Diogel?/Safe?

The initial stimulus in each participating school is a performance by SWT using puppets inside a revolving set that is its own ‘Small World'. Introduced by a refugee mentor, the story follows a young boy's journey from West Africa to a playground in Wales. The play combines elements of different people's recent experience seeking asylum in Wales, including those of the current mentor's own family that have been researched during the planning of the project. (That is, primary and secondary schoolchildren work with refugee mentors who engage the children in the real stories of asylum seekers settling in Wales. The young people then raise a wide range of issues covering areas such as governance, playground bullying, family values, safety and war; these issues form the basis of the plays). After the performance there is an opportunity for audience members to discuss issues raised by the play.

Follow-up activities include workshops using drama to explore issues highlighted in the performance, children's rights workshops, and participatory monitoring and evaluation of the process. More specifically, drama sessions focus on fostering the production by young participants of plays that will be performed for parents and other adults from the local community. Following these performances, there will be an opportunity for discussion between the community audience and refugees and asylum seeker representatives from the locality. In addition, classroom-based sessions link refugee issues to children's rights. An additional opportunity afforded by this project has been the design and delivery by SWT of an 11-session module for 4th year trainee teachers looking at language development with refugee stories as the focus.

Children, Youth, Rights, Refugee Care.

"Diogel" is the word for "safe" in the Welsh language.

A participatory planning session was held in January, 2002 with 25 stakeholders from the education and community sectors, funders, refugee support groups, racial equality council, and partners.

During Refugee Week (June, 2002), there was a public performance at the Patti Pavilion in Swansea involving all five participating schools from the first phase of the programme. Approximately 120 children played out the refugee stories they had been dramatising by using the theatre itself as a means to involve the community audience in the experience of refugees seeking safety. Positive media coverage of this and other events is being generated; as a result, a 12-minute piece on Diogel?/Safe? was included in "High Performance", a series of HTV arts programmes. A documentary team has been following the performance and workshop process.