La letteratura femminile come mediazione educativa e fonte di sapere pedagogico: pratiche di libertà

The present theoretical and empirical research addresses the relationship between women's literature, education and pedagogical studies. The first part is devoted to a reflection on how pedagogy as a practical knowledge of education can find in the literature written by women stimuli and helpful ideas for its enrichment and development. The writers whose works have been the subject of this study are: Virginia Woolf, Clarice Lispector and Carmen Martín Gaite. The second part is a qualitative research that analyses describes and interrogates the educational practices, formal and informal, in which women’s literature is being used. The guiding questions of the research activity were born bound to a fundamental question: whether and how the texts of writers can be of a significant and effective educational role in the process of formation of adolescents and adult women. The aim was to understand how texts are mediated, where they are put into play in the educational relationship, what contexts are created, and if and where they are generators of changes, which effects they have on the participants and how it circulates (if it does) the female knowledge contained in them. And again: what questions to ask the texts in relation to education, its meaning and its implementation. The research was carried out through a double movement, between a phenomenological approach, based on the understanding of educational phenomena from the perspective of the people involved and the meanings they attach to these phenomena, and an ethnographic approach. The possibility to use different methods is practiced in the educational research when they have presuppositions in common: in this case the voice and the experience of those involved is of central importance for both methods. In fact it was the train of thought of this experience to cross the research activities, both in reading the texts of the women writers as well as in approaching the contexts under study.