Teaching through lives: biographical-narrative constructions thought as an active and meaningful methodology

Abstract

The present work intends to present as a perspective of the field of social sciences, the biographical-narrative approach of lives, has the founding potential – when applied in teaching – to activate and make meaningful (and significant) both learning and the lives of students and educators. Based on an interpretive and reflective reading, the methodology is based on a broad discussion about dealing with biographical narratives. Along with this, the relational possibilities that narrating and reconstructing trajectories reveal are pointed out, added to the understanding of how these are intercrossed in contexts and relationships at the micro and macro level, in the private and public spheres, encompassing traditional, popular and cultivated knowledge. This fact leads to the pedagogical latency of this methodological experience of teaching-learning-research. Therefore, it is intended to point to ways of operationalizing – disciplinary and also inter-, multi- and transdisciplinary – the processes and tools, as well as the gains in interests and contextualization of the contents proposed by the curricula and school calendars. These procedures have the relevant role of revealing the socio-historical present of the trajectories and of the agents that circulate educational life, but also of the families and, especially, of the students themselves, and place them as historical agents filled with subjectivities built in the daily interrelationships and intercoms. In this way, it is pointed out, finally, how the biographical-narrative approach has the potential to constitute itself as an active, interpretive and reflective methodology, without forgetting to be critical and to produce openings for the emancipation of the agents (educator and student).