The Sensemaking Process of Academic Inclusion Experience: A Semiotic Research Based upon the Innovative Narrative Methodology of “upside-down-world”

Abstract

Authors discuss the topic of inclusion process in academic education from a semiotic and dynamic perspective. Inclusive experience in educational and academic context is constructed through the personalization of the processes of sensemaking within a wider cultural and shared social context. Authors have implemented an innovative tool for a qualitative research about sensemaking processes. They create the upside down world narrative methodology, namely, a double task of narrating one’s own experience in two times, asking participants to turn upside down their narration. Such a device allows grasping the inherent and constitutive ambivalence of each psychological process of sensemaking. Results of semiotic narrative analysis show that inclusion appears narratively articulated on two broadly generalized domains of sense as follows: the relationship with others and the training path.