Who are you? - Emergency Brake

Methods
Description Introductory part
Sheet
II How to use this manual
Page 10
the process and that you, as a facilitator, get to know
what they felt about the activity. Sometimes individual
group members may need individual support after the
activity. It is you, as a facilitator, who decides what to
bring up in the debriefing with the group, and what to
explore further afterwards in individual discussions.
This manual contains a wide variety of methods. They
are described so that you can take them out and use
them as they are. Our wish though is that you see this
as a smorgasbord of ideas in preventive work against
violence, that you bring out the stuff that works for you
and use it in the ways that suits your group.
Role-play
During the project and whilst making this manual, we
have had quite a lot of discussions around methodologies
we know and especially about role-playing. These
discussions have been very rewarding and therefore
we think that it might be good to share some of the
highlights.
It is evident that we look upon role-playing in different
ways. For most people role-playing probably means that
you act according to a role in a game or an exercise. It
is fun and by acting it gives a richer experience. If you
go deeper into the subject, you see that this is indeed
true, however also that there is more to know. In a
role-play the participants act out the roles of actual
persons, play characters and try to feel and act as that
character. The point is to experience the life of another.
This experience is dependent, among other things, on
the depth that the participant can go into the character.
This in turn is very reliant on the presence (or not) of an
audience. Experience shows that as soon as there is an
audience, even if it is a single person, the participants
in the role-play start to act for the audience and not
for themselves and the role-playing group. This is also
one of the main differences between improvised theatre
and role-playing. As soon as there is an audience the
acting participants start to produce for the audience.
That is a different process then when the acting is for
the fun of acting, when it is a play (as in child’s play,
not theatrical play). It is much easier to understand
values and emotions when you focus on the role-play,
the acting of one another, experience life, as it could be
for some other person, than to produce a nice piece of
theatre for the audience.
But with this also comes some responsibility. Roleplaying
in general, needs more debriefing. This is
because, as said before, emotions and experience are
more strongly related to the self or soul, than when
acting in front of an audience.