Words in democracy. The alliance between pedagogy and journalism for media and information literacy

Abstract

"In acting and speaking, men show who they are", recalls Hannah Arendt. Consistent with this statement, the often fragile boundary between experiences of democratic life and non-democratic contexts seems to be defined not only by the ways and forms of action but also by the words used, starting from those conveyed by the media and information outlets. A linguistic framework that not only determines the communicability of action itself but also defines lifestyles and conditions of social, political, and educational behavior.

The flow of words in which we are immersed constitutes both an educational and "political" source of the democratic quality of a country's socio-political-cultural fabric and a prerequisite for shaping our ethical and emotional "consistency" and our attitude toward confrontation, whether democratic or non-democratic, starting from early childhood.

Building upon these premises, the paper aims to explore the sense of a strategic alliance between pedagogy and journalism as a possible privileged pathway to foster reflection on the "political" relationship between enacted words, media and information literacy, and a formation for and of childhood in an authentically democratic perspective.