Clara, From the Ghetto to the European Parliament

Abstract

Through the biographical reconstruction of Clara’s story, the authors analyze how her participation in dialogic literary gatherings (DLGs) enhanced her personal transformation. Clara received her primary education in a school located in a suburban neighborhood with a low socioeconomic level and great cultural diversity. However, despite difficulties, this is a school with enormous expectations of its students, in which successful educational actions such as DLGs are implemented. Memory, identity, sociability, and interactions combine in Clara’s story. She explains how she participated as a speaker in the Final Conference of the FP6 Project INCLUD-ED (December, 2011) at the headquarters of the European Parliament in Brussels in front of more than 300 people when she was only 10 years old. Clara tells the story of how this was possible due to sharing words with her schoolmates about classic world literature, including The Odyssey and Don Quixote, in the DLGs, spaces that gave her self-confidence and precious knowledge to now motivate and help other students succeed in their own educational trajectories.