Across and Beyond Gender Stereotypes: Facilitating Dialogue and Narratives in Children's Interactions

This article investigates how a specific form of interaction—dialogic facilitation—can enhance children's active participation in meaning negotiation and in co-constructing both gender stereotypes and counter narratives. Based on a theoretical background comprising dialogue, facilitation, narratives and gender, and a systemic and constructivist approach to society and communication, we analyse interactions collected in a primary school through video-recording. The data are part of a national research project on children's agency, where a workshop on gender differences and equal relationships was coordinated by a facilitator of a local feminist association in a city of Northern Italy. Despite the limitations of this study, the findings indicate that facilitation, the main form of communication implemented during the workshop, relied on a variety of dialogic actions that display active listening and support, in particular repetitions, minimal feedback and different kinds of gist formulations. In the workshop, facilitation elicited a plurality of intertwined children's stories, some with stereotypes, about gender differences. Particularly recurrent and significant were personal narratives based on lived experiences that deconstruct public and stereotypical narratives. The findings also deepen the understanding of master narratives and counter narrative interlacement dynamics.