Reading the Uncomfortable: Reflections on a Methodology for Engaging Children with Difficult Socio-Environmental Topics Through Poetry

Abstract

This article presents and discusses the preliminary findings of a participatory action research project in which a team of reading mediators investigates its own practice with the aim of refining it to address difficult socio-environmental knowledge with children in the Los Ríos Region of Chile. Drawing on the pedagogy of discomfort and the new social studies of childhood, it challenges the notion of childhood innocence as grounds for avoiding difficult knowledge and proposes the activation of a “brave space” in poetry mediation. Literary dialogue, from this perspective, entails ethically sustaining the discomfort that emerges when the consequences of the socio-environmental crisis are explored.

Drawing on the analysis and collective reflection of field notes and audiovisual content from the mediation sessions of Leonel Lienlaf’s poem “Imágenes”, the study identifies three recurring tensions: an interpersonal tension between mediator and students in response to misanthropic reactions; a tension among peers confronting divergent interpretations of an intervened landscape; and an internal tension when personal discomfort displaces engagement with the discomfort elicited by the difficult knowledge. The findings reveal a tendency among mediators to soften or prematurely foreclose these tensions. The study concludes that mediating poetry on difficult knowledge requires embracing the ethical and political dimensions of pedagogy: making tensions visible and holding space for them without seeking premature resolution, while safeguarding the integrity of children.