Poetry,Utopia and ecopedagogy,Hannah Arendt and Danilo Dolci’s approaches applied to a primary school project

Abstract

The article focuses on the role of poetry within an ecopedagogical perspective based on Danilo Dolci’s utopian approach integrated with Hannah Arendt’s theories on critical thinking and judgement as part of a project conducted by the University of Turin in collaboration with Middlesex University, London, at a primary school near Turin in the academic years 2021–2022 and 2022–2023. Arendt and Dolci’s pedagogies aim to stimulate the growth of consciousness by guiding the participants to listen to different points of view. Thus, the role of educators is to lead their interlocutors towards the dissolution of their prejudices and pre-judgments and lead them towards the revelation of their own thoughts. The method is built on the need to guide children as they develop into responsible adults, working towards the formation of a planetary citizenship based on dialogue between all the creatures that inhabit the Earth. Within this framework, ways that educators can bring poetry and utopia into play in the classroom are explored.

Introduction

This article focuses on the application of Hannah Arendt’s theories on critical thinking and judgement and Danilo Dolci’s utopian ecopedagogy in the teaching of poetry in a Year 5 primary school class in a school near Turin. The study forms part of a project conducted by the University of Turin in collaboration with Middlesex University, London, in the academic years 2021–2022 and 2022–2023. It had two main objectives: the acquisition by teachers of knowledge relating to the meaning of judgement skills, their role in the decision-making process and their development in the child; and teachers’ planning and implementation of educational and didactic activities for the formation of judgement within an ecopedagogical perspective.

The research process was conducted using a participatory action-research (PAR) approach. “It is defined as ‘participatory action research’ because there is no distinction between the experts [. . .] and the people who experience the problems. It is therefore a question of developing a community in which experts work on an equal footing with the people directly affected, trying to develop a shared understanding of them and a unitary project” (Sorzio, 2019: 145–146, our translation). It is an approach that combines pragmatist and critical-hermeneutic-constructivist theoretical assumptions (Baldacci, 2013) and develops through processes of collaboration and interaction between teachers and professional researchers (Barbier, 2007). Within this framework, the professional researcher is to be understood as a “participatory researcher” (Guarcello, 2021: 126) and the teacher/researcher as a partner in the research process and as a point of reference for other teachers not directly involved in the project, but active in the relevant school community.

With reference to poetry teaching, the project examined how teachers can bring poetry and utopia into play in the classroom, more specifically guiding children, through poetry, to engage soulfully in their work together; offering children a perspective on poetry as an art form that awakens and enlightens; conceiving poetry as a process of relational sensitivity since each one of us, as Dolci says, is “capable through poetry of discovering the invisible, innumerable roots that reach out in every direction to connect us to the world” (Spagnoletti, 2013: 150–151, our translation); and, finally, of an education through poetry aimed at the promotion of active and responsible citizenship.

Hannah Arendt and Danilo Dolci, the formation of critical thinking and judgement within an ecopedagogical framework

German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt developed a theoretical-political proposal around the meaning and role of the faculties of critical thinking and judgement within the process of the formation of the individual. In her last and unfinished work, The life of the mind, Arendt (1978) elaborates on what she calls the “faculty of thinking”, which deals with the understanding of the meaning of our existence in the world. Thinking is identified as the capacity through which we ask those questions that are unanswerable because they concern topics that do not have a definitive answer, such as freedom, death, beauty, or faith. Human beings ask such questions because our own humanity makes us feel an inexorable urge to search for the meaning of our existence, even though it is of no direct and immediate utility.

This capacity to think does not exhaust all the activity of our mind. In fact, it interacts with the capacity to know, to observe the world through our senses, for all that we can grasp with a good margin of certainty because it is evident. If the intellect makes us know the world for what it already is, it is only our reason that makes us understand the world as it should be; namely that “quality environment” – also in the sense of sustainability – within which to lead a life on a human scale. The dialogue between intelligence and thought is the only one that allows us to ask ourselves if what is concretely feasible also has such a meaning for human existence to make it right – whether it should be done or avoided or, if it is already done, transformed.

Arendt was inspired by two voices of Western philosophy: Socrates, as known to us through the works of Plato, and Immanuel Kant. It was Socrates who first invited us to reflect on the indispensability of examining everything that happens. In fact, Socrates’ maieutics aimed precisely to dismantle pre-conceived or common-sense ideas and to initiate, starting from the interiority of each person, a new, well-founded, and dialogic vision of reality (Arendt, 1978). Kant, much later, placed judgement based on taste at the centre of his final reflections, namely that personal deliberative process that becomes necessary when we face those situations for which the application of rules established a priori would not be coherent (Arendt, 1989).

Starting from this framework, Arendt argues that to “save the world from ruin” it is necessary for teachers to assume the responsibility of initiating, nourishing and introducing into society the absolute novelty that each child brings. This is because it will be precisely the originality of each individual that, if put at the service of the world, will save it from ruin and will allow it to flourish again (Arendt, 2006). It is that originality that makes a child feel competent and special and allows the community to recognize them as a person with a real and significant “talent” for the prosperity of the community itself. To recognize oneself as a person with an unrepeatable originality and value for oneself, for others and for the community, it is necessary, Arendt argues for two conditions to occur for the child:

• – Involvement in an educational relationship with adults and teachers sincerely interested in promoting this recognition through proposals, experiences and training opportunities that allow them to discover and test themselves.

• – The awakening and exercise of the highest human capacity: the faculty of judging.

Judgement, according to Arendt, is the faculty that allows one to examine oneself, recognizing one’s originality and potential. Judgement also allows one to evaluate one’s own thinking process and behaviour, to correct oneself and to understand the value of personal achievement that is not just individualistic. That is, a realisation that is profoundly such only if it is authentically respectful of one’s own aspirations, talents, inclinations and if it contributes to the fulfilment of others and the well-being of the world.

Judgement allows all this not because it makes the child subjugated or passively subservient to socially defined norms of conduct. Arendtian judgement, on the contrary, allows all of this since it is the faculty that places oneself, others and the world under constant evaluation; an evaluation that discerns facts and ideas in order to understand them and proceeds in the decision-making process on “what it is right to think” and “what it is right to do”.

From an Arendtian perspective, it is vitally important to train the competence of judgement in the new generations to avoid the repetition of the skandala that shocked the twentieth century: the extermination of part of humanity during the Nazi and fascist totalitarianisms. In fact, Arendt states that this incurable evil perpetrated by human beings on other human beings was so rampant and affected such a high number of individuals engaging in violent conduct because they chose to suspend their thinking and judgement capacities. That is, despite being able to recognize the brutality of their violent acts, millions of ordinary people chose not to activate their critical thinking and judgement skills, indiscriminately supporting the norms of conduct commonly accepted and propagated in that historical situation.

More specifically, the educational activities implemented by the teachers in this project referred to the five steps identified by Hannah Arendt for the promotion of judgement capacity: taste, “thinking for oneself”, dialogical confrontation, imagining, inter-subjective deliberation, and the definition of a common action. These five steps were followed starting from an experience/fact/social problem on which to exercise judgement. Thus, the experience of different bread children in the same community from different social and cultural backgrounds ate, prompted them to consider questions such as how they tasted them; whether they liked or disliked them and why; whether they knew the stories behind each type of bread; what bread means for people and how it is prepared and baked. Following on from these questions came further questions that took the children’s thinking wider and deeper as they considered how their personal taste and appreciation of the bread changed when they tasted the same bread again after this discussion. Finally, they went on to consider what the class’s agreed decision and action on the topic of eating different kinds of bread would be, including how this decision and action could positively affect and transform the community.

Hannah Arendt’s vision of education has key points in common with Italian radical educationalist Danilo Dolci’s ecopedagogy, which sees the classroom as a starting place for “political strategies for reinventing the world” (Kahn, 2010: xv). Like Freire, who endorsed Dolci’s views and collaborated with him in various instances (Longo, 2020), Dolci’s ecopedagogy aims to educate children to face everyday problems with action, creativity and dialogue, guiding them towards growth based on respect for nature, the rights of all and a culture of peace. Dolci’s aspiration was to progress towards a future in which humanity is intimately connected with nature, inspired by a utopian belief that means enabling children to discover the strength to express themselves and find the intuition for the new to be designed. His vision of the human world and nature as a unified whole is the essence of Dolci’s (1993a) method, which is known as “reciprocal maieutics” and he himself also defined as “ecological maieutics” (p. 188). Dolci’s ecological maieutics is a dialectic method of inquiry that aims to stimulate the growth of consciousness by guiding the participants to listen to different points of view, acknowledging and respecting any contradictions that emerge. Dolci, like Arendt, was inspired by Socrates’ dialectics, which compares the philosopher to a “midwife of knowledge”, eschewing the temptation to fill people’s minds with information and helping them instead to use dialogue as an instrument to reach the truth.

There is however an important addition that Dolci makes to Socrates’ approach, making it “reciprocal”. For Dolci, educators are all those who are not only able to help others to teach themselves but also those who will learn from others at the same time. Thus, the maieutic approach is not limited to inter-personal relationships but nature, trees, flowers, animals, insects, lakes and seas all “speak” too and are able to teach those able to observe and listen to what they have to say: “We need to look at how to deepen and widen our powers of observation, how to exercise and express it in different ways, how to widen our field of experience; how to enhance and value experience in order to try to resolve the problems that life throws at us” (Dolci, 2018: 300, our translation).

Propaedeutic to Dolci’s reciprocal maieutics is “communication”, which is defined by Dolci (1993c) as “the capacity to develop through dialogue” (p. 24); it involves a spiritual tension that encompasses the body and all things and is renewed in a continual process of creative reciprocity. This process, by which people learn to express their personal “power”, as part of a deep-felt need to be creative, known as “conscientisation”, can be linked to Freire (2017), and be defined as “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (p. 9). Like Freire, Dolci fosters an “empowered” community, invoking a world in which humanity lives in nonviolent harmony with nature, coexisting in a perfect power balance, as opposed to existing as a burden on and flourishing at the expense of others. For the ideal city that Dolci had in mind, the “terrestrial city”, the new citizen needs to be able to face and solve problems at an individual, group and structural level. Such an ideal city, as Arendt (1998) highlighted too in Human Condition, would nourish and reinvigorate those neglected human capacities of being “plural” and “capable of new perspectives and new actions” (p. xxix).

A new future, according to Dolci, must be “moulded” by every individual, so that humanity acquires a sense of what is necessary to be able to make new choices; to learn how to imagine and bring into being new dreams. Dolci (1993a) maintains that our worst enemy is “the fear of being creative, the lack of courage, the inability to rouse ourselves from our deep inertia” (p. 40, our translation). Thus, in his poetry collection Non sentite l’odore del fumo? (“Don’t you smell the smoke?”, Dolci, 1971), focusing on the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, Dolci, like Arendt, when she references the skandala, alludes to the destructive and terrible effects of being locked in a fearful conformist mode of thinking arising from a lack of courage and an inability to break away from the collective mindset.

Poetry and Utopia

According to Gianni Rodari, teaching poetry is a sign that “a higher civilization was born in that school, which teaches children that their role in the world must not be that of those who merely accept reality, who only execute and obey, but rather that of producers, creators, transformers of the world” (Roghi, 2020). He then adds that it does not matter if children leave school and no longer write poems, because it is likely that they will retain “the need for poetry” and, in any case, poetry will have been for them “an exercise in freedom, an education in freedom whose fruits will last a long time”. As a fellow poet, Dolci also believed in the transformative power of teaching poetry at a young age, working towards developing a conception of the world as a “creature of creatures” through creative writing workshops aimed at developing both personal, group and collective creativity. Dreams, he claims, come to us from poetry, that “messenger of loving impulse and creative fervour”, and can become reality. Poetry is also seen as “a song, sometimes a cry, of rediscovered dignity, as a loving act capable of revelation and liberation” (Telleri, 1997: 10, our translation).

“Each of us”, says Dolci (2012), “is born with their own song inside, with their dream to express themselves” (p. 207, our translation). Still, Dolci adds, poetry needs to be nourished by what he calls a “realisable” utopia, which means enabling children to discover the strength to express themselves and find the intuition for the new to be designed. Utopia is also for Dolci the effort to bring our life into the open, in images and ideas, so that what is hidden can be brought into the light, leading the way to a brighter future and a better world.

The teachers’ mission is to help children embark on the arduous but necessary path to utopia. Utopia is dream, hope, and at the same time something more: becoming consciously aware of the dream and going on to make it a manifesto for one’s existence. Utopia, central in ecopedagogical discourse, is in fact understood by Freire as critical hope. Thinking that hope alone can transform the world can result in despair, pessimism and fatalism. What Freire (2001) writes in Pedagogy of Freedom, is that hope, based on truth, gives ethical quality to the struggle to transform the world. Freire adds that for this purpose the capacity for suffering, a sense of love for people and tolerance are needed. Utopia plays the role of ethical charge, which pushes for rigour and requires critical sense, which strengthens commitment and passion for the search for perspectives, operational paths aimed at educational projects of high human depth and democratic, since no one frees anyone; no one is freed by anyone; we free ourselves together; and on a pedagogical level no one educates anyone; no one is educated by anyone; we educate ourselves together.

How can educators bring poetry and utopia into play in the classroom? Guiding children to engage in their work together and offering a perspective on poetry as an art form that awakens and enlightens is a form of reciprocal maieutics. This is how Dolci defines poetry: “poetry is the passage from reality as it is to how it could be, dialectic between being and desire”. Poetry is also composing the experience, “intuition, radar, the possibility of seeing every time in a face, in a specific face, beyond that face: grasping in it the parable that reveals beyond itself” (Spagnoletti, 2013: 150, our translation). According to Dolci, those who judge poetry to be “impotent” misunderstand its importance. Poetry does not force or impose, but corrodes and dismantles the structures of domination, springing from the depths of the mysterious, yet-to-be-created truth. “Through silent words, from the most varied matter, poetry enables us to express ourselves from infinite eyes, ears, tongues, infinite hands and unpredictable seeds” (Dolci, 1993b: 73, our translation).

Poetry, at the same time, for Dolci, comes to represent a form of reciprocal maieutics, which he developed through his poetic output, focusing on the importance of questions for educational action. Questioning in the sense of excavation, of going beyond the apparent, seeking to discover the unknown, what is veiled by traditions, customs and stereotypes. “Maieutics is helping to bring possible ideas, relationships, identities and communities to light. It is the awareness of the need to find shared truths. It is therefore the place of permanent construction of truth” (Cappello, 2011: 22, our translation). An example is provided to us by Each one grows only if dreamed (“Ciascuno cresce solo se sognato”), in which Dolci underlines how the awareness of not knowing must push us towards continuous research, how curiosity and interest in others are founding values of the educational act. Dolci gives us a lesson on relationships with others, revealing how people can change if we imagine them differently, just as love “makes them become more beautiful”. The strength of a maieuta is to encourage the emergence of all that is best in the individual. The maieutic process awakens from deep within, allowing each of us to identify with others through the authentic experience of growing together:

There are also those who educate, without hiding

the absurdity of the world, open to each

development but trying

to be honest with others and with themselves,

dreaming of others not as they are now

Everybody grows only if dreamt about

(Dolci, 2016: 112, our translation) ¹

Playing with poetry in the classroom

Inspired by Arendt’s ideas on critical thinking and judgement and Dolci’s utopian ecopedagogy, a series of poetry activities were carried out by a year five class. As part of the educational pathway aimed at encouraging the development of thinking and judgement skills, the teacher presented the children with a contextual reality to focus on. Each child was thus encouraged to adopt an active listening mode, “tasting” the experience to give life to an internal dialogue with themselves and with others. In this context, free poetic writing was born as a spontaneous choice by some children, for example within an activity consisting of reflecting on Pablo Picasso’s painting, the Guernica. The painting, created as an anti-war protest triggered by the 1937 aerial bombing of the town of Guernica, has become one of the most renowned cubist paintings for its violent images in monochromatic colours.

Children were aware of being able to freely write their sensations, thoughts and interpretations regarding the painting, in their personal “tasting” of the work and the artist’s choices to make it communicative and alive. The teacher’s role in these activities is conceived differently from usual: they remain in the background and act neither as a constant guide nor as an evaluator of the work looking for a predictable and exact result. This liberated role of the teacher aims to encourage children to feel capable of broadening their freedom from the contents of their creative work to the chosen format, freeing them up to develop their own idea of poetry. As a result, some children decided spontaneously to write poems as a comment on the painting. Interestingly, some of the poems translated Picasso’s fragmentary work into words playing, for instance, on the free arrangement of words on the page, scattering them in different positions and with no more than three or four words on each line, for example: “Light, hope/But dark/Death/a flower/hope!/Democracy is leaving./Feet/Arm/Legs/Destroyed like life./The bitterness/Loneliness/Fire flames/pain from/son to mother”.

Others instead composed free verse poems characterized by continuous enjambments, which again can be seen as a poetic representation of Picasso’s cubist painting, for example, “That scene makes me light up/the suffering it causes me/and illuminates my sadness”. The poetics inherent in Picasso’s work seem to have resonated in a strong and particularly immediate way, almost evocative of reality, in the children who chose to express through poetry what the experience moved in them. In the next stage of the proposal, which involved listening through dialogue between classmates what each one “tasted”, these poems made a communicative force resonate in the classroom leading to a sense of community embracing the painting and the author.

A few weeks after working on the Guernica, the teacher proposed a poem on an ecological theme as an experience to be “tasted” individually and in dialogue with others. The poem in question was Han descuajado un árbol (“They have uprooted a tree”) by Rafael Alberti, a poet who went into exile after the Spanish Civil War. The poem, taken from Poemas de Punta del Este (1945–1956), sees the poet talking about a tree that has been uprooted, which in the morning was still young and happy, with the wind, the sun and the birds caressing it, while in the evening it lies like a child exiled from its cradle with its tender legs broken. The poet concludes that in the night he will go out to close its eyes and sing the tree the song that the wind whispered as it passed that morning. The reflections written by the children on the poem, highlighted how the poet conveyed sadness but also a certain tenderness towards the tree. Some children observed how the poet wanted to communicate the importance of treating nature with respect and kindness. In particular, they noticed how the poet treats the tree as if it were his child; how the poem communicates the feeling of pain for the tree that was uprooted, both physical pain and emotional pain; how there is however humanity in some people, unlike those who uprooted the tree. Interestingly, they also drew associations between the poem and the Guernica painting, since just as the tree was suddenly and violently uprooted, so Guernica was suddenly and devastatingly bombed, with young lives in both instances being needlessly and carelessly sacrificed. Associations were also made between the uprooted tree and the poet himself in exile. These are some examples of the children’s reflections:

The poet conveyed sadness but also a certain tenderness towards the tree in a very refined way. In my opinion he wants to communicate to us that we must give importance to the things that surround us in the world and treat them well. And he treats the tree as if it were his child. It is suffering for the tree but also for the poet, the poem somehow reminds us of the Guernica painting. It is clear that the tree’s friends, the sun, the stars and the birds, were saddened by the death of the tree.

To me the poem resonates the faith in some human beings when the last verse begins, the poet writes the poem because he believes that life can go on.

This is a sad poem that tells us about this young, clean, strong and happy tree until humans came and uprooted it without mercy and without reason. It also tells us that there is a bit of humanity in some people, unlike those who uprooted the tree.

I connect it to the Guernica painting because just as all of a sudden, they uprooted the tree, so all of a sudden, they bombed Guernica. Then also because a young life was killed here just as young lives were killed in the bombing. In my opinion the message is there is no point in killing a young life at random with a long life still ahead. This poem also makes me feel pain for the tree that was uprooted, both physical pain and emotional pain.

In the children’s writings one perceives freedom of expression of thoughts, emotions and feelings. The poetic text seems to have struck different, intimate and personal chords. The children highlighted a “common sense”, felt in the poem and they often linked it to the Guernica – common sense in the Arendtian meaning of the phrase, namely a process of developing our thoughts about public issues through open discussion whereby participants are encouraged to learn from one another. The communicative and thought fabric born from the intertwining of poetry and teaching methods seems to confirm the possibility of a contribution to the formation of the person in relationship with themselves and the world.

In the path of formation of thought and judgement, a new line of work, from an ecological perspective, was that of recognizing the universal value of cereals in the life of human beings. In this context, the teacher arranged a bread-making session in class conducted in a free, open and non-prescriptive way. Every child knew they could write about the immediate feeling of the hands working the dough, about having “tasted” the testimony of the bread maker, a person invited to talk to the children, who helped the children and talked to them about how she learned to make bread. Some children felt inspired to write poems as a result of the experience. Their poems were reflections on how a ball of dough makes its journey to becoming bread; the importance of bread in our lives; how bread making reminded them of their grandmothers. There were also poems written using words from some Italian dialects of where their families came from. One in particular was written entirely in a southern Italian dialect, from the area in which the grandmother of one of the children lives. The poem, dedicated by the child to her grandmother, says how grandmother becomes “muscolosa”, muscular, from making bread. Still bread, “paen”, says the grandmother, needs to be handled slowly, “pien”, with the tenderness and light touch of an angel.

The possibility that the freedom to write poetry, linked to mindfully chosen and meaningful stimuli, may nourish the child’s self-perception as a valuable thinker is something to keep in mind in educational planning and, in particular, in view of the training of thinking and critical judgement, starting from early childhood. In some poems the children “brought” to school people who had a special significance in their lives, something that they had never previously done, making teachers and classmates witness to their internal dialogue with roots and themes that had a deep and far-reaching significance for them.

The teacher also proposed the experience of listening and reading poems, in their Italian translation, by authors of the ethnic origins of some of the children in class. Once again, poetry became an experience to be “tasted” and gave rise to an internal dialogue in each child with themselves, with the Other within the text and as part of their class community.

Conclusion

Based on Arendt’s perspectives on the promotion of critical thinking and judgement and Dolci’s ecopedagogy, the project adopted a participatory action-research methodology that, taking into account the needs genuinely perceived and identified by the teachers involved, proved to be particularly fruitful in terms of its aim of engaging in transforming society. The project explored the importance of bringing poetry to children and encouraging them to write it, leading them into deeper, more soulful forms of engagement in their work. Both the creative writing and the contemplative aspects of poetry were therefore nourished, revealing its potential as a form of language that awakens, disarms, and apprehends us as part of a process of personal growth and relational sensitivity. The many possibilities that poetry offers, as children were enabled to write about their feelings and emotions, recalling important personal aspects of their lives and giving space and words to experiences ranging from the individual to the universal, fully exercising their right to speak and freely interpreting topics and issues discussed. Moreover, children belonging to the culture of some of the poems discussed, were offered the possibility to become more aware of their own culture and contributed to making everyone else participate in it, thus becoming more attentive to some parts of the community in which they live.

In the spirit of Dolci and Freire’s ecopedagogy, the aim was to educate children to face everyday problems with action, creativity, and dialogue, supporting them in growth based on respect for nature, the rights of all and a culture of peace. Topics such as Picasso’s Guernica and the bread making activity, proved to be lively, open-ended experiences, which certainly contributed to making all the children experience – including those who in everyday school life seem to need teachers to stimulate their will to be there – the possibility of speaking up and occupying their own space. It is above all in poetry, even for those who experience their talent in this way for the first time, that something of their inner self is entrusted in an immediate, intense and enduring way, in words.