Narratives and counternarratives of fragility. Pedagogical counseling in schools as a space for reflexivity

Abstract

The paper offers a critique of public narratives of fragility, highlighting their simplifying and individualising character. The case of CransMontana is taken as emblematic for a rereading of these narratives and for the opening of possible new forms of punctuation. From this perspective, fragility is understood as a structural condition of human existence, always embedded within relational contexts, and the focus shifts from a purely individual dimension to a biopsychosocial perspective.
Building on this framework, the paper analyses the role of schoolbased pedagogical counseling as a professional space for dialogue, participation, and the coconstruction of meanings in relation to the complexity of children’s and adolescents’ functioning.
As an illustrative example, a researchtraining pathway dedicated to pedagogical counseling for teachers is presented, based on the use of the critical incident technique, with the aim of fostering new possibilities for educational action, within which fragility can be disentangled from individualising interpretations, resituated within the complexity of contexts and within forms of more communally oriented responsibility.