combinatory machines that, ultimately, building sites for social, cultural and artistic crossbreeding. The method focuses around three praxis components:
Objects from which to trigger the participatory processes
Actions that are useful to build communities of practice
Characteristics and operation of the final space devices
In conclusion, the poetics of the Assemplaces tries to rethink some ways of functioning of the place of culture within increasingly multi-ethnic cities and with ever greater inequalities between those who access cultural itineraries and those who don't. For this reason, this poetics starts from objects as "entrance keys" which, by keeping intellectual investment and dexterity together, are able to activate, under the mediation/responsibility of the artists, joint creation processes that mix people with diverse levels of competences. This means culture as a common good not only in terms of fruition but also and above all in terms of creation, activity and common governance. This is why the Assemplaces must also become AssemblEages, i.e. installations in which the hundreds of people who, while building them, discussed their meaning and, once built, will decide their destinations and programming, are recognized as authors. We believe that in such a difficult moment for cultural institutions, many of which are finding it increasingly difficult to keep up with and adequately respond to changes in both contexts and people's needs, move the axis towards participatory governance of cultural policies, create machines that are both the symbol and the tool and, finally, providing them with the necessary mobility to allow people to collectively decide in which territories they will go to carry out their activities, can help the reconstitution of a pact between artists and citizens towards objectives and functions of culture felt, again, as important to the city as a whole.
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