This new approach suggests that "the preservation of cultural ecology is arguably as important as that of natural ecology, since world development without cultural sustainability will ultimately lead to a world of civilizational stagnation" (Xian. This failure was for mostly attributed to the undemocratic structures of the media institutions that were heavily concentrated in urban areas and.
The concept of entertainment-education (EE)
Therefore, an EE strategy, if properly implemented, can help many programs succeed (Singhal and Rogers, 1999). Used in campaigns against HIV/AIDS, these theories and models – along with a range of other social theories (UNAIDS, 2001) not mentioned here – have proved largely unsuitable for the contexts in which they were conceived in the West.
Freirean critical pedagogy
Impassable Thought – At this stage, people are dominant to the point of despairing of their fate. Moreover, this approach is unlikely to apply literally to the South African context.
Augusto Boal’s dramaturgy
Theater was considered one of the best mediums for development communication because it “has the potential to become a democratic medium in which the audience can play an active role in media programming and thus in the production and distribution of messages. . Harding (1998) and Okagbu (1998) suggest that, on the one hand, effective theater for development should not be a 'fixed masterpiece' ie.
The fixation of belief
Evidence for that would be the fact that "the whole process [was] controlled by the more powerful members of the community leaders" (Kerr. As such, the intimate realm refers to "the corporeal part of human existence that need[ed ]).to be hidden in privacy, all connected with the necessity of the life process itself, which prior to the modern age included all activities that served the existence of the individual and the survival of the species” (Arendt, 1958: 72).
CHAPTER THREE: CASE STUDY
DramAidE: AIDS education through drama
In this effort, the project committed to the goal of providing life skills and sex education to youth in the fight against AIDS. The project is built on the premise that most of the problems faced by young people can be located between the relationships between parents, students and teachers. Clubs are trained in the project's life skills curriculum that includes issues such as sexuality, gender issues and HIV/AIDS prevention.
In fact, foreigners must decide on the intervention and "the problem is to find ways to attract local communities to the educational program and to gain credibility for the educators" (Dalrymple. It should be noted that the project rethinks its techniques on an annual basis during the so-called 'year-end evaluations' taking into account the various studies carried out by DramAidE (Interview with Gumede, October 2004).The project has been said to have had a positive impact in terms of raising awareness and changing attitudes or beliefs.
The project has been said to have a positive impact on South Africa although challenges remain (Kelly, 2002).
CHAPTER FOUR: DATA ANALYSIS
Only then did teachers in charge of DramAidE's health clubs undertake to select learners for interviews. Learners were asked to give their views on their participation in DramAidE's programmes, what they gained from it in terms of life skills and the extent to which they put them into practice, and the possible difficulties they encountered. Rarely was this period long enough for each of the respondents to express their opinion.
This lack of time was a result of the fact that principals in most cases encouraged the researcher not to detain learners for a long time, as focus group interviews were conducted during class hours. The questions were read and explained to the learners so that they could help their parents answer them when necessary. Questions aimed at measuring parents' views on DramAidE's education in general and in what sense they communicated with their children and possibly helped them practice newly learned life skills.
In-depth semi-structured interviews were also conducted with teachers responsible for DramAidE's Clubs in schools – one teacher in each school was interviewed – to determine how they communicated with schoolchildren, how they perceived DramAidE's teaching of their students and the challenges they encountered. they were confronted.
Learners’ perspectives
The problem is that in the past boys have pressured girls to have sex, but now it is the girls who are pressuring boys to have sex. In the latter case, it is clear that critical consciousness would not necessarily lead to positive transformation of the oppressed context, which Freire did not clearly emphasize in his process. Male teachers always mislead us, they will tell you like...if you don't have sex, sperm will go to your brain and you will go crazy, so it's not easy to talk to them.
Male) Some guys believe that if you have sex and you don't want to get AIDS, you should, after having sex, just wash your penis and you will wash off AIDS, I don't know using dettol 7, it's stupid. …[sic] (FGD, 2004). Clearly, some of these misconceptions stem from the fact that AIDS has become so common. Therefore, people tend to trivialize the pandemic perhaps because it is still an invisible disease.
As Sondergaard (2000) pointed out, disease is called the "silent killer" because it is invisible and only opportunistic diseases are seen as the obvious cause of the victim's death. Sexuality is so intimate that it is an integral part of an individual's own identity, their feelings, who they are. However, it is also not stated that further reflection will necessarily lead to the breakdown of learned life skills.
Teachers’ perspectives
We have to always stop the lessons and do this drama thing and that's why the principal sometimes opposes DramAidE and tells us to do it after class [sic] (Interview, 2004). You know children are stubborn, they behave better today and tomorrow they change, for example some who still smoke drugs (Interview, 2004). Despite the difficulties encountered, the teachers believed that DramAidE had done enough to empower them, although most of them remained skeptical about the possibility of continuing to teach life skills on their own if the project stopped its interventions.
They still needed to be backed up by DramAidE's teams as catalysts to sort out a number of problems, and they sometimes lacked funds and logistics. This lack of sustainability challenges to a certain extent DramAidE's objective which is to form clubs in schools that will become self-sustaining and to encourage the school community to build a culture of learning and health promotion in schools (Dalrymple, 1997) .
Parents’ perspectives
In a similar vein, parents seemed to resent the way their children were isolated by their peer group and given “bad names” as they practiced the life skills they learned from DramAidE. Some of them thought that this life skills program was probably the cause of the academic failure of their children, who spent much of their time preparing and performing plays. This view falls within the common understanding of many teachers and parents in South Africa, who feel that too much is asked of schools, and instead of focusing on academics, they distract students with life skills games.
Therefore, schools would better serve health and social needs by focusing exclusively on academics, such as reading, science, and so on (Deutsch and Swartz, 2002). An analysis of this parental position regarding DramAidE education, together with the children's feeling of being overprotected by their parents, reveals that this education probably conflicts with parents' expectations for their children's future. In short, it should be emphasized that the students had gained a lot in terms of life skills.
These obstacles impede DramAidE's effort to influence the intimate sphere of schoolchildren to bring their sexuality into a form of identity assertion.
CHAPTER FIVE: SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
However, this road to success has been littered with mixed results despite previous research hailing the positive side of the project. In addition, teachers' enthusiasm for DramAidE programs could transfer the potential long-term sustainability of the project to schools. As long as any issue related to sexuality was still deeply hidden in their intimate realm, children were unlikely to easily change their behavior, especially that which they had learned through the transmission of generational memory (Attias-Donfut and Wolff, 2003 ).
In fact, the problem with these alleged life skills in this study is that they are mostly anchored in the intimate realm, as they are mostly closely connected to the very sensitive area of sexuality. But perhaps a deeper study - both qualitative and quantitative - in the future will be able to determine whether and to what extent the above exception to Freire's principles is likely to hinder DramAidE's work. Here it must be remembered that DramAidE's work is based on the premise that good health is dependent on social, psychological economic and environmental factors (Dalrymple, 1997).
One would therefore assume that DramAidE's work in initiating change should not be transparent.
Paper presented at the 4th International Conference on Education for Entertainment, Cape Town, South Africa. Old Wine in a New Bottle: The US Public Journalism Movement and the Former NWICO Debate. Available at www.ukzn.ac.za/ccms/publications/dissertations/PhD.theses.asp?ID=4 Accessed 10 May 2004.
Theater for Problem Solving: A Case Study of Using Participatory Forum Theater to Explore HIV/AIDS Issues in the Workplace. Available at www.ukzn.ac.za/ccms/publications/dissertations/matheses_default.asp Accessed 20 August 2004.
