Conversations Between Research and Orientation: Walking Barefoot in a Public School

Abstract

In this article, we propose to think about research in education through the reflections of a doctoral student and her advisor on two unique processes: the relationship with the school that is produced in the student encounter with its inhabitants and the orientation relationship that accompanies and sustains this investigative path. Considering this experience, we intend to think about the intersections between research and orientation through the movement of attention, presence, and freedom. The participant observation research, carried out for 18 months in a municipal school in Duque de Caxias, followed teachers’ work on the literacy cycle considering the evidence offered by children of what the practices produced in them. We understand that research built from an openness to the field and the transformations that such a relationship can produce allows us to access other possibilities in the relationship with knowledge, with research and orientation that differ from what has been common ground in the university. From this experience, we problematize the paths of research in education and the ways in which orientation in the process of training researchers in education has been understood, distancing ourselves from certain dominant modes of knowledge production and claiming an ethical commitment to the transformation of self in the encounter with the world by valuing elements that science tends to underestimate: subjectivity, uncertainty, the body, sensitivity, and life.