Conference Program

Transformative Education (TE), as articulated under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4.7, aims to enable students to align knowledge, values and practices with socio-ecological sustainability and global justice. However, in the context of an accelerated climate collapse and a persistent "permacrisis", approaches to sustainability education still appear to be too minority. In a context of increasing precariousness, education professionals may find themselves working with young people who may increasingly take radical positions towards the issues of social, political and climate crises (Merzagora et al., 2024). Starting from this, this contribution intends to propose counter-narrative devices to promote transformative education interventions.

In a research experience carried out in 2024 in an attempt to explore the experiences of activists, semi-structured interviews (no. 26) were conducted with people who participate in political life, in activism and association realities. The central theme of interest was to bring to the surface beliefs and opinions about the repertoires of radical actions and civil disobedience within climate movement. From the analysis of the data, different perspectives of meaning emerged (Mezirow, 2003; Fabbri and Melacarne, 2023). One argues that environmental protection must take place through democratic tools such as laws, awareness campaigns and political pressure. The second believes that the methods of the first are not effective enough and therefore implements awareness campaigns, demonstrations in squares, flash mobs. The third, on the other hand, driven by the sense of urgency of the climate crisis, uses direct actions and a strong break with existing rules, arguing that blockades, occupations and civil disobedience can attract attention and force institutions to act more quickly.

How can we work in an educational key to ensure that these perspectives do not lose permeability and become exclusive over time and a limit to rational dialectics?

A viable way forward is to build counter-narratives from the bottom up (RAN, 2015; Schlegel, 2022). An example is the comic book Davide, created by Dante Caramellino and Claudio Melacarne of the University of Siena, which uses graphic storytelling as an educational tool to encourage dialogue and critical reflection. The comic tells the story of Davide, a high school boy who ends up approaching an extreme group. During a violent racist attack on a club frequented by black people, Davide realizes that he is on the wrong side of the story, stops his "companions" and decides to narrate himself independently, becoming the protagonist and not a secondary character.

Counter-narratives, when they are built from bottom-up stories, can encourage the creation of spaces for dialogue and reflection. In this way, it is possible to develop educational methods and approaches that avoid increasing polarization, that know how to welcome contradictions and offer a more realistic vision of reality, made up of complexities and solutions to be negotiated and reconsidered continuously (Melacarne, 2021).