ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with training teachers working in difficult educational situations in Southern Italy. It describes a number of psychoanalytically informed interventions to help teachers, and reflections on those experiences. During subsequent meetings, the group was asked to engage in developing a narrative, a device designed to create further breathing and thinking space to consider the student–teacher relationship. The development of the collective narrative seemed especially important in enabling the teachers to recognise their emotional involvement in the work, and that it was some way from simply being a collection of duties. At the end of the dramatisation, the team asked the participants to write down their feelings: all agreed that the psychodrama class felt real and exemplified the behaviours experienced, and often withstood, by the teachers. The frontier school was already actively engaged in the development and delivery of training programmes, for both students and teachers.
