Percorsi generativi di Letteratura per l’Infanzia

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze children’s literature as a «generative device». In the perspective of the paradigm of Pedagogical Generativity by Emiliana Mannese, this «generative device» fulfills a transformative function, becoming a cipher of a possible change, capable of orienting the construction of new educational paths that are capable of welcoming and facing the «challenges of complexity». Children’s literature as a «generative device» is a relational process that interprets the «categories of learning and knowledge as a non-place of educational change». It is structured in the educational relationship. It is in this awareness that the complex process that has characterized children’s literature is inscribed, as historically a secondary handmaiden of the literary system. On the generative side, this process has been at the center of a recent reflection on the crisis of narration. This crisis is understood as an indistinctness between being and information, an indistinctness that underlines the need to put Knowledge-Sharing Communities back at the center as Narrative Communities. For some time now, children’s literature has acquired that educational centrality and that epistemic autonomy that «manages to definitively put aside the artificial and dangerous operation supported by the historiography of the sector that, for a long part of the twentieth century, continued to distinguish between narrative production in the strict sense and production of a didactic, informative, edifying and scholastic nature». Therefore, the discipline is enriched with numerous interpretative keys that have had the merit of shifting the focus of attention from the marginal role of children’s literature in the literary system tout court to the centrality of the pedagogical dimension that children’s literature assumes in the capacity to construct complex schemes and thought processes. In the first case, it is a question of overcoming that prejudicial marginality of Croce’s type; in the second case, of distinguishing in the epistemic structure of the discipline the literary function that concerns the analysis, study and meaning of the text, from the generative function that acts, working on the
World-System, on the processes of construction of meaning and thought. Starting from the research of dynamic neuroscience, the generative function of children’s literature has highlighted the centrality of reading processes in the construction of thought and culture. It starts from the principle according to which reading allows the Human to go through information, to elaborate it and to transform it into Knowledge. If it is true, as Doidge writes, that culture transforms the brain, in our perspective, reading transforms knowledge to form Thought, making it dynamic and plastic. In this direction, we can identify the epistemological coordinates and methodological paths that have guided the drafting of this contribution. The epistemological coordinates refer to the paradigm of Generative Pedagogy by Emiliana Mannese which is specified as a theory of Learning, Guidance and Thought, characterized by a constant search for transdisciplinary integration between Subject-Person and System-World.