Conference Program

The method of the collective version of the folktale intercepts the expression of peer culture: "a stable set of activities, routines, artifacts, values, and concerns that children produce and share in peer interaction" (Corsaro, 2017, 21). The teacher reads a folktale to pupils aged 9–12 and invites them to re-narrate it through writing and/or drawing, refraining from evaluations, corrections, explanations, or instructions. Children thus access the imaginary through their own paths and tools. The teacher gathers all the work and composes the collective version using exclusively the words and drawings produced by the pupils, preserving their original form. Children's re-narrations express interpretations and fantasies that find in the folktale both a framework and an expressive context (Carli et al., 2021).

How can teachers be trained in a method rooted in psychoanalysis (Bettelheim, 2005; von Franz, 1980)? And above all, how can they be supported in welcoming children's peer culture? We propose an online training program, “aimed at shaping and transforming educational and teaching practices, while fostering teachers’ reflectivity” (Asquini, 2018, 9), structured in two parts. The first includes eight video lectures and two exercises. Participants produce collective versions reviewed by experts, who discuss incorrect, improvable, and effective solutions during dedicated webinars. In the second part, teachers produce three collective versions with their class. The experts compare them with the children’s original work and add personalized annotations, later discussed in a webinar.

From the first exercise to the final work, the collective versions evolved from uncertain or poorly constructed texts into coherent and well-structured narratives. Teachers became more able to welcome children’s expressions in their immediacy and intensity, including unconventional or apparently incorrect work, recognizing their expressive meaning. The resulting narratives allow children to identify both the original and their own story.

Providing a solid theoretical framework together with practical guidance on how to let children’s culture emerge—and how to value specific formulations and drawings—has proven essential, as has providing detailed tools to accompany each phase of the process and a logbook to support observation and reflection (Chellini et al., 2025).

Two elements underpin the training’s success. First, the working group consists of three experts in the collective version method who share a psychoanalytic approach based on simultaneous listening to the other and oneself. Teachers thus experience in practice the stance they are invited to adopt with their students.

Second, the training is grounded in over twenty years of the experts’ direct work with children, combined with teacher training. This made it possible to observe teachers closely and identify deeply rooted professional habits, such as explaining everything without leaving “empty” spaces, prescribing what and how to produce work, or correcting errors in texts and drawings without grasping their expressive meaning. Our aim was thus directly focused on showing through practical examples how the method—thanks to its contrainte and drawing on the teacher's psychoanalytic approach—enables children's voices to find their own space as they are, without further adaptations, in a meaning-rich narrative that is collective yet individual.