Rainbow of Desires as tool for Adult Education

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 wh...

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.

The foreseen and realised activities were these ones: 1) Management: coordination,monitoring, administration, evaluation. 2) Theoretical seminar to check up the situation in the world about RoD techniques and open a debate. 3) Training: to explore some of RoD techniques in a safe space for adult educators. 4) Systematizing seminar: to summarise the outputs of the training and release doubts. To prepare the next step. 5) Application on the field: to test in each specific context what lernt during the training. 6) Follow up seminar: to summarise and deepen the previous step. 7) Handbook: to write a text base don theory but also strongly linked to"Application on the field" phase. 8) Dissemination: to make adult educators to know the results of the project and promote the use of the handbook.

The main output is the handbook “Rainbow of desires as tool for adult education”. It is a text with 40 pages plus annexes (short description of each relevant application on the field experience in Italy and Hungary). Its aim is to offer all the relevant information for adult educators willing to use RoD to improve their action, especially the skill to deal with learners' internal experience and oppression/suffering, without falling into a therapeutic setting. The text is in English, Italian and Hungarian. Its contents are also linked with the practice we have done to test the approach and techniques. INDEX: 1) INTRODUCTION 1.1 To readers 1.2 How it was created 1.3 The TO tree 1.4 RoD as concept and history 1.5 Usefulness and goals 1.6 Why do we need to connect the individual with society 1.7 RoD and therapy 1.8 Some risks and limits 1.9 The SPIC (Social, Political, Ideological, Cultural) research 2) PREPARATION 2.1) Safe and brave space 2.2) Improving images creation 2.3) Improving improvisation based on images 3) DESCRIPTION OF SOME TECHNIQUES 3.1 The techniques a) Perspectives b) Introspective 3.2 Identification, recognition, resonance 3.3 Questions and doubts 4) SUGGESTIONS FOR READERS 4.1 ARTICLES 4.2 BOOKS 4.3 WEBSITES