Maria da Conceição Passeggi

Narrativas de crianças sobre as escolas da infância: cenários e desafios da pesquisa (auto)biográfica

This study deals with 4-10 year-old children stories and analyses how they portrait their experiences at school. It is the outcome of an inter-institutional research project performed at schools in Natal, Sao Paulo, Recife, Niteroi and Boa Vista. To collect data, we opted for conversations of children in groups of five, who would share a conversation with a little alien whose planet lacked schools. The analyses revealed consensus and tensions between scholar cultu - re and childhood cultures, which affect the way children play and learn, make friends or not, remain children or not. When narrating, the child redefines his/her experience and contributes to seize the primary school as a place where he/she becomes (or not) a citizen.

Autobiographical Narratives: Pedagogical Practice as a Lifeline for Hospitalized Children

The present article focuses on the meanings created by children with illnesses who tell stories—through the pedagogical practice of writing autobiographical narratives—about their experiences coping with chronic disease and hospitalization. Using the children’s autobiographical narratives to infer their perspectives, the authors here seek to understand how particular school lessons improve these children’s lives. We reflect on the possible role of hospital schools, and this pedagogical practice of asking for autobiographical narratives in particular, as one that affords the children a range of pleasurable and meaningful experiences, helping them to go beyond their intense treatment schedules and motivating them to rise every day to the challenges they face in the hospital.

Autobiographical Narratives in Education

For the past forty years, autobiographical narratives have progressively made their way into the world of education, opposing the canon of positivistic research, among various linguistic traditions: biographieforschung; biographical research; histoire de vie en formation; recherche biographique en education; investigaci on biogr afico-narrativa; pesquisa (auto)biogr afica. Within this context, they are used as research methods and as pedagogical mechanisms for self-actualization. Their epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and political principles are based on the assumption that the self is constituted in the narrative rather than being an essence that is hidden behind subjectivity. This phenomenon challenges the unique human trait of self-reflection, which gives meaning to what happens in life and to what happens to people themselves. Hence, this work investigates the processes in which children, youth, and adults, relying on various semiotic tools (natural language, digital language, graphics, design, images, gesture, and so on), organize their experiences and their duties as a plot line and, in this process of autobiographicalization, reinvent themselves. This text represents my reflections on the binomial “autobiographical narrative and education,” based on research carried out with children in projects financed by the Brazilian Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (Minist erio brasileiro de Cîencia Tecnologia e Inovaç~ao, or MCTI-CNPq), in various social contexts—schools, hospitals, families, rural communities, Indigenous communities, and Afro-Brazilian escaped slave communities— and gathering researchers from various regions in Brazil in partnership with colleagues from Colombia and France. To begin this investigation of the potentials that autobiographical narratives foment for education, health, and life in general, I am reminded of the words of Theodor Shulze, who conceived of these narratives on three levels: as life lived (bio), as text (narrative), and as process of self-actualization (reinvention) (Delory-Momberger, 331). At the intersection of the first two levels—life and text—the author proposes the notion of biographical subject. Anchored in the

Narrativas da infância: a escola no mundo urbano e no mundo rural

Este artigo tem como objetivo refletir acerca do sentido da escola para criancas de 6 a 12 anos de idade. A pesquisa foi realizada em dois cenarios: em uma escola da periferia urbana e em uma escola da zona rural, recorrendo a um protocolo comum. Em uma roda de conversa, as criancas falam da escola para um pequeno alienigena que vem de um planeta que nao tem escolas. As narrativas das criancas da periferia urbana evidenciam a escola como lugar de violencia tao presente em suas vidas. As criancas da zona rural narram a respeito da importância da escola enquanto lugar de convivencia e alternativa para mudancas de vida. Essas narrativas da infância nos ajudam a compreender as singularidades da escola em cada contexto, ressaltando o sentido desses espacos de acolhimento da infância para as proprias criancas.