Dossier | Narrative research in ordinary teaching practice: multiple perspectives

Biographization/heterobiographisation: memorial elaboration of an auto(hetero)biographical character in teacher training

Biografização/heterobiografização: elaboração memorialística de uma personagem auto(hetero)biográfica em formação docente

Biografización/heterobiografización: elaboración memorial de un personaje auto(hetero)biográfico en la formación docente

Ricoeur, Delory-Momberger and Marinas shed light on another direction for teacher training.

The auto(hetero)biographical character has mutual recognition (attestation/ascription).

The article operates, among others, with concepts of biographization and heterobiographisation through teacher training processes in Research-Training Seminar, experienced through the memorialistic elaboration of an auto(hetero)biographical character, concept referring to the subject of the narrative process which requires reflection from the narrator since the narrative intrigue does not occur without the intention of narrating from himself to himself and to the other – listener or reader – movement that institutes the narrative identity demanding of reflexivity that takes place in alterity, built within a narrative circuit dedicated to the personal/professional teachers´training.

It is the narrative that gives our life a story: we do not narrate our life because we have a story; we have a story because we make the narrative of our life. (Delory-Momberger, 2014, p. 97)

The person, understood as a narrative character, is not an entity distinct from his “experiences”. Quite the contrary: he divides the regime of its own dynamic identity with the reported story. The narrative builds the identity of the character, which we can call his narrative identity, building that of the reported story. It is the identity of the story that makes the character identity. This [the] character’s dialectic of discordant agreement [...]; it is now necessary to inscribe [the character] in the dialectic of sameness and ipseity. (Ricoeur, 2014, p. 176)

Biographization ¹,understood as a narrative process at the interface between the individual and the social (Delory-Momberger, 2008), requires reflection from the narrator because the narrative plot that speaks of experience does not occur, on his part, without the intention of narrating from himself to other – listener or reader – demanding movement of reflexivity² that takes place in alterity, in our study within a narrative circuit wich Marinas (2007, p. 61) calls “circuit of word and experience”.

The narrative subject when constructing the narrative plot differs in formative terms from what he experienced before this process, due to the fact that when reflexively narrating personal/sociocultural experiences, he (re)constructs them as experiences, which is embodied in a formative process, as well as Josso (2016) also understands it.

Biographization is addressed by Delory-Momberger (2008, p. 57) when dealing with an hermeneutics of the (auto)biographical narrative which can be implemented through the constitution of a “biographical intelligibility, that is, on the way in which man learns his own life by recounting it”, experiencing it, in order to build “an unitary and structured whole with which he relates the moments of his existence” (Delory-Momberger, 2008, pp. 57-58, emphasis added by the authoress).

This process, conceptualized by Ricoeur (2014) as the synthesis of the heterogeneous carried out through a narrative plot woven by the meaning reflexively given to concordant/discordant elements of the experienced and held in the narrator's memory, makes one think of an autobiographical uniqueness, non-linear, however, always ready for new meanings and recompositions of narrativity (Abrahão,2022a). Delory-Momberger (2008, p. 58, emphasis added by authoress) pays attention to the fact that this process of biographization establishes what she calls biographical experience which, being cumulative, “is equally the place of experience and production of the self identity: the self that experiences as identical to itself insofar as he recognizes itself as an unique instance of reinterpretation of the successive figures of life”.

Ricoeur considers personal identity as sameness, the result of the dialectic between identity-idem and identity-ipse, referring to the permanence in time – but not static – of personal physical traits, tastes, gestures, among others, as well as character traits, beyond, therefore, the self identity, since, for Ricoeur (2014), talking about me is different than talking about the self³, subject of the reflexive grammatical category me (oneself).

Through a complementary dialectic to the previous one – that of the self constituted in otherness – Ricoeur (2014) offers us the concept of narrative identity: that which is narratively constituted between identity-ipse and the other that is not the self. In this case, it is about the narrator understanding himself by understanding the other (who listens to him, who reads him) as different from himself, which allows, in my opinion, the construction of an evolutionary narrative identity proper to the participant subject of the marinian narrative circuit, with which I have also been operating (Abrahão, 2016, 2018).

It is, therefore, this self that recognizes itself as different from the other, through the alterity that:

it is not added to ipseity from outside, as if to prevent the solipsistic drift from there, but it belongs to the content of meaning and to the ontological constitution of ipseity, this trait strongly distinguishes this […] dialectic from that of ipseity and sameness, whose disjunctive character will remain dominant. (Ricoeur, 2014, p. 371)⁴

Along these lines, we arrive at the notion of character built by Ricoeur considering the theory of action, since in narration “intrigue is precisely the configuration that makes a composition of events and characters” (Ricoeur, 2014, p. 265). Better, if read from the source, in another page by the same author:

A character is the one who performs the narrative action. The character category is, therefore, itself a narrative category, and its role in the narration depends on the narrative intelligence, which intrigues itself. […]. The thesis supported here will be that the identity of the character is understood by transferring to him the operation of the intrigue first applied to the reported action: the character, we will say, is himself intrigue. (Ricoeur, 2014, pp. 170-171, emphasis added by author)

[…] the person, understood as a narrative character, is not an entity distinct from their “experiences”. Quite the contrary: she divides the regime of its own dynamic identity with the reported story. The narrative builds the identity of the character, which we can call his narrative identity, building that of the reported story. It is the story identity that makes the character' identity. This is the character' concordant discordant dialectic [...]; it is now necessary to inscribe [the character] in the sameness and ipseity dialectic. (Ricoeur, 2014, p. 176, emphasis added by author)

How to inscribe the character as an agent of action in this dialectic, or rather, how to inscribe him in the dialectic of the self in alterity? Ricoeur (2014, p. 35, emphasis added by author) gives us the answer through the attestation construct:

Faith is also surety. […] attestation is fundamentally self-attestation. This confidence will be successively confidence in the power to say, in the power to do, in the power to recognize oneself as a narrative character [...]. This security remains the last resort against all suspicion; even if it is always in some way received from another, it remains self-attestation. This self-attestation that at all levels – linguistic, praxis, narrative, prescriptive – will prevent the question who? to be replaced by the question what? or the question why? Inversely, in the depressive emptiness of the aporia, only the persistence of the question who? however expressed by the lack of response, it will prove to be the invincible refuge of the attestation.

This movement (changing the question who for the questions what, why) “removes” the subject's action, understanding it as an action of the world. It is in overcoming this aporia of action without an agent that the subject of the action recognizes himself, through the attestation of himself or by the attestation of the action to the subject, that is, the character of the narrative. Recognizing oneself or being recognized as a character of the narrative leads us to the dialectic, constructed by Ricoeur, between recognition through self-attestation and alterity, that is, attributing the action to the subject through recognition of the other or through mutual recognition. I understand that, in Ricoeur, the statements I recognize and I am recognized do not obscure the narrative identity, since the “achievements of self-recognition-attestation cannot be lost, much less abolished when moving to the stage of mutual recognition” (Ricoeur, 2007, p. 262).

On the other hand, when narrating about himself, the character brings to the narrative experiences he wants to tell and those he wants to obscure, trying to build the narrative plot – the logical plot already mentioned – that gives them meaning. The narrative plot, whether aiming at the researcher's understanding or with the attention turned to the reading of peers or, even, of relatives and friends, or even of the narrator himself, works in human timespace. The conceptual dimension “human time” is learned in Ricoeur (2010, p. 85) in a text which clarifies that there is “between the activity of telling a story and the temporal nature of human experience a correlation that is not purely accidental”, so that “Time becomes human time to the extent that it is articulated in a narrative way, and that narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” (Ricoeur, 2010, p. 15). Human time, therefore, presents itself in Ricoeur with its own characteristic, especially given the understanding that the personal/sociocultural temporal character of the narrator's experience is articulated by the narrative, by clarifying the aporia chronological time/phenomenological time. Complementarily to human time, one can understand the human space dimension as in (Abrahão, 2022b, p.15):

[...] knowing one's own lived life is inscribed in a human space that goes beyond the contradiction between world space – geometric space – and experienced space – descriptively ordered, making it another space: the space experienced by reflexivity, narrative space, subjectivated and full of meaning.

This notion of third spacetime can be better clarified in Ricoeur, 2018, p. 159):

Between “narrated” time and “constructed” time, analogies and interferences abound. Neither one nor the other is reduced to fractions of the universal time and space of geometers. But neither do they offer a frank alternative. The act of configuration intervenes on both sides at the point of rupture and suture of the two levels of apprehension: the built space is also geometric space, measurable and calculable; its qualification as a place of life is superimposed and intertwined with its geometric properties in the same way as narrated time weaves cosmic time and phenomenological time together.

The narrated life, therefore, integrates a complex human spacetime system, as a conceptual dimension of this system.

Up to the present moment, I have approached the construction of the character on the part of the narrator, which is constructed through the process of biographization in a human timespace. On the other hand, there is the listener, in this case, the researcher-trainer, and possibly the reader at the other end, who also operate within a spacetime system. Listener and reader, given the biographization undertaken by the person who narrates their own life, when listening to it – or reading it – reflectively, they also change and, in the same way, according to their own references, weave an idiosyncratic construction of the character, process, this one, also of formative learning for both: narrative configuration. To this learning on the part of the listener and the reader, Delory-Momberger calls heterobiographisation, a concept she coined with the meaning of “appropriation process, of making the experiences of others one’s own” (Delory-Momberger, 2014, p. 156), through a “work of listening or reading biographical texts and the effects of understanding and self-formation” (Delory-Momberger, 2019, p. 89).

In this article, therefore, whenever I mention the narratives constructed through formative processes of biographization, I am referring to the narrator's narratives; whenever I refer to heterobiographisation, I allude to my own learning – also eminently formative – through research with memorials and narratives resulting from this process, always bearing in mind the understanding that through the process of heterobiographisation the researcher-trainer (and also the reader) will weave the own narratives, even if only mentally, as a result of the understanding of attentive listening and reading in the face of references that are their own. This is because the experience resulting from the reflective biographization and heterobiographisation process is cumulative, woven by the meaning reflexively given to concordant/discordant elements of what was experienced and held in the memory of the subjects of the narrativity, that is, the narrator, the researcher-trainer and the reader. Prior to a written or oral narrative, there is certainly a narrative gestated in the minds of these subjects who (re)configure the narratives throughout the narrative and/or reading experience.

I understand that in the process experienced in the narrative circuit, both with regard to biographization and with regard to heterobiographisation, auto(hetero)biographical narratives are constructed, which are the result of facts reflexively narrated by the character and received with attentive listening by the listeners – especially the researcher-trainer and readers of the given word⁵ – narratives, these, reconfigured in new and multiple interpretative possibilities according to theoretical perspectives and references woven in different experiential spacestimes of each one. Auto(hetero)biographical narratives therefore consist of speech acts by the character – the one who exercises the action of narrating her own life – within the process of enunciation and listening that Ricoeur (2014) prefers to signify, it should be remembered, as speech acts set in intrigue which operate with interpretive elements, both on the part of those who reflectively enunciate them, and on the part of those who listen or read them with attention and reflection.

The auto(hetero)biographical narrative woven in intrigue results, therefore, from a resignified totality of speech acts, concordant/discordant, clarified through idiosyncratic reflexive processes of the narrator, the listener, the reader in interpretative movements that operate heterogeneous syntheses of the narrated facts. Ricoeur (2014) refers to this movement that articulates narrator, listener and reader, through three dimensions of narrativity: Mimesis I, understood as prefiguration, moment of pre-understanding of the set world and the character's narrative action; Mimesis II, placed as a configuration of the action, an interpretative moment of the narrative; Mimesis III, affects the reconfiguration of the narrative action, moment of reflection of the narrated that unfolds in new configurations and narrative reconfigurations, made possible by diverse and diversified readings in auto(hetero)biographical processes of speech/listening/interpretation/understanding. In this Hermeneutic Circle, as alluded, narrator, listener and reader compete with different interpretations of the narrated, through constructive meanings and resignifications of the auto(hetero)biographical character because he is built as a result of different mimesis.

The Research-Training Seminars we have been developing have been consubstantiated as a constituent locus of auto(hetero)biographical characters, reason why, at this moment, it is worth remembering an example of this theory-practice that we have been elaborating in this regard. First, however, it is worth bringing to the text some notes about the Research-Training Seminar.

In relation to the auto(hetero)biographical narratives that occur through research at the university level – the focus of studies that I have been carrying out – I understand them as building elements of narrative identities (re)constructed in Research-Training spaces experienced as a formative process for the subject narrator who, by narrating himself reflectively, constructs himself as a character in the story of his own life. This is because, as already mentioned, it is through the plot weaving of the narrative that, according to Ricoeur (2014), a story is produced – the character story. But not only. This process is also formative for the researcher-trainer and for the pairs that participate in seminars of this nature. It is pertinent to clarify that the aforementioned teacher training, a corollary of this process, even before being a result, is a goal set and worked on in the seminar collective.

Since 2006, I have been working with Research-Training Seminars, carried out especially Josso's light (2002), which take place during a semester at the university, both with graduate students in the Pedagogy course and with students Master's and Doctorate in Education. In Graduation, object of this text, I have developed this seminar in the first semester of the course. I usually leave the structure of the Formation Memorial, which represents the “product” of the seminar, whose “complete” construction I ask the students at the end of the semester, to the will of the students with regard to the shape and physical support of this piece. I only ask that this be the result of an intentionally reflective process, since it was developed within the scope of the Research-Training Seminar, therefore experiential-training, that reflects experiences during the student years prior to arriving at the course, which may correspond to the years of early studies to the present stage. For this reason, I have always received reflective memorials, presented in different formats using different supports. For example: bound containing a set of commented photos and/or in the form of poems whose verses are rich in information from relevant life experiences. There is a Memorial that was presented in the manner of a Theater of Shadows, which, later, became, with the necessary and appropriate requirements, firstly into a Course Completion Work (TCC) and, later, into a beautiful Dissertation (Hossein, 2013). There is a Memorial written in the format of a comic book, which I will bring in collation later in this text.

To the effort to understand the data and information posted in the memorials, in addition to the ricoeurian hermeneutic circle, previously mentioned in this article, I adopt a methodology called scenic understanding by Marinas (2007), according to the concept in which the categories of subjects are understood as a space for enunciation, in which the relevant narrative elements are outlined in scenes as the narratives relate to their contexts. This assertion is made explicit by the author, as follows: “scenic understanding implies understanding the story not as a linear, cumulative story, but as a repertoire of scenes” (Marinas, 2007, p. 118). Continuing, Marinas (2007, p. 118) seeks to clarify what he calls the model of scenic understanding:

Among these [scenes], the first (E1) is the one that brings together [in the process of] listening, the narrator and the interviewer. Phenomena occur in it that refer both to the logic of the intimate (transfer) and to the social and discursive conditions (reproduction or rupture of the dominant discourse, and innovation). Scenes 2 are the ones that form part of the everyday life of the narrator, his positions as sender and receiver cross back to Scene 1 as they are updated in it. In this game between scenes 1 and 2, the possible step or emergence of repressed or forgotten scenes takes place.

According to a reading of this methodology, I understand the different scenes of the utterance/heard as integrating a space-time system which “shapes” the narration process, that is, the development of the narrative circuit that involves narrator, listener (researcher-trainer) and reader through the word given and consequent listening or attentive reading of these subjects of (auto)biographical narrativity, in narrative modulations, pre-configured, configured, reconfigured, experienced, in particular, at the moment of enunciation and in moments of reading the narratives put into text. These different mimesis are “fed” by the mnemonic effort of the narrator who searches for meaning in concordant/discordant scenes of daily experiences for the construction of the autobiographical narrative.

I understand that the moment of enunciation is crucial for the word to be given with meaning, this because I usually say that if listening is not attentive, ceases to be sensitive at the moment of scene 1, ultimately the word will not be given in such a way as to build a narrative full of meaning. For what reason? Because the given word contains a commitment. What commitment? The one that guarantees the narrating circuit, guaranteeing the significant relationship between narration and listening, not only because of what Marinas calls the core of the deed, but also because of the peripheral dimensions of what happened to the narrator. Adding the Ricoeurian hermeneutics of the self to the process of Marinian enunciation, where reflective narratives and attentive listening occur, which links the self in otherness with the diversity of this self, we can know the possibility of understanding auto(hetero)biographical characters that are constructed through these processes. Below is a scheme that represents the marinian theory, according to my reading, which I have been discussing in previous writings.

Note: Scene 1 Enunciation; 2 Scenes from everyday life; 3 Repressed or forgotten scenes.

Source: reinterpretation (Abrahão, 2016, p. 69) of the original Marinas' construct (2007, p. 118).

In the Research-Training Seminar, which we have been developing⁶, these scenes from the marinian scheme are articulated to provide self constructions that are meaningful and re-signified in different phases of the seminar. In the seminar, there is an initial step that welcomes the events of the agreement phase and the phase of introduction to the construction of the formation history nrrative, of the jossonian model. In this process, referring to the acceptance of the construction of a memorial, this did not have immediate and peaceful acceptance on the part of academics of the Pedagogy Course. Not all, but some. Most likely because they are enrolled in the Education Research Course and not specifically in the Research-Training Seminar.

Naturally, due to the characteristic of the discipline, the semester was not reserved only for research on (auto)biographical tradition, which, among other methodologies, includes this seminar. Students, therefore, had, during the semester, classes that dealt with different research methodologies, both with theoretical and practical contributions. At the same time, they participated in a Research-Training Seminar, preserving the jossonian phases, but adapted to students at this level of study, whose “product” is the writing of a reflective memorial – the Formation Memorial. Although this activity was of a personal nature, it worked within the scope of the seminar with commented readings in the circle of colleagues – narrative circuit – during the steps of writing the memorials, a process that lasted for the entire semester. Initially, as already mentioned, the activity was not as well received as the research project activity was by all the participants in a class of 30 students. This task of writing about oneself caused a little fear at first. However, during the development of the semester and especially at the end, there was no student who was not engaged in the process and loved the seminar, loved narrating about himself and his training until then, producing a reflective memorial constructed in the most diverse and more creative ways.

For the undergraduate students, scene 1 of the marinian model, had the jossonian phases of elaboration of narratives and collective work on narratives well modulated. It is in the time-space of scene 1 – moment of enunciation that foresees the attentive listening for the word to be given – that the pre-configuration thought takes place, in this process, according to the ricoeurian hermeneutic circle. In the Research-Training Seminar, in its development, scene 1 represents the narrator/listener relations, at the moment of enunciation. During this process, the students brought objects to the classroom – toys, clothes, school report cards, photos, albums, music CDs, books, etc. – that made them remember facts and moments experienced while narrating parts of their own life trajectory. They shared these moments through the narrated and listened to the manifestations of their colleagues. In the next class, they brought part of the written memorial, including excerpts from the manifestations of colleagues. And so on until the Formation Memorial is concluded. In the phase of understanding and interpreting the narratives, in which the researcher-trainer's contributions brought some conceptual elements that would help them to establish more significant understandings of why certain facts they experienced, allied to the very rich phase of the balance of the researcher-trainer and the participants, moments were provided during which the students orally evaluated how they felt their own participation, the participation of their colleagues, that of the researcher-trainer and how these moments were rich in helping to understand the experienced by each one, an understanding that they also expressed in their respective memorials. It is in these two “last” jossonian's phases model that I understand that the configuration and reconfiguration of the narratives constitute itselves, especially, through new and renewed understandings of the experiences of the students participating in the seminar, but not only, this hermeneutic circle also experiences the researcher-trainer who, like the students, carries out a comprehensive balance of their own experiences in this process.

Thus, the Formation Memorial concerns the process and resultant of remembrance with reflection on facts reported, orally and/or in writing, through a life narrative, whose intrigue (plot) makes formative sense for the subject of the narration, provided that there is always the intention of clarifying and re-signifying aspects, dimensions and moments of training itself, as well as meaning training opportunities for colleagues and the researcher-trainer. The constructed memorial is, therefore, the product of training practices generally carried out through Research-Training Seminars in the area of Education that are developed in academia, with intentionality aimed at continuing education, both for the participants and for the researcher-trainer.

With regard to the process, it is about experiencing the reflected moment of the narrative of experiences that, through reflection, are embodied in experiences. It is about the narrator, creator of the memorial himself, being the subject of the narration (although he is also the object of it), a character aware that the reflection undertaken is a sine qua non element for understanding one's own formation and, furthermore, that the The moment of narration, as understood here, is also an idiosyncratic formative moment for everyone involved, depending on the references of each participant, whether students or the researcher-trainer.

The narrative plot about which I have been studying and writing makes sense when weaving facts, relating them to the socio-political and cultural context of the narrator. This intrigue also links, in the same warp, the spatial context with the temporal one, in such a way that the narration presents itself, as Ricoeur (2014) wants, with a three-dimensional nature, in which past, present and future are intertwined in the sense that the temporal nature of the narrator's experience, both in the personal and social order, is articulated by the narrative, especially when it clarifies the chronological duality time/phenomenological time.

The three-dimensional temporal nature of the life narrative is made explicit by remembering the past with eyes of the present and allows prospecting the future, which is why the narrative plot itself does not necessarily seek to obey a linear and sequential logic. The Ricoeurian human timespace can be perceived in life narratives, which does not elide the possibility of the narrator telling us about life through age groups and named places, as can be seen in the following narrative, because in addition to temporal chronology and space geometric it is in the feeling (re)signifying of the absences and presences of loved ones, of “comings and goings” in formative processes and other situations of the lived and experienced, that the duration of human timespace presents, in this case, a stronger accent in the comic strip in the subtitle that follows.

Biographization/heterobiographisation of an auto(hetero)biographical character

Next, a Memorial built in comics as an illustration of the creative and artistic possibilities of students, allied to the comprehensive reflection and construction of a of meaningfull narrative elaborated in a Research-Formation Seminar, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) ), first semester of the Pedagogy Course, in 2010, made available by the author, whose name I did not write to preserve the identity (source: researcher-trainer file).

Source: PUCRS Pedagogy Course student's memorial, first semester of studies in 2010 (researcher's archive).

The memorial prepared in comic book format by the Pedagogy student, in the first semester of the course (2010 school year) is surprising due to the authoress' power of synthesis. The student, in no more than 24 pictures and a few sentences in each one, tells us her own life trajectory through a meaningful narrative, woven into an intrigue that synthesizes the heterogeneous experience whose beginning, middle and end comprises a period that extends from birth to adulthood. Despite the economical characteristic of the narrator's words – it is worth remembering, a story built in comics – one can observe the density of the reflection present in all moments of the writing and of the figures that make up the memorial. The guiding thread of the narrative introduces us to the experienced knowledge of life within a large family, of a remedied class, in which there was no lack of love, a sense of belonging and union, but also a sense of renunciation and a feeling of forgiveness. It is also noted a powerful imagery thread – the constant presence of the train – that made displacements possible so that the family could always get together, whether when the student and her parents traveled to be close to the other family members, or when brought them to live in the same city, or even to distance the father at times when his presence was required by the formation of a “second family”, only discovered later. The comings and goings provided, from childhood to adulthood, by the train trips, metaphorically let the narrative show human time-space, through the comings and goings in the course of the student's experiences, as well as the pivotal moments (Josso, 2002) present in special in the sentimental life and in the student life. The figuration of the train seems to be the amalgam that sediments the construction of the student's narrative identity, a construction that is perceived whenever she seems to realize, through reflection, the lessons learned in experience, in different spacestime, not only of the narrative, but phenomenal of life itself. Stylistically, the text of the memorial that integrates the comics presents a form wich honors the content treated until then. There is a beginning that introduces the narrative and a closing that does not leave the text unfinished, both with messages that, despite being written in 2010, remain very significant today.

Scene 3 seems to suffer from the meaning attributed to it by Marinas. As for the text, it is difficult to perceive elements that induce us to think about scenes forgotten or repressed by the narrator. What we have is a reflective memorial of events that happened to her and the understandings that reflection on these facts gave them meaning. It's not about all the facts, about everything that happened in a lifetime; not even the truth of these facts, but the truth for the authoress of facts that were dear to her and, for that reason, resignified during the self-reflective process. I don't think I have elements to say that this or that choice to narrate was biased; that this or that choice to leave something out of the narrative was due to restrictive reasons or because of forgetfulness. On the contrary, although explained only “lightly”, practically in passing, we can perceive moments of terror, not only by the written narrative, but, mainly, by the image in the comic. Would she have been physically assaulted that night, possibly even raped? We don't know, but we know of a suffering that had a strong impact and was reflectively narrated. It is also possible to perceive moments of support from the family and what seems to be the helplessness of the father in relation to the child in which she had to bear the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. And thus, so many other understandings, so many other learning experiences, so many other feelings; a whole life of ups and downs, a whole reflexivity in the sense of activating a prospect in search of better days for herself, without forgetting the thought turned to the need for humanization of being and living in the world (box 2). Anyway, here the maxim that an image is worth more than a hundred words seems to create conditions for us to think that, in this Memorial, what is not said with all the words, even so, is said, does not configure as forgotten or repressed scenes. The content of the student's narrative, as well as the auto(hetero)biographical formative process that took place in the respective Research-training Seminar, will be analyzed in the light of previously worked theorists in the following section.

Open understandings: auto(hetero)biographical memorialistic construction of a character in teacher training

I take the time to close this text to understand it as an advance directed towards a new knowledge oriented to teacher training, establishing a differentiated theoretical-practical dimension, aimed at a new epistemological level, by highlighting the value of Research-Training Seminars, of which, based on the reflective movement on formative experiences in this context, brought to the fore an example to accentuate this modality of formation as a unique experience lived in a creative environment of self-invention and expressed in memorials elaborated as works of art, in which the art of living and recognizing/being recognized as a character of the experience is expressed in different ways (comics, shadow theater, poems, sayings related to photos and videos, etc.). These are, in reality, works of self-reinvention encouraged and arising in the context of self-(hetero)biographical narratives and listening/understandings. Concepts such as biographical intelligibility, narrative timespace, narrative identity that, along with other constructs were worked on in this text, allow us to understand that not only the student narrator, but also the students participating in the Research-Training Seminar, the researcher-trainer and, even the reader of the Formation Memorial, when reading it reflectively, constituted, in this process, auto(hetero)biographical characters as a result of the synthesis of idiosyncratic learning of epistemic subjects when they produced knowledge of themselves with the other through formative praxis in mutuality; subjects of experience lived in processes of auto(hetero)biographisation; subjects who build narrative identities by understanding themselves in alterity. Therefore, not only the student narrator constituted an auto(hetero)biographical character. However, given the possibilities of space in the text of the nature of this and to represent the formation of the other auto(hetero)biographical characters that took place in the collective of this seminar, I brought to the collation a Memorial of Formation. The memorial of a student whose narrative the reader had the opportunity to appreciate in a previous item.

It was during the Research-Training Seminar that the student's reflective narrative action constituted her as a character who attests (to herself) the story of her own life. This action of narrating found receptivity in sensitive, attentive and also reflective listeners who understood that the student narrator is the subject of her own narration (ascription). I understand that this process took place as a constructor of narrative identities: of the student in alterity with the study group, reflectively weaving memories; of the researcher-trainer and of her colleagues – this other of hers different –, and of this group among themselves, in mutuality with the narrator colleague. The student's narrative identity was constituted, therefore, in this collective, in a different movement from that which constitutes personal identity, the result of the dialectic between idem identity and ipse identity. Unlike the constitution of personal identity, the mutuality that exists in the constituent alterity of this narrative identity was eminently formative for the student narrator, for the researcher-trainer, as well as for the other members of this seminar, in an idiosyncratic way, however, because it is the result of the references of each subject in this formative process. I understand that this phenomenon also occurs with the subsequent reader, when lending new meaning to the narrated. It is pertinent to remember what I said earlier in the sense that I consider teacher training to be a corollary of this process that took place in the Research-Training Seminar, without forgetting, however, that this training was an objective set by the group of participants, by the researcher-trainer and intentionally worked on in the seminar collective.

Likewise, equally important, there is a different other of the narrator student, with which she dialogues in the narrative later transformed into text in the aforementioned memorial that integrates in a space-time frame the images and words placed in the comics presented in the previous item: grandparents, parents , boyfriend, daughter, assailant, alterities, these, which also gave experiential meaning to the narrativity of this character who emanates when telling us about the past, thaught in the present, prospectively with eyes on the future.

This Formation Memorial reveals the reflexivity of the narrator student in the process of biographization – an eminently pre-configurative comprehensive movement – which enabled her to express her own experiences in terms of life experiences and formation, built in narrative intrigue. This mimetic device took place within the scope of the seminar in the collective moments of reporting and listening to the memorial, during its construction and, equally, when reading the “final” format that was given to it. Thus, the biographization of the student, according to my heterobiographical reading – an eminently configurative comprehensive analytical movement – revealed (Marinian scenes 1 and 2) the intentional reflexivity that took place in this process, which enabled her to express her own experiences in terms of life experiences and training, with the inclusive Ricoeurian identity narrative construction, which was woven, as already explained, in alterity with different subjects – the people she recalled during the narrative explanation – but not only. This other, also different from her, was resignified in relation to the researcher-trainer and the colleagues of the Research-Training Seminar, in different human time-space, experienced during the duration of the seminar, in an auto(hetero)biographical movement that was comprehensive and eminently (re)configured.

In short, in my opinion, the word is given; listening, in my understanding, was attentive (Marinas, 2007; Abrahão, 2018, 2023), it was sensitive (Josso, 2002), generating a narrative that enabled the comprehensive analytical exercise that took place through a Ricoeurian hermeneutic circle that provided the full word (Marinas, 2007). The word was full on the part of those who narrated the experience and those who listened or read it reflectively; however, the narrated experience represented the moment of the narration, not the moment of the event, which is why the event was interpreted by the knowledge that the student (character who performed the action of narrating) had of the past to understand it reflectively in the present of the narrative, according to their own references, and projecting the future (biographization in pre-configuration In the same way, the attentive and sensitive listening of the listeners (in this case, the researcher-trainer and colleagues in the Research-Training Seminar) provided heterobiographical configurations of the narrated and, certainly, also the sensitivity of the reader of the Training Memorial, which took place /will be filtered by references that are known to him, (re)configuring the narration of the character (heterobiographisation). These elements, idiosyncratic of understandings through different mimesis of the events narrated in the comic book brought in the present text, made possible the construction of a differentiated character – the one constituted by the narrator, the one understood by the researcher-trainer and colleagues from the Research-Training Seminar, the imagined by those who read the Formative Memorial or who will read this text – an auto(hetero)biographical character, constituted from different alterities.

Thus, the memorial of the undergraduate student, brought here as an example of many other formative narratives built in the various editions of the Research-Training Seminar, allows, in conclusion, to return to the title and recognize the heuristic value of seminars of this nature to refine our perception of narated life in teacher training processes via biographization/heterobiographization in the construction of an auto(hetero)biographical character.

Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2016). Intencionalidade, reflexividade, experiência e identidade em pesquisa (auto)biográfica: dimensões epistemo-empíricas em narrativas de formação. Em I. Bragança, M. H. M. B. Abrahão, & M. Ferreira (Orgs.). Perspectivas epistêmico-metodológicas da pesquisa (auto)biográfica (Tomo 1, pp. 29-50). CRV.

Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2018). A Aventura do Diálogo (Auto)Biográfico: narrativa de si/narrativa do outro como construção epistemo-empírica. Em M. H. M. B. Abrahão, J. L. Cunha, & L. Vilas-Bôas (Orgs.). Pesquisa (auto)biográfica: diálogos epistêmico metodológicos (Tomo I, pp. 25-49). CRV.

Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2022a). A intriga narrativa em História de Vida de uma destacada educadora sul-rio-grandense – (re)construindo a personagem. Em R. Costella, & V. Menezes (Orgs.). Retalhos em trama: entre fios do narrar, docenciar e geografar (pp. 21-39). Ed. UFRGS.

Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2022b). A hermenêutica do si via construção de um memorial acadêmico. Prefácio. Em M. A. Cunha. Escrever uma vida: o diário como fonte de pesquisa-formação (pp. 9-18). Caravana.

Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2023). Méta-mémoires-mémoires; le mémorial de formation. Em: M. Passeggi, & V. Braum (Orgs.). Mémorial universitaire et de formation. Une culture narrative dans l’enseignement supérieur au Brésil. Collection Histoire de vie et Formation (No prelo). L’Harmattan.

Delory-Momberger, C. (2008). Biografia e educação: figuras do indivíduo projeto. Paulus; EDUFRN.

Delory-Momberger, C. (2014). De la recherche biographique en éducation: Fondements, méthodes, pratiques. Téraèdre.

Delory-momberger, C. (2019). Hétérobiographie/hétérobiographisation. Em C. Delory-momberger (Org.), Vocabulaire des histoires de vie et de la recherche biographique. Érès.

Hossein, T. S. (2013). A formação docente inicial e o teatro de sombras e luz-eu: reflexão da vida e formação a partir das escritas de si. [Dissertação de mestrado, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul]. Repositório da PUCRS. https://hdl.handle.net/10923/5616

Josso, M-C. (2016). Processo Autobiográfico do Conhecimento da Identidade Evolutiva Singular-Plural e o conhecimento da epistemologia existencial. Em M. H. M. B. Abrahão, L. Frison, & C. Barreiro (Orgs.). A Aventura (Auto)biográfica. EDIPUCRS.

Marinas, J. M. (2007). La escucha en la historia oral: palabra dada. Sintesis.

PhD in Human Sciences-Education from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (1989). Senior Researcher at CNPq. She is part of the Permanent Teaching Staff of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Pelotas. Leader of the Research Group “Teacher Professionalization and Identity: singular/plural narratives”. Email: abrahaomhmb@gmail.com

O artigo opera, dentre outros, com conceitos de biografização e heterobiografização ativos mediante processos de formação docente em Seminário de Pesquisa-Formação, vivenciados por meio da elaboração memorialística de uma personagem auto(hetero)biográfica, conceito, este, que denomino como referente ao sujeito do processo narrativo o qual exige reflexão do narrador visto que a intriga narrativa não ocorre, de parte deste, sem a intencionalidade de narrar de si para si e para o outro – ouvinte ou leitor – movimento instituinte de identidade narrativa exigente da reflexividade que se dá em alteridade, construída no seio de um circuito narrativo voltado à formação pessoal/profissional de professores.

Palavras-chave: Pesquisa narrativa. Memorial auto(hetero)biográfico. Formação de educadores.

El artículo opera, entre otros, con conceptos activos de biografización y heterobiografización través de procesos de formación docente en Seminario de Investigación-Formación, através de la elaboración memorialística de un personaje auto(hetero)biográfico, concepto, este, que denomino referente al sujeto del proceso narrativo que exige reflexión del narrador ya que la intriga narrativa no se da sin la intención de narrar de sí mismo a sí mismo y al otro – oyente o lector – movimiento que constituye la identidad narrativa exigente de la reflexividad que se produce en la alteridad, construida dentro de un circuito narrativo dedicadado a la formación personal/profesional de los docentes.

Palabras clave: Investigación-narrativa. Memorial auto(hetero)biográfico. Formación de educadores.

Linhas Críticas | Journal edited by the Faculty of Education at the University of Brasília, Brazil e-ISSN: 1981-0431 | ISSN: 1516-4896

Full reference (APA): Abrahão, M. H. M. B. (2023). Biographization/heterobiographisation: memorial elaboration of an auto(hetero)biographical character in teacher training. Linhas Críticas, 29, e47664. https://doi.org/10.26512/lc29202347664

Full reference (ABNT): ABRAHÃO, M. H. M. B. Biographization/heterobiographisation: memorial elaboration of an auto(hetero)biographical character in teacher training. Linhas Críticas, 29, e47664, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26512/lc29202347664

All information and opinions in this manuscript are the sole responsibility of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the opinion of the journal Linhas Críticas, its editors, or the University of Brasília.

The authors hold the copyright of this manuscript, with the first publication rights reserved to the journal Linhas Críticas, which distributes it in open access under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

1Whenever the authorship of the highlight is not indicated, the italics are mine to highlight constructs, dimensions, relevant concepts to (auto)biographical research.

2The reflexivity concept is used in this text in two conceptions: as an act of reflected thought and as mutuality in the alterity between the self and the other, as the case may be.

3“Saying self is not saying I. I stands or is deposed. The self is reflexively implicated in the operations whose analysis precedes the return to itself. In this dialectic […] the ipse and the idem are grafted” (Ricoeur, 2014, p. 30, emphasis added by author).

4It is the “first determination of selfhood through its contrast with sameness” (Ricoeur, 2014, p.347).

5Word given, a powerful concept found in Marinas (2007) when clarifying that the word to be given requires attentive listening. In Josso (2016), a sensitive listening.

6The Research-Training Seminar in the jossonian model (Josso, 2002) is structured in phases, some of which are discussed below, as they have been outlined in our seminars.