Reading bodies, feeling minds
Jessica Colizza, Roberta Sinagoga
Transforming a set of good practices into a systematic model of inclusive and guidance-oriented education, aimed at developing cultural and transversal competences, requires a continuous and reiterated organizational and productive effort. Our institute has been tackling the challenge of institutional embedding for years through a series of synchronic processes focused on building coherent and functional curricula and on planning teaching based on competences and learning units (UdA). This intervention presents an example of a learning unit designed within an interdisciplinary, guidance-oriented, and inclusive context, focused on transversal skills and inspired by the paradigm of Embodied Education. While the overall educational context aims to foster students’ awareness, autonomy, and decision-making skills through a metacognitive and metaemotional approach, the activities of the Literature and identity UdA are based on an experiential cycle that combines aesthetic reading, critical analysis, bodily expression, and metacognitive debate. Students explore — and physically embody — the emotional and relational dynamics found in literary texts, learning how to constructively overturn limiting thought patterns and the emotions that negatively influence everyday choices. In this perspective, the study of literature is not an end in itself but becomes a tool to explore the world and one’s own identity, to give meaning to personal and shared experiences, and to express and better understand oneself.
Keywords
Inclusive teaching, transversal skills, guidance-oriented teaching, embodied education, education for decision-making.
