Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design

Franco Passalacqua, who developed, analyzed, and implemented his project on “Writing Fictional Narratives to Promote Social Justice Education: Towards a Heuristic-Dialogic Model of Didactic Design” with school teachers in Italy. He believes that the challenge of teaching, at any level of education, is not only knowing how to foster the students’ desire to learn, but also to allow all students, regardless of their initial cultural, social, and economic circumstances, to construct knowledge that will enable them to become active citizens and to fully exercise their abilities and rights in public life. His chapter explores a narrative writing project implemented by teachers, to generate stories as a didactic pre-condition that can foster the construction of an initial level of socially just knowledge. In the course of this project, the participating teachers constructed fictional narratives to read to their students in class and use them to mediate the construction of interdisciplinary concepts and to cultivate a critical stance towards the objects of knowledge. To reach this goal, teachers who constructed narratives for imagination had to engage both with the students’ background knowledge, experience, misconceptions, and with their own personal perspective on the world, including personal values that were concealed behind and within the points of view they choose to adopt. But what made this didactic design through narrative writing particularly supportive of inclusive learning was the emphasis on a “handcrafted” process of investigating the students’ experiential world, which helped the teachers thematize their own relationship with knowledge and, consequently, enabled the teachers to design learning experiences that are coherent with active citizenship and democratic values.