Conference Program

More than fifteen years after the Italian Law 170/2010 which recognised Dyslexia and all Specific Learning Disorders (SLDs), significant amount of training hours for teacher on inclusion; even after the recognition of Neurodiversity as the leading paradigm to adsress the special educational needs, ensuring a truly inclusive and accessible school enviroment remains a challenge. On one hand, teachers often feel burdened by improperly used practices that cannot guaratee results nor prevent the growth of resentement and cultural prejudices. On the other hand, students with special needs internalize the same prejudices, and that leads them, particularly at the beginning of the university years, to hide their special needs or to apply inadecuate coping strategies in study challenges.

This study proposes a solution aimed at decreasing teachers' perception of otherness and conflict towards students with special needs, specifically by enhacing their empathetic abilities to recognise a common human level. Using an interdisciplinary narrative approach, this study compares different supplementary phases in a standard teacher training course. One group watches a selected tv series featuring a neurodivergent main character. The second experimental group reads a selected novel in witch a neurodivergent character appears too. Both are involved in specific engaging narrative activities designed from narrative approach works to promote closer identification with neurodivergent characters. Both groups are interviewed both before and after the steps, to mesure the empathetic levels, self-efficacy perception and desired attitudinal changes. A control group, which follows only the standard course and is also interwied, establishes the baseline to evaluate the efficacy of the narrative intervention, a stroger human connection and shared humanity experience.

The post-training collected data demonstrate that both cognitive and affective empathy are significantly enhanced by the narrative approach, showing higher outcomes compared to the control group. Moreover, a specific section of the study analyzed teachers' perceptions of neurodiversity by applying the same parameters used in previous research on student self-narratives, thereby highlighting a significant 'perception gap' between professional beliefs and lived experiences.

The narrative approach, through both tv seris watching and novel reading, facilitates significantly the bridging of this bias gap, fostering a deeper and more effective empathetic relationship. This shift results in a reduction of perceived ‘otherness’ too, as well as an increased teachers’ sense of self-efficacy and wellbeing. This methodology seems to promote a stronger democratic sense of justice regarding learning rights, dismantling the 'special vs. normal' dichotomy in favor of a more human-centered and inclusive teaching practice.