Lending Potential: Literature as a Cognitive Commons for the Neurodiverse Classroom

While contemporary educational agendas increasingly attend to the socio-emotional dimensions of learning, the prevailing inclusionary praxis remains paradoxically tethered to a technicist paradigm. By reducing neurodivergence to a checklist of deficits requiring environmental accommodation, this model frequently overlooks Immordino-Yang’s insights into the affective grounding of all high-level cognition. Grounded in Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of the self and Louise Rosenblatt’s transactional theory, where the literary work is understood not as a static artifact but as a dynamic event requiring the reader’s agency, this paper argues for a radical reconceptualization of the literature classroom. Moving beyond the medical model toward the critical perspectives of Damian Milton, the study proposes the environment be viewed as a cognitive commons rooted in the principle of “lending potential”, a concept expanding on Jerome Bruner’s acts of meaning. Here, strategies traditionally reserved for special education are universalized to create an ecosystem of reciprocal empowerment: neurotypical students gain affective access to divergent realities, while neurodivergent learners shift from being passively “accommodated” to holding equal epistemic status. In this framework, supported by Vittorio Gallese’s research on embodied simulation, the act of reading functions as a lateral exchange. The specific cognitive architectures of neurodivergent learners reveal themselves as privileged interpretive keys capable of unlocking textual nuances otherwise invisible to the normative gaze. The analysis draws on a practice-led inquiry conducted within Italian upper-secondary schools with the neuroscientific partnership and mentorship of the IRCCS Stella Maris Foundation. It traces how students engaged with the structural idiosyncrasies of canonical texts, utilizing the safe distance of fiction, as defined by Jean-Marie Schaeffer, to recognize and validate atypical cognitive patterns. Participants found in Italo Calvino’s protagonist, Cosimo, a model for how the oppositional refusal of the “vertical withdrawal” can be seen as a necessary strategy for sensory regulation; in Luigi Pirandello’s Vitangelo Moscarda a mirror for the dysphoric vulnerability of rejection and the exhausting labor of social masking; and in Lewis Carroll’s Alice, a validation of arborescent, visual, associative, and non-linear thinking. Through the examination of students’ perspective-switching rewritings and visual interpretations framed through John Dewey’s aesthetics of experience, the article demonstrates that when the curriculum is reimagined to welcome both the capabilities and the challenges of the neurodiverse mind as a necessary interpretive authority, the classroom transcends its function as solely a space of instruction: it becomes a strength-based ecosystem where students cooperate by sharing and compensating for their diverse, yet complementary, sets of skills and needs. Promoting the ideals of autonomy and self-determination advocated by Paulo Freire, this pedagogical action fosters genuine student agency and empowerment. Finally, it becomes a site of what Rita Felski terms “recognition”, a community of practice where the reshaping of text facilitates the reshaping of the self, allowing students to weave their singular lived experiences into the collective fabric of culture.