Facilitating Gender Narratives Using the Visual in Dialogic Classroom Interaction: Tools for Preventing Gender-Based Violence

Our contribution shows how in classroom interactions the meaning of gender can be constructed and negotiated using visual tools and dialogic facilitation, in order to foster and produce counter-narratives and new narratives about gender relations, characterised by equality and respect, overcoming stereotypes and bias. We start from an original conceptualisation of gender both as product and process of its visual representations (de Lauretis, 1989), the construction of gender meanings in interaction (Stokoe & Smithson, 2001; West & Zimmerman, 1987), the dialogic facilitation of children’s agency and narratives in classroom interactions, also using the visual (Baraldi, 2022; Rossi, 2019). This paper is based on a constructivist approach of communication and gender, combined with visual studies, dialogue studies, and narrative studies. Against this theoretical background, the paper presents the main results of some research projects on five workshops, which were realised in recent years in Italian middle schools, video-recorded following the ethical indications of the EC and then transcribed according to a simplified version of Conversation Analysis conventions (Jefferson 2004). The workshops aimed to prevent gender-based violence by discouraging stereotypical representations of gender and enhancing narratives of gender based on equality, respect, and dialogue. Our analysis focused on: 1) the visual stimuli used during the workshops in order to promote children’s agency in constructing meanings of gender and negotiations of gender; 2) the interactional features of facilitation based on the use of visual stimuli and aimed to enhance the children’s dialogue and narratives; 3) the socialisation effects on children’s representations, shown by the final posters produced by the children at the end of the workshops. Here we put our attention on the use of images to promote children’s active participation and negotiations, to facilitate dialogue with adults and among peers, and to elicit the co-construction of innovative narratives on gender relations.