Conference Program

Within the dialogical-transformative paradigm of shared reading aloud, this paper offers a theoretical and methodological reflection on a workshop device designed for lower and upper secondary school students, developed as part of the project “Leggere Forte 4.0: Immersive Experience, the Ability to Recognise One’s Own Desire, and the Development of an Ironic Mindset through Reading”, carried out by the University of Siena within the Tuscan regional policy Leggere: Forte! Ad alta voce fa crescere l'intelligenza. The reflection rests on the assumption that reading aloud, when guided by specific pedagogical categories and extended into autobiographical writing and dialogue, can function not merely as a means of strengthening linguistic competences but as a transformative experience capable of reshaping the subject’s relationship with the self, with others, and with one’s horizon of possibility.

The two pedagogical categories adopted as both interpretive lenses and criteria for text selection are irony and desire. Irony, understood not as a simple rhetorical figure, but as a cognitive device – a mindset and a form of intelligence – enables adolescents to step back from lived experience, to revisit situations in which they felt different, inadequate or exposed to others’ judgement, without being overwhelmed, thereby opening up spaces for reinterpretation and divergent thinking. Desire, conceived as an orientative and generative force, engages the dimension of the possible: the desire for recognition, belonging and future that runs through adolescence and that literary narrative makes it possible to recognise, name and share. The interplay between these two categories generates a particularly fertile pedagogical field: without irony, desire risks hardening into idealisation and producing frustration when it meets reality; at the same time, without desire, irony risks becoming detachment, self-protection, and fear of exposure. It is precisely their reciprocal tension that makes the device pedagogically significant.

The device, structured across four sessions, follows a recursive cycle: reading aloud from selected texts – including R.J. Palacio’s Wonder, Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and David Yoon’s Frankly in Love – followed by activating questions, autobiographical writing, and dialogic sharing. Reading aloud operates as an activator of emotional resonance: the literary text provides a narrative frame that legitimises the exploration of personal experience. Autobiographical writing becomes the device through which students reflectively rework their lived experience, giving linguistic form to what they have experienced and perceived. The subsequent dialogue transforms the individual act into a shared experience, fostering processes of mutual recognition.

The potential of the device lies in the very structure of the practice: reading aloud lowers barriers to literary engagement; autobiographical writing requires no prior competences yet gives each student a space for voice and self-narrative; the ironic climate, in turn, reduces the risk of emotional overexposure and encourages participation even among those who tend to withdraw. In this sense, the paper aims to show how the interweaving of irony, desire and self-writing, mediated by reading aloud, can constitute a transformative practice that democratises access to literature and opens young people to reflexivity and the desire for a future.