Adolescenza e orientamento sessuale: il confine pedagogico tra solitudine e isolamento

Abstract

This contribution aims to explore the different connotations of the experience of solitude in adolescence as a specific biographical transition. Our research used some autobiographies by homosexual adolescents. We conducted a narrative analysis of the data coming from that research in order to re-read those different connotations of solitude in a pedagogical perspective able to offer a formative interpretation of experiences and conditions which are usually considered as exclusively negative or painful. We start from a preliminary semantic and conceptual delineation of the different expressions and meanings of solitude as an inescapable experience of living and growing. Then, we can consider it through an educational lens as a fundamental component of the process of anthropogenesis. The contribution focuses on the particular phases of solitude experienced during adolescence, proposing a distinction that is relevant from a pedagogical point of view. On the one hand, solitude can be considered as a human disposition to an inner search and, therefore, more easily associated with educational contents; on the other hand, solitude can be considered as an accident due to external factors that risks turning into isolation (as in the cited case of the social and cultural interpretation of sexual orientation). On the basis of this distinction, it would be desirable that the pedagogical reflection makes a further passage from the phenomenology of the experiences to the hermeneutics of the experiences, in order to find and explain the transformative potential of the conditions of risk or suffering. Ultimately, that potential glimpsed in the formation of self-reflexive and narrative skills necessary for the ability to make changes and relocations with respect to one’s own growth in a period of life as complex as that of adolescence.