“Our Goal: to improve the lives of 1 billion “information-poor” people by 2030 while positioning the world’s 320,000 public libraries as critical community assets and providers of information through relevant technologies”.
TÔ NA REDE is a partnership between Instituto de Políticas Relacionais, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Public Libraries System and local governments to improve Public Libraries’ engagement with their community. Our main goal is to foment a network of knowledge, reading and information where we pass and, in that way, strengthen the role of public libraries within their cities. They should be dynamic and modern spaces of creation, interaction and information dissemination that welcome and engage communities.
TÔ NA REDE always starts by enhancing the capacity of people working in libraries to work with the community so they understand their context and are able to use participatory methodology to establish new partnerships. The library becomes directly related to local governments, universities, NGOs, commerce, media and etc. Through classes and courses, we mobilize library staff to identify the demands and talents of the community and then point out the information and communication needs that TÔ NA REDE will work with. Employees map out relevant local partners to the public libraries and develop a participatory activity plan for their users and the community. Later, we establish a “learning contract”: the rules that will permeate the theoretical and practical activities that the library will offer such as thematic workshops, lectures, videos, group discussions, testimonials and field visits.
The second stage of the program is training in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) at the service of libraries. Participants increase the ability to integrate ICT into library services to expand the range of activities offered and to serve the community. It is also at this point that the network is formed, between libraries and other partners: they use the online platforms (and TÔ NA REDE’s own website) to exchange information and integrate the municipal, state and national spheres.
Information and Communication Points: In an effort to increase its capacity to manage local information, each public library has an area designated for new electronic and mobile equipment, with free Wi-Fi and computers with programs that answer local demand. This is the space where the trainings in participatory methodology, ICTs and educommunication happen. Library officers are responsible for selecting a group of young community members for joint training. They also collect, organize and disseminate the information from the classes.
Tô na Rede’s actions are directly linked to the 17 sustainable development goals from UN’s 2030 Agenda. In this sense, we believe that Information and Communication Technologies are the ideal tools for library staff to better serve the needs of the community and thus contribute to the achievement of the goals from the Agenda.
TÔ NA REDE is a part of the following international programs:
Global Libraries da Fundação Bill & Melinda Gates, Iberbibliotecas, Internacional Advocacy Program da IFLA
As it is with other Instituto de Políticas Relacionais’ projects, TÔ NA REDE is developed using participatory methodology. We count on the participation of people who work in libraries, in addition to community engagement, to jointly develop an activity plan that meets the specific demands of each location. The participatory methodology is based on the teachings of Paulo Freire and the methods of Psychodrama, in order to value the reality of each person.
We create a space that highlights differences, promotes questioning and reflection on actions and movements, and thus strengthens citizenship and the network within each community.
In the participatory methodology, we consider the individualities of each library and the way in which its employees carry out daily activities, then find the conflicts and think together about the solution. That way, participants can clearly see the roles they play within the network. The articulations and rearticulations allow for a more qualified professional to serve the community. It is proven that the quality of results is always better when people, whether library or local government officials, are actively involved in planning and executing the project. Actors become more invested when they are organically incorporated into the process. The work aims community development, the well-being of the population and the promotion of healthy social relations.
In that sense, within each library is established a TÔ NA REDE point, as a strategy of involvement between staff and community and as support to the activities that will be carried out. Throughout the program, libraries articulate a network among themselves and with their partners to facilitate the exchange of information and learning. In addition to being able to be replicated in other public libraries throughout the country, the TÔ NA REDE initiative integrates municipal librarians, state coordinators and the National System of Public Libraries.
What is Psychodrama?
Drama stands for action in Greek. Psychodrama can be defined as a way of investigating the human soul through action. It is a method of research and intervention in interpersonal relationships, in groups, between groups or a person with their own self. It mobilizes to experience reality from the recognition of differences and conflicts and facilitates the search for alternatives to solve what is revealed, expanding the available resources. It has been widely used in education, enterprises, hospitals, clinic, communities.
Psychodrama is a part of a much wider construction, created by Jacob Levy Moreno, the Socionomy. In fact, the denomination of the part was extended to the whole, and when people use the term Psychodrama, they are generally referring to the Socionomy. Science of social laws and relationships, Socionomy is fundamentally characterized by its focus on the intersection of the subjective, psychological world and the objective, social world, contextualizing the individual in relation to their circumstances. It is divided into three branches: Sociometry, Sociodynamics and Sociatry, which have in common dramatic action as a resource to facilitate the expression of reality implied in interpersonal relations or for research and reflection on a given topic.
Sociometry, through the sociometric test, measures the choices of the individuals and expresses them through graphs representative of the interpersonal relations, making it possible to understand the group structure.
Sociodynamics investigates the dynamics of the group, the networks of bonds between the components of the groups.
Sociatry proposes social transformation, the therapy of society.
Sociodynamics and Sociatry have complementary objectives and use the same techniques: Psychodrama, Sociodrama, Role Playing, Spontaneous Theater, Group Psychotherapy.
As techniques, the difference between Psychodrama and Sociodrama consists in that in the first the dramatic work focuses on the individual – although always seen as a being in relation – and the second focuses on the group.
Social transformation and working with the community was Moreno’s great dream. At the beginning of the twentieth century, he went to the squares and streets of Vienna and interacted with children and adults, encouraging them to discover new ways of being in the world. The philosophy of the moment, based on psychodramatic theory and practice, was being shaped through its observation of the creative potential of the human being.
Since then, Psychodrama has been changing, evolving as theory and practice. Professionals from the clinical area have adapted it to the processional care in the office, often in a framework of individual psychotherapy, bringing new contributions to the psychodramatic theory of emotional development and to the understanding of psychopathology, as well as to the configuration of referential models in the understanding of human emotional experience and groups. In this context, more commonly, the expression of impediments and conflicts involves tension, aggression and, mainly, the recognition and reception of psychic pain.
In the last decade, we witnessed a rescue of the origins of Psychodrama in the theater and in the social scene, with numerous contributions to the psychodramatic methodology. New ways of spontaneous theater were presented to work on human issues while maintaining the privacy of people, a necessary condition for educational work.
Psychodramatic practice, in its many forms, begins with the involvement of people with the theme or practice to be experienced, through memories or stories of the daily life of individuals and/or organizations.
It is up to the director to handle psychodramatic techniques, as action resources, to ensure the group’s involvement and the choice of the protagonist scene, which will reflect the experience of those present. He invites everyone to participate in the joint creation of the plot, favoring the emergence of group reality.
In this sense, the Psychodrama facilitates the manifestation of ideas, conflicts over a theme, moral dilemmas, impediments and possibilities of expression in a given situation. Based on the theory of the moment and the principle of spontaneity, it promotes the free participation of all and stimulates the creativity in the dramatic production and the active catharsis.
It ends with the comments, initially from the participants of the scene and later, the large group, with the identification of the reality that has just been experienced and with the survey of possible solutions to the issues addressed.
In social work, practical and real solutions are sought for the problems, contributing to the discovery of alternatives that promote the sustainable development in the communities.
The main purpose of dramatic action is to encourage group members to discover the inherent richness of fully experiencing the nascendi status of the group experience by participating as honestly as possible at the moment. In this way, participants will recreate their relationship models in the group, confronting and being confronted with individual differences, a necessary condition to apprehend the distinction between their emotional experience and that of others, each being a transforming agent of the other.
Psychodrama has been expanding its borders, expanding the diversity of experiences of psychosocial intervention. Accompanying this expansion, the scientific production has tried to deepen the questions provoked by this renewed practice.
Psychodramatists are professionals from different areas: doctors, psychologists, pedagogues, speech therapists, HR professionals, all those who work with groups in their professional practice.
The Brazilian Federation of Psychodrama (FEBRAP) is dedicated to the teaching and development of Moreno’s socionomic proposal, promotes scientific events – with emphasis on the Brazilian Congress – and exchange with the international scientific community, always stimulating reflection on the theory and practice of Psychodrama, its scope and possibilities of social intervention.
Citizenship and Sociopsicodrama
To work the concept of Citizenship from the communities, using the methodology of the Sociopsycodrama, which is participatory and emancipatory, in the cities that proposes the relationship between the people in a group, working their emerging issues in the collective: their social relations, subjectivity and environment, bringing visibility to the group of its representation in society from its values, in the focus of ethics, affirming its citizenship, rights and duties in the daily exercise.
This exercise takes place from the participation of the population effectively in the programs and projects, forums, movements compatible with their local community. Our methodology facilitates project and program proposals legitimized by the communities and can continue these programs even if they have already completed their deadlines. These communities can be multipliers of actions for the exercise of citizenship providing the Local Social Protagonism.
Group Policy
Why work with group policy, not mass policy?
Group is the place of conflict, in that sense it is the place where people can position themselves, discuss, create new solutions, create support networks and, therefore, exercise citizenship, taking responsibility in front of the collective. Group is the place of differences, where the transfer is worked and resignified, which allows people to take responsibility for the production of their relationships and actions. Mass politics is the place where the population does not create support networks, it does not fit the difference, where “all” and “none” are the same thing, because it does not fit the conflict. It is the reproduction of the hierarchical system of power in which we live.
The work happens in groups, in a constant movement of action-reflection, aiming at research, understanding and spontaneous and creative intervention in these dynamics, to become involved in the plots that can hinder new actions, and more specifically, to facilitate the perception – of the games we do not perceive, of the scenes that are denied us and of the roles that are attributed to us …, – recreating the real, through the methodology of Sociopsycodrama.
The very involvement and proximity required in the community, paradoxically, prevents the population from distancing themselves enough to capture by conscious dynamics, underlying data, leading to a partial view and taken as if complete. There are pieces in this puzzle that do not show up so easily with the naked eye … These data, when perceived and re-articulated, should give the problems a new configuration that will probably point to solutions that could not be seen previously.
Marisa Greeb – sociopsycodramatist
Who created Psychodrama?
“There are wise words, but the
wisdom is not enough,
it lacks action ”
Jacob Levy Moreno, the creator of Psychodrama, was born on May 6th, 1889 in the city of Bucharest, Romania. He was of Jewish origin (sephardim). His family came from the Iberian Peninsula and settled in Romania at the time of the Inquisition. At the age of five he moved with his family to Vienna and it was there that he experienced the play of being a god, which he, with humor, relates to his idea of spontaneity as a divine spark that exists in each one of us. In this play, in which he and several other children played as gods and angels, Moreno was sitting on the “throne of god” – a chair on crates stacked on a table – and one of the “angels” asked him to fly. He tried to answer and, of course, he sprained himself on the floor and fractured his right arm.
Until 1920, Moreno had an intense religious life. He was part of a group that founded the “Religion of Encounter”. They expressed their rebellion in the face of established customs using beards, living on the streets in the manner of the poorest and seeking new forms of interaction with the people. During this period, he went to the gardens of Vienna and spontaneously played games with the children. In 1914 he attended in Amspittelberg, together with a doctor of venereology and a journalist, from a work with Viennese prostitutes through which, using group techniques, made them aware of their condition, which allowed them to organize a kind of union. He graduated in medicine in 1917.
He was interested in the Theater where, according to him, “there were unlimited possibilities for the investigation of spontaneity in the experimental plane”. In 1921 he founded the Viennese Theater of Spontaneity, an experience that formed the basis of his ideas on Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama. Working with the patients of the psychiatric hospital using the “Theater of Spontaneity”, he created the Therapeutic Theater, which was later called “Therapeutic Psychodrama”. The proposal of the Spontaneity Theater was to create a spontaneous representation, without text ready and decorated, with the actors creating at the time and thus relating to the audience. From there he created the “living newspaper”, in which he dramatized the news of the daily newspaper along with the participating group, at that moment launching the roots of Sociodrama.
From 1917 to 1920 he collaborated with Daimon Magazine, an important existentialist and Expressionist magazine, in which Martin Buber, Max Scheller, Jakob Wasserman, Kafka and others collaborated. In 1925 he emigrated to the United States. Two years later he made the first presentation of Psychodrama outside Europe. In 1931 he introduced the term Group Psychotherapy and this was considered the true year of the beginning of Group Psychotherapy, although the foundations and experiences began in Vienna.
Moreno died at Beacon on May 14th, 1974, at the age 85 and asked that the following words to be engraved on his grave: “Here lies the one who opened the doors of Psychiatry to joy.”
Lições de Psicodrama
Introdução ao Pensamento de J.L.Moreno
Camila Salles Gonçalves
José Roberto Wolff
Wilson Castello de Almeida
1988 – Ed. Ágora
TÔ NA REDE offers a course to all employees of the participating libraries. In addition to training the team in all phases of the program (lasting 12 months), the classes also strengthen the relationships among the participants. In all, there are 6 training blocks. They happen face to face and take place over the course of six months. You can also access some of the content from the classes below:
Our classes
See how the Impact Assessment process was
Results of the pilot project carried out in the cities of São Paulo (SP), Arapiraca (AL), Belém (PA):
Quantitative Results:
167 professionals from trained libraries
- belém – 72
- arapiraca – 71
- são paulo – 24
46 young people trained
- Belem – 17
- arapiraca – 23
- são paulo – 6
250 partnerships:
- belém: 42
- arapiraca: 154 (all over town)
- são paulo: 54
5 Information and Communication Points – deployed as TÔ NA REDE
Qualitative Results:
- improved self-esteem
- changed their view of the library
- use ICTs in activities
- use of participatory methodology
- annual plan of activities with the community
- replicated pilot in other libraries
The analysis of indicators of the pilot project activities resulted in a book which guides the use of participatory methodology in any community. It shows its potential to generate real changes and improve services according to the demands of the population. The publication today serves as a parameter to replicate the initiative in other libraries, municipalities and States. Just a local partnership and the will to change! TÔ NA REDE is currently working on the interiorization process in Pará, starting the course in Pernambuco and pre-production in São João da Boa Vista in the interior of São Paulo, but between 2014 and 2016 we conducted the pilot project in three cities: Arapiraca (AL), São Paulo (SP) and Belém (PA). With this experience we have noticed that the most significant result of TÔ NA REDE is the improvement in the way the community and the library perceive themselves and their needs.
Impact Assessment was carried out through research that refers to the elaboration, development and application of instruments for the evaluation and possible impacts generated by the pilot project Tô the Net Program(2014-2015), implemented in the cities: Arapiraca – Alagoas; Belém – Pará; São Paulo – SP.
The demand was to create a assessment process and participatory monitoring, from classroom activities and distance, giving priority to empirical experiences with employees of public libraries in the cities mentioned above, who participated in the pilot project in TÔ NA REDE (2014-2015).
One of North of the evaluation process were the guidelines suggested by the consultant David Streatfield (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) for the qualitative dimension, as well as the suggestion of Survey CIMS, which indicated a number of issues that the methodological research design are present, with an adapted design and incorporated into a form (questionnaire), that can capture the local realities.
The research sought to work with both quantitative data, as qualitative, not mentioning only spectra numerical order, but also to capture qualitative dimensions in the project caused changes in everyday life and collaborative working practices of social actors (involved directly and indirectly), also in professional relationships, affective andself- reflection of the participants.
Importantly, the research was guided by analytical content guidelines, which resulted in an extensive evaluation process documentation, which can be measured in the report for Participatory Methodology Guide for Public Libraries: TÔ NA REDE. The second guideline was the contextual cut of each city, which involves an institutional look of the provision of public services at each site and politician who sought to analyze the participation and interaction of the public structure, to which these libraries are allocated. The results in each of them were different in this way, the research sought to value the specific local features in the design of instruments, especially monitoring and training of participants in the project TÔ NA REDE.
In this way, the research focused on the application of qualitative and quantitative methodologies with theoretical basis, executed in the three cities (Arapiraca, Belém, São Paulo) to generate data to enable the comparison and evaluation of TÔ NA REDE and its possible impacts.
The research was divided into two stages:
- Quantitative stage
Personal application of data collection instruments – questionnaire (SP, AL, PA), through interviews with a quantitative closed questionnaire, which made it possible to measure quantifiable aspects of the project, such as: number of participants, educational level, gender, activities developed from the training carried out with public managers in the libraries chosen for the project, among other important aspects for more objective understanding of the process.
For this quantitative part of the research was developed a common questionnaire for the 03 cities, which was systematized through online form (limesurvey) with database programmed to generate general tabs between the cities, from the following lines of evaluation:
- Profile and characterization of research participants
- Characterization of the infrastructure of the participating libraries, according to the perception of the employees
- The use of information and communication technology assessment – ICT
- Evaluation of interpersonal relationships and personal growth of the participants of the Project in TÔ NA REDE
- Evaluation of mediation relationship with the public and territories
- Qualitative stage
The second stage of the research identified the qualitative aspects fostered by the project. As they are not measurable aspects, it is about capturing more subjective spheres of life, such as feelings of self-esteem, belonging, among other elements, that transcended the initial objectives of the project. These two steps take place at different times of the research and both had face-to-face fieldwork. The qualitative stage happened through mediation groups with focal issues that guided the evaluation process of the group of employees and the impacts of the project.