Nothing is less innocent than a story. Experiencing conflict and healing peace through the formative power of children's literature

Abstract

“There is nothing less innocent than a story”,warns Jonathan-Gottschall (2022), reminding us of the capacity of literature to constitute itself as a living source of "powerful" narratives, capable of determining, for better and for worse, the path of a society toward a state of democracy. If it is true, in fact, that stories are mimesis of reality, their “eliciting power” (Benedetti, 2021, p. 200) must be pedagogically reconnected not only to the "power of agenda-setting" they express in promoting processes of peacebuilding, but also to the horizon of confrontation/clash with the lacerating, divisive dynamics that belong to narratives, often implicitly geared to nurture conflict and confrontation, rather than soothing it.

Starting from these premises, the essay aims to analyze the role of children's literature as a privileged educational device to defuse the "danger of a single story" (Ngozi Adichie, 2020) for the benefit of pedagogically groundedopportunities aimed at traversing conflict with a view to authentically oriented processes for generating conditions of sustainable peace.