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.

Keywords:
university; pedagogical research; experience; training of researchers; academic orientation

RESUMO:

Neste artigo propomos pensar a pesquisa em educação a partir das reflexões de uma doutoranda e sua orientadora acerca de dois processos singulares: a relação com a escola, que se vai produzindo no encontro com seus habitantes, e a relação de orientação que acompanha e sustenta tal caminhar investigativo. Conversando com esta experiência, pretendemos pensar as intersecções entre pesquisa e orientação a partir de um movimento de atenção, presença e liberdade. A pesquisa de observação participante, realizada por dezoito meses em uma escola municipal de Duque de Caxias, acompanhou o trabalho das professoras do ciclo de alfabetização a partir dos indícios oferecidos pelas crianças daquilo que as práticas produziam nelas. Entendemos que uma pesquisa construída a partir de uma abertura ao campo e às transformações que uma tal relação pode produzir nos coloca perante possibilidades outras de relação com o conhecimento, com a pesquisa e a orientação, que diferem do que vem sendo mais comum na universidade. A partir desta experiência, problematizamos os caminhos da pesquisa em educação e os modos como tem sido entendida a orientação no processo de formação de pesquisadoras(es) em educação, distanciando-nos de certos modos dominantes de relação com o conhecimento e reivindicando o compromisso ético com a transformação de si na relação com o mundo pela valorização de elementos que a ciência costuma menosprezar: a subjetividade, a incerteza, o corpo, a sensibilidade, a vida.

Palavras-chave:
universidade; pesquisa pedagógica; experiência; formação de pesquisadores; orientação acadêmica

RESUMEN:

En este artículo nos proponemos pensar la investigación en educación a partir de las reflexiones de una estudiante de doctorado y su directora de tesis sobre dos procesos singulares: la relación con la escuela que se produce en el encuentro con sus habitantes y la relación de orientación que acompaña y sostiene este camino investigativo. Conversando con esta experiencia, pretendemos pensar las intersecciones entre la investigación y la orientación desde un movimiento de atención, presencia y libertad. La investigación de observación participante, realizada durante 18 meses en una escuela municipal de Duque de Caxias, acompañó el trabajo de los docentes del ciclo de alfabetización a partir de las indicaciones ofrecidas por los niños de lo que las prácticas produjeron en ellos. Entendemos que una investigación construida desde una apertura al campo y las transformaciones que tal relación puede producir nos pone ante otras posibilidades de relación con el conocimiento, con la investigación y la orientación que difieren de lo que ha sido más común en la universidad. A partir de esta experiencia, problematizamos los caminos de la investigación en educación y las formas en que se ha entendido la orientación en el proceso de formación de investigadores en educación, alejándonos de ciertos modos dominantes de relacionarnos con el saber y reivindicando un compromiso ético con la transformación de si mismo en relación con el mundo, valorando elementos que la ciencia tiende a subestimar: la subjetividad, la incertidumbre, el cuerpo, la sensibilidad, la vida.

Palabras clave:
universidad; investigación pegagógica; experiência; formación de investigadores; orientación academica

“BECAUSE ALL I NEED IS FREE FEET, HOLDING HANDS, AND WATCHING EYES”

Guimarães Rosa (1997, p. 138-139) leads us into a conversation about research. His short sentence brings, as a metaphor, a precise synthesis of three central elements to think about the construction of research¹ in a public school: to avoid taking objectives and methodologies established a priori, as well as hypotheses and judgements, into the field; always to keep in mind that the research is produced collectively based on what happens in the field; and to pay attention to what happens and what goes through us. Each of these elements is a guiding principle for thinking about research in education in terms of both the relationship with the empirical field and the orientation relationship that supports this path of research in the construction of a dialogue with the school. There are two singular processes: the relationship with the school that is built in this way, and the relationship of guidance that accompanies and sustains such a journey in research. We intend to think about the intersections between research and guidance in relation to the attention, presence, and freedom that took place in a unique investigative process.

What we propose here is a text about the research process with two voices, a complex process that involves taking risks and challenges; a process of walking freely, without a pre-established direction, without an expected place of arrival, since “walking is, at the same time, walking along a path and opening a path” (MASSCHELEIN, 2008, p. 39). We understand that research built from an openness to the field and the transformations that such a relationship can produce presents us with other possibilities in terms of the relationship with knowledge, research and guidance that differ from what has been more common in the university. We will focus our attention on issues related to the formative nature of research in education and on the transformations in the relationship between teaching and research that we experienced in the process. For our discussion, we will bring the authors and concepts that have kept us company along this journey.

In this text, two voices and two movements intertwine: the voice of the doctoral student (Clarissa) in her research process for the preparation of her thesis, and the voice of someone who accompanies this process as a supervisor (Teresa). Therefore, we intend to show a double movement of orientation and building a relationship with the field as two elements from which a path of research is composed, preserving the uniqueness of each of the experiences that constitute this process. This reflection with two voices revolves around the following questions: how to research from an openness to the field? And how to guide the events that emerge from this relationship? Based on this experience, we sought to produce some displacements regarding the understanding of education research and how the role of guidance in the process of training researchers in education has been understood. The text is composed of fragments of experiences that touched us and that were intertwined and affected us.

“STEPPING ON THIS GROUND SLOWLY” ² (Pisar nesse Chão Devagarinho)

Clarissa:

I am an assistant professor of educational psychology at the Faculdade de Educação da Baixada Fluminense (FEBF/UERJ), pursuing a doctorate in the Postgraduate Course in Education at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Presenting the places I inhabit is important because research that is intended to be vivacious, lively is also affected by experiences outside the field, and these will be shared in this text—experiences lived in the process of training me as a doctoral researcher and those lived in my classroom, acting as a teacher trainer, from which I also (trans)form myself, because, as pointed out by Larrosa (2011, p. 7), there is a “constitutive relationship between the idea of experience and the idea of training”. In the different paths lived, I expose myself, I take risks, and I move, keeping in mind that:

Experience, in the first place, is a step, a passage, a path. If the word experience has the ex of exterior, it also has the per which is an Indo-European radical for words that have to do with crossing, with passage, with path, with travel. The experience, therefore, presupposes a way out of oneself towards something else, a step towards something else, towards that ex we spoke about earlier, towards the that of “that which is happening to me”. But, at the same time, experience also presupposes that something passes from the event to me, that something comes or happens to me. This step, moreover, is an adventure and therefore has something uncertain about it, it involves a risk, a danger. (LARROSA, 2011, p. 7-8).

As it could not be different, my investigative trajectory is modified by the affections and authors that permeate the research group of which I am a part, GESTE (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre o Trabalho da Educação - Group of Studies and Research on the Work of Education). Weekly participation in the group has given me exposure and displacement in encounters with authors that lead me to other ways of inhabiting education. There, I have learned to formulate questions. There, it has been possible to create a community in which we exercise care and generosity, in which each individual—with such different trajectories and backgrounds—brings himself or herself and contributes, asking provocative questions that set me in motion and invite me to think on events from other perspectives. Each semester, we share our texts in the process so that different perspectives can be cast on our writings, and suggestions can expand our conversations with other authors. There, based on the different research in progress, we can follow the work of education in different spaces, learning from other ways of experiencing education.

In addition, while carrying out the research, I am taking the last subject of my doctoral course, the elective subject “Narrative, Research, and Formation: Investigating the Daily Life and the Educational Experience”. The conversations that take place there, conversations with the texts and with the group, crossed me and provoked me to think about my investigation. This text brings such reverberations, because “as a pedagogical gesture, talking is directed not so much at what things are, but at what there is in things. We talk not so much about a text, but about its effects on someone, we talk not so much about knowledge, but about its resonances in us” (SKLIAR, 2019, p. 12).

It is Masschelein (2008, p. 36), one of the authors presented by the research group, who accompanies me at the beginning of my investigative path. When comparing the attitude in research with the attitude on a walk, the author reassures me when he points out that if I just pay attention, I will find the present there:

Attention (...) is a state of mind that is open to the world so that it can present to me (so that I can “get” to see it) and so that I can be transformed. Attention makes room for possible self-transformation, that is, a space for practical freedom. In my view, e-educating the gaze requires a critical research practice that makes a practical change in ourselves and in the present in which we live, and not an escape from it (towards a better future). This critical research practice does not depend on method, but on discipline; it does not require a rich methodology, but asks for a poor pedagogy; that is, practices that allow us to expose ourselves, practices that take us to the street, that move us.

I risk “disobedient” research, which does not bend to norms, “research that can itself force paths, point out roads, bridges, bifurcations, crossroads... and that invites to venture through them, experience them, feel them, learn” (GUEDES; RIBEIRO, 2019, p. 21). Thus, I embark on an adventure.

Teresa:

In the research group meetings, that moment when, weekly, we gather around the same text, previously studied and revived in the conversation and discussion that takes place at the time of the group meeting, other levels of understanding are raised by the various readings that are put into play there. Something sets in motion in this encounter between advisor and advisee(s), between a group of students and their professor or advisor. This moment of collective study, of academic work around a text, pluralizes readings and writing possibilities and, simultaneously, calls each one to make approximations between the methodological elements of the construction of the read text, the excerpts, the concepts, the ideas, and their research, to the construction and discovery of passages to their own text based on this collective reading. In this space-time of meetings, an attentional space-time opens in which sharing, discussion, and intensities allow the proliferation of different ways of constructing a research and writing production, singling out the forms of access to knowledge and existentializing the research process.

In the meetings, the positions of reader and writer alternate, as participants are also invited to present their work in progress to the group. In this community place, the participants experience forms of relationship with their particular objects of research based on contact with other texts, other research, and other readings. This process involves both those who lead the meetings and those who participate in them in a joint movement of questioning and problematization which seeks to escape the automatisms present in academic culture. These processes of experimentation, attention, and care expand the possibilities of interpretation, analysis and writing from a common base.

The orientation meetings are an inviting space to play, to practise displacement as a method in a movement that we make together, in which we are touched by others so that we can be collectively present in front of others and front of the things brought to our attention (INGOLD, 2018; GONÇALVES, 2020) in this coming and going of research between the field and the group, between the university and the school, between guidance and immersion in the field, and between the readings of each individual and peer readings.

RESEARCH AND GUIDANCE: BUILDING OUR WAYS

Clarissa:

The question “Miss, will you help me when I don’t know?” was asked by a second grade girl on my third day at school. In 2018, I was there for a few weeks to get to know a little about the school and those who inhabit it. I intended to find clues there about what I would research during the 2019 school year. With an attentive look at the present and suspending judgements and intentions (MASSCHELEIN, 2008) I opened myself up to the demand.

Her question is the key to the methodological route that I will pursue. It allows me to realize that children help each other as well as me being there, and that, being present, I can also participate, contribute. It is precisely through movement that we get to know the world; it is by being in the world and acting that we get to know it (INGOLD, 2011). It was therefore acting that allowed me to get to know the work carried out there and the people who produce it daily:

If our concern is to inhabit this world or to study it—and, deep down, the two things are the same since all inhabitants are students and all students are inhabitants—our task is not to take stock of its content but to follow what is happening, tracing the multiple paths of becoming, wherever they lead (INGOLD, 2011, p. 41).

In research built upon every day, the key found along the way fits much better than the one brought from home. Colasanti (2007, p. 21) asks:

Where do they take us? Where do all the lost keys take us? the keys that get broken the keys hidden from their lock In the forgotten box A fair measure key awaits me But it doesn't matter anymore while I was looking for it I lost the door.

In order not to miss the door, it is important to be attentive. Pay attention to the clues that come up as you walk. Such clues touch me, cross me, move me. For Masschelein (2008), walking would mean bringing one's position into play; it would mean exposition, being out of position, a displacement: “Walking along the road makes the road impose on us with a certain authority, that it guides our gaze and presents us with a dramatic reality in its differences, evidence that dominates us” (MASSCHELEIN, 2008, p. 38).

Thus, listening to the children’s narratives give me clues to the meanings constructed by them about the educational practices offered, and I realize that my investigation:

needs to remain open to the contingent, to the very flow that the act of research encloses, to the small, the minimum, the commonplace, to what is commonly rejected under the accusation of being unimportant. The curious look yearns for the unimportant. Because it is in the ordinariness that the transformative powers between subjects are hidden and revealed: how can we not pay attention to what happens between us? (GUEDES; RIBEIRO, 2019, p. 21-22).

Along the way, in the research group, I meet Ingold (2018) and I realize my intention was based on attention. I realize that I have been trying to inhabit the research responsively and attentively, and the research process becomes, for me, an educational process, as the author also calls it. I respond and act based on what goes through me, what I feel, observe, and hear, and the experiences transform me. Attention is what allows me to relate, walk along, and respond to what happens and to others, since “walking, as we have seen, requires the pedestrian's continuous response to the terrain, the path, and the elements. To answer, he must attend to these things as he walks, participating or participating with them in his movements. This is what it means to listen, observe, and feel” (INGOLD, 2020, p. 45).

The week I handed in the material to the qualifying committee, I began to question the use of the term ‘participant observation’. I asked myself why I must name what I was doing, the research I was building. We were coming to GESTE, reading each chapter of the English version of Anthropology and/as Education, and the following week it would be the turn of the fourth and last chapter, precisely in which, to my surprise, Ingold (2018) discusses the similarities between participant observation and education. From then on, it makes perfect sense to name my work in the field that way. The author describes this observation as a practice of exposure and attention, a practice of caring for others which takes us to a world where we can share the company of people, and which leads them to become a presence while it unveils and undoes destinies. When focusing on the term, the author points out that it is not only possible but interesting to observe and participate, as this makes it possible to learn from others and correspond with them based on real problems, even if not to find solutions (INGOLD, 2018).

When writing, when narrating what was experienced during the journey, I realize that the research is being outlined by the written words. Furthermore, the possibility of writing about what was experienced implies practising attention and exposition, and “writing transforms me and transforms what I think, so I cannot know what I think before starting to write about what I want to think” (GONÇALVES, 2019, p. 18). As I write, initially in the field notebook and then in much more detail on the computer, I feel attentive. As a narrator of my experience, I pursue two pieces of advice from Benjamin (1994) about the art of written narratives: not distancing from oral narratives and avoiding explanations, because narrating is not about spreading information but about sharing unique experiences. Writing allows me to go through what I experienced again, to dialogue with the reverberations of these encounters in me, and to face the unexpected, without seeking truths or pre-established goals. I seek, therefore, a “research-writing” that is produced in the process of researching, research “that can be written and experienced in the first person, that can say something about the self that investigates, be coated and invested with the word itself, with the trajectory unique [...] that has, itself, the authorship as a mark and way of walking, of inhabiting doing research” (GUEDES; RIBEIRO, 2019, p. 28).

For this, it is necessary to take risks, expose ourselves, expose our being, our stumbles, doubts, mistakes, our deviations and new beginnings, offering generous writing, certain that “experience has to do, also with not knowing, with the limit of what we already know, with the limit of our knowledge, with the finitude of what we know” (LARROSA, 2011, pp. 24-25). In conversation with colleagues from the elective discipline about what is put on the table by Claudinin and Connelly (2015), I notice a serious methodological slip: increasingly involved with what happens at school, I have put aside the field notebook and I write little in it, needing to resort to memory to describe on the computer screen what happens weekly. The reading and discussion of the questions posed by the authors resonated and forced me to use the notebook more often, even if only to write down individual words and short sentences, facilitating the later work of composing the text and enabling what happens to me to not be forgotten, to be narrated and shared. With sensitivity to listen and see what happens to us, what crosses us, we can live experiences that form and transform us, since it is in our ideas, feelings, knowledge, and intentions that the experience takes place (LARROSA, 2011).

I wish, more than researching a school, to carry out research with the school, with those who inhabit it. Along the way, it has made more and more sense, methodologically, to participate in this community and learn from people. When addressing the community of those who have nothing in common, Ingold (2018, p. 25) shares the etymology of communus (com, together; and munus, gift—that is, giving together), which suggests giving/offering together and points out that it is precisely the unique contribution of each one that propitiates the existence of the community.

Skliar (2019, p. 51-52), thinking about the community beyond the “naive idea of pure harmony in social and cultural relations”, points out that:

“Being together” does not suppose an intrinsic value or a virtue in itself: it would be a description—more than a definition—of what happens in the daily life of communities, nuanced not only by the power of the meeting or by the ability to develop a common project, if not, also by the impotence, by the mismatch, in short, by the discovery of mutual weaknesses.

[...] But it is not about approaching or assimilating this notion of “being together” to some sort of laboratory of coexistence without otherness or disturbance: “Being together”, said Jean-Luc Nancy (2007), is being in affection, is to affect and be affected; above all, it assumes the difficulty of thinking about a conversation within schools that, as such, raises doubts, hesitations, controversies, uneasiness, a kind of clash between the common and the singular, normality and the other.

Finally, “being together” is a starting point for “doing things together”, which does not imply the same actions, an identity, or consensus between points of view, nor equivalence in their pedagogical effects (SKLIAR, 2019, p. 51-52).

I have been participating in the community and with it, we have been doing things together. It would make sense for the thesis also to be a collective undertaking. Due to my concern for an ethical posture in writing, in the qualification, the board suggested that I show the text to the school team. In the same week that I am involved in writing the text, and rereading authors, I send the first chapters of the thesis to the school's WhatsApp group—after personally commenting that I would do so—and I point out that they are free to make suggestions and give feedback. For me, this is a decisive and tense moment because it involves risks, the risk of exposing what I think, the risk that reading will change our relationship when I return to school, the risk that people will oppose what I wrote, and risks that I cannot even imagine. Three days later, the director writes to the group: “Clarissa, I loved the reading. Many reflections arose, and thinking about our contradictions is one of them. Congratulations on the text and for your participation in the school. You are a Mariana.”³

Others respond similarly. I read and reread the messages the next morning. I go out for a run. I am in another city and the terrain is unfamiliar to me. My mind boils and I cannot stop thinking about what happened. I feel relief and joy. I start to run and a few meters later I find myself falling. The cement was uneven, and I did not lift my foot enough. As I fall, in slow motion, I realize my inattention. I scrape my knee and hands. A young man helps me up, though unnecessarily, and encourages me to continue. I keep running to another surface, outside the bike path, on the sidewalk, now more attentive and grateful for the gift I received. The fall is an important metaphor, and the blood and subsequent scarring will help me remember to practise mindfulness in my wanderings not just at school but in life as well.

More attentively, I await the beginning of the new school year so that we can meet in person and the teachers and advisors can bring details of what it was like for them to read the text and think about it, bearing in mind that:

A conversation is not just taking a position; it is, above all, a form of exposure: I expose myself to the elements of incomprehension, of untranslatability, of what I am not able to say, of impotence. And I also expose myself to what will come and cannot be known in advance, I expose myself to another exposure. And so, I think (SKLIAR, 2018, p. 13).

In this way, I will also be able to think about what they bring to the game and review my position, overflowing with the transformations that occurred in my writings. The experiences I've been having, in the field and outside it, have led me to expose myself, to take risks, to learn, and to look at my research.

Teresa:

Masschelein and Simons (2014) talk about the price of pedagogical research to propose a perspective that pays attention to the educational and formative dimension of the research activity, both for the researcher and for students or educators. Their proposition distances from the dominant tradition that understands research as the production of knowledge focused on cognitive aspects, which links access to the truth to the conditions of knowledge production. The authors think of the educational and formative character of research from another minority tradition, which postulates access to the truth from the transformation of the self. This tradition implies a change in the very existential condition of the researcher. In this sense, there is a relationship between truth and ethics that places the researcher's relationship with himself, with others, and with the world at the centre of the research process. Inspired by Foucault's idea of self-care, Masschelein and Simons (2014) emphasize the importance of an attitude of attention and care in the researcher's relationship with himself and others; it is about reaching a state of attention and transformation of the self—that is, a reflexivity willing to put oneself into question, to expose oneself to an unknown knowledge.

Jorge do Ó (2019, p. 49), from his reading of Bourdieu, refers to academic self-reflexivity as “the first condition of action, pointing to this skeptical modality that consists of incisively questioning what is closest to us and constitutes us even as transcendent and founding evidence”. Regarding research, this modality would imply a cognitive transformation that would allow thinking and encourage research processes in which knowledge and experience work on a mutual intersection plane. The price to pay for this self-reflexivity, to use the expression used by Masschelein and Simons, would be the need for self-vigilance, epistemic and existential surveillance, which allows us to break with ways of life and thought that are more familiar and in which we find ourselves comfortably installed to take a path marked by an understanding of the distance in the field and its determinisms, exposing oneself to a permanent mirror effect in which the forces of the body, affections, and cognition cross each other in a reflective displacement that presupposes an endless interrogation of one's epistemic posture.

From an understanding of the formative dimension of research, perceived as pedagogical research in the sense that Masschelein and Simons (2014) propose, we can think of guidance as having a crucial role in promoting this academic self-reflexivity.

WHAT CAN AN ADVISOR DO? WHAT CAN A RESEARCHER DO?

Teresa:

I return, adapting the question 'What can a professor do?', asked by Jorge do Ó (2019) at the opening of his book Fazer a mão. Por uma escrita inventiva na Universidade. This is a question that reverberates in my experience as an advisor and that is renewed or resurfaces in each new guidance experience due to the uniqueness of each process and each relationship that is established through it. As the author asks, “How can I escape sharply reflecting on the intensity, the multiplicity of events, the crossed forces that these encounters with my students always trigger?” (Ó, 2019, p. 25). It is, once again, about operating with care and attention that mobilizes me to try to understand what happens and what can be set in motion in this encounter between a student and the advisor within the university. What compositions emerge from the movement to build a path of research, from participation in an academic work process committed to experimentation, in the relationship with the field, in the relationship with reading, in the relationship with writing, betting on differentiated creation and dodging the logic of normalization of thought?

This movement takes place in group meetings but also individual guidance meetings between me and Clarissa. To the questions of how to enter, how to be there, there are questions of writing, of the construction of writing that emerges from this entry and this being, from a relationship that is built with the field, with the readings and discussions in the group and with a space for experimentation and freedom that is created in the orientation relationship. Creating space so that singular paths of research can be constructed implies availability and attention that materialize in this being together, in this being there, which is care, a willingness to deal with the unknown, with or without knowing.

Thinking together around Clarissa's questions: can I, as an observer, intervene in the processes and relationships that are taking place at school? How do I place myself? What writing methods can I exercise to reflect my relationship with the field? Can I do this, can I do that? Better to do it this way or that way? That is, the question of 'What can an advisor do?' is closely related to the question 'What can a researcher do?'

The idea of research as a practice of freedom, closely related to Foucault's understanding of practice, has inspired our understanding of research and guidance. For Foucault (2006), the practice of freedom is associated with the diagnosis of the present that his philosophy undertakes and is thought of as a possibility of relating to the present, since it is constituted as resistance to the modes of knowledge and power that are operating in present times. These forms of resistance to the present in Foucault’s philosophy are associated with a transformative relationship with oneself and with the world. The practice of freedom can be understood as experiences that operate through discontinuities, ruptures, and mutations, causing estrangement in what is closest or most common to us, making manifest the dangers associated with what is presented as innocent. Freedom, in Foucault, does not have a transcendental or universal value; rather it is constituted as a singular exercise that is inseparable from the possibility of transformation, and this possibility is closely linked to practices that are both engines of historical displacement and vectors of subjective transformation (LAVAL, 2018). Resistance, refusal, and disobedience (concerning power, disciplines, and norms) operate through a practice of the self that transforms us into what we are, what we have made of ourselves, and what is said we should be.

In this sense, to think guidance as a relationship that creates and sustains the conditions for experimentation, the transformation of the researcher into the research movement, allows us to highligh the formative dimension related to self-care that Masschelein and Simons (2014) attribute to pedagogical research. Within this perspective, the pedagogical can be understood as a way of relating to research from an ethical-political perspective that implies a process of de-subjectivation. This process, by pulling the subject out of himself, makes the researcher a subjectivity in movement and allows him to establish new relationships with questions related to research, education, training. At the university, this experience is linked to a collective practice, to a way of researching, saying, reading, writing, and thinking that escapes pure subjectivity and individuality and is affected by others (GONÇALVES, 2020).

What is at stake within this perspective is the importance to experience the possibility of working from a transforming understanding of research and guidance at the university, promoting other modes of relationship with the field, with writing, with science, and training, which, simultaneously, can make students’ teaching spaces—the classroom, the seminar, the research group—these spaces with their rhythms, their rituals, their exercises, their materials—spaces for experimenting with research practices, beyond the logic of conformation, transmission, verification or disciplinary normalization.

TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN EDUCATION AND RESEARCH

Clarissa:

Throughout the semester, I narrate to my students the situations that I experience in research, articulating them with the themes discussed in the classroom and provoking questions. The richness brought by the experiences is increasingly evident, and I perceive research and teaching as inseparable elements of the educational task, both supported by care and curiosity (INGOLD, 2018). I also hear stories from my students and authors who are committed to linking life with academia. In the week that I had held a creative writing workshop with one of my undergraduate classes, coordinated by two members of slam groups⁴ from the Baixada Fluminense region, interweavings emerged from the discussions experienced in the elective discipline of the chapters “Language: teaching new worlds/new words”, by Hooks (2019) and “The Mask: becoming a subject”, by Kilomba (2019).

I proposed the workshop because of my commitment to writing as a powerful tool for transformation. As pointed out by Gonçalves (2019) reading and writing exercises at the university as possibilities for transforming the self, of “testing oneself and testing oneself implies a relationship with the present, care and attention” (GONÇALVES, 2019, p. 8), offering a space to “displace oneself”.

The workshop was impressive. Maui and Hera, 18 and 20 years old, respectively, briefly shared the history of slam and brought some of their rhymes, rhymes flooded with affection, criticism, questioning, and stories. They explained that, even though the genre emerged in the United States as a space for denouncing social inequalities, and has remained so in Brazil, rhymes were also produced on the most diverse themes and what mattered was that the theme was true to us, that it was something that touched us and that we wanted to share.

We only had fifteen minutes to produce a poem. Increasingly affected by research at school and writing the thesis, this was the theme I chose. I also participated because, like hooks (2019, p. 34), “I don't want students to take any risks that I won't take myself, I don't want them to share anything that I wouldn't share myself”. In class, I produced the first phrases of the slam that follows. The last 12 lines I created at home, for the next class, in which all the students who wished to would recite their compositions, as previously agreed.

Attention, Attention? Action Research at school teaches me to look for what happens, for what I feel, for what I choose to practise. I have understood education as an attentive practice. Children, when heard, make the school alive. I feel accomplished fulfill myself on this road. My heart beats strong and burning. What a potent experience! For me this is proof Proof that I exist Proof that I resist, Proof that I trust Proof that right and wrong are both hanging by a thread. And that's okay. What matters is the process. Is to have an open heart and mind It is looking for company and realizing you're never alone. It is constant construction It is care and attention It is to keep walking And always always share.

So, I wrote about the research process. As happened with the others, the writing flowed. We were moved by the poems recited about sexism, fatphobia, abuse, families, loving relationships, and courage. Even though I have a habit of respecting those who prefer not to share, the students insisted, one by one, until everyone who did it, shared it. The insistence, at first, bothered me until I realized that it seemed to be shaping up to be an important experience for each of them, as it was “a writing that is made available to everyone for common use” (GONÇALVES, 2019, p. 20). All productions were valued by us. Skliar (2019) explains what happened, when he affirms education as a space for sharing our own stories:

Here is a sensitive and essential key that comes from the act of educating: listening and being able to tell our stories, whatever they may be, with the words that are ours, however, to make room for otherness. And this otherness can only originate from a certain form of conversation, which has nothing to do with hypocrisy or the arrogance of giving voice to those we believe do not have one.

This otherness comes from receiving the truths that others offer us; of a loving language, yes, but not of a banal love, but complex and surrounded by threats: a love that, born in the relationship with the other, extends beyond and desperately seeks that the world also becomes more loving (or just, or egalitarian, as others would say) (SKLIAR, 2019, p. 12).

In the elective course “Narrative, Research, and Training: Investigating the Daily Life and the Educational Experience”, when we discussed the texts by Hooks and Kilomba, I shared experiences in my class. In slam, language is also “taken, claimed as a space of resistance” (Hooks, 2019, p. 226), an art that presents ethically, aesthetically, and politically. Thus, a “culture of resistance” is created which has ethics as a pillar: more than once the teachers stressed that poetry could not break with human rights. In addition, in slam battles, the jury is defined at the beginning, five people being chosen from the public, the most diverse in terms of race, age, social class, gender, and sexuality, because, knowing that the evaluation is subjective, it guarantees that the views are multiple, that the perspectives are different, and thus the evaluation becomes more balanced and fairer.

It is important to mention that slam is spoken poetry, poetry that is presented with the body and the voice. Watching a battle is a powerful, moving experience, as the slams penetrate us, mark us, and bring us closer to each other.

Recognizing that through language we touch each other seems particularly difficult in a society that would like to make us believe that there is no dignity in the experience of passion, that feeling deeply is a mark of inferiority; for, within the dualism of Western metaphysical thought, ideas are always more important than language (hooks, 2019, p. 233).

On the contrary, feeling provokes me to think, encourages reflection, and makes me more attentive to the question of representativeness. Discussions in the elective discipline and my classroom potentiate the desire and need to problematize such issues at school.

Teresa:

Through Clarissa's account, we can follow the transformation of her teaching through her research experience. In his text Aula, Roland Barthes (1989) refers to his experience as a teacher as a process that went through several phases, implying different relationships between teaching and knowledge from an initial moment in which you teach what you know; through an intermediate phase of teaching what is not known, which the author identifies as research; and, finally, the experience of “unlearning, as a way of teaching from the unpredictable rearrangement that oblivion imposes on the sedimentation of knowledge, cultures, beliefs that we go through” (BARTHES, 1989, p. 45). This practice of forgetting, of unlearning, is understood as a way of keeping thought alive through a process of experimentation that allows the renewal of pedagogical and discursive practices that make teaching oppressive, that hierarchize pedagogical relationships and close research to the event, to what happens. We could associate this way of relating teaching to the idea of the practice of freedom understood by Foucault, referred to earlier. The orientation, including the research group meetings, would be a space where there is a possibility of renewing ways of doing research, reading, and writing practices, forms of relationship with the field, where the game could be (re)invented. Research is an experience of unlearning in this transformative and therefore formative sense proposed by Masschelein and Simons (2014). It is necessary to unlearn ready-made ways, predefined paths, and worn-out formulas for the possibility of renewing research in education and thinking within the university, including ways of relating to guidance.

Also, for Barthes (1987, p. 9), the professor's activity would consist of researching and speaking, “pleasantly dreaming of his/her research”. In a research group, in a mentoring relationship, this is a collective, shared dream, something that is put together so that a game can be invented in this movement of being together around issues of interest. Research emerges as a daily commitment to life, a fight that takes place between the vital force and the potential modes of existence that cross it, on the one hand, and the institutional requirements, judgements, deadlines, and verdicts on the other, during which work on oneself unfolds as a condition for the possibility of research inseparable from the act of creation. The Barthesian idea of teaching as a phantasmatic method, as a mirage, and its relationship with research, implies thinking, writing, researching in front of others, putting an object to be produced in circulation, working together based on a desire, an openness to encounters, creation, composition, an activity that is nothing more than the exercise of thought and its corresponding possibility of building new meanings. If, as Barthes (2004, p. 423) states, “investigation is never more than the set of people who seek (who seek themselves?)”, this relationship with research, with guidance, is of contagion and multiplication. A relationship where that which touches me, may then proliferate through other classes, other encounters, other texts, and other ways of doing things. The refusal of teaching as transmission and explanation, and the distrust of pedagogical relationships based on the hierarchy established from a certain relationship with knowledge, open up the possibility of practising the relationship of orientation based on being together through an interrogation, a movement from which thought unfolds, “looking, in common, to de-individualize processes and propose collective practices” (DIAS, 2019, p. 27). It is about thinking of teaching and, with it, guidance, as a process based on problematization that creates a space for “testing ways of thinking, based on the explanation of the methods and processes that sustain and make them possible” (Ó, 2019, p. 65).

Conceived and practised in this way, guidance operates within the scope of a shift towards teaching practised as research, identified by some authors with the movement produced by Foucault in his courses (EWALD; FONTANA, 2011; DIAS; RODRIGUES, 2020), but that we could extend to Barthes' perspective, present in Aula. Teaching research, in the case of Foucault, would be characterized, according to Ewald and Fontana (2011, p. XI), by “explorations for books, also exploring fields of problematization, which were formulated, much more like an invitation launched to potential researchers”. This work starts from the opening of thought, from working with the event to problematizing the relationship with knowledge, teaching, and research.

Practising teaching based on research, on a certain relationship with knowledge that problematizes the truth, exposes processes and ways of relating to the world and events beyond universalizing tendencies or the attribution of a priori meanings. This understanding of teaching as an investigative gesture allows us to shift the orientation towards a certain relationship with study, understood as patient experimentation, openness to the untimely by suspending productive time and social demands (INGOLD, 2018; MASSCHELEIN; SIMONS, 2014) and collective activity, linked to an ethical-aesthetic-political dimension related to the care of oneself and the world, which we mentioned above in the proposal of formative research by Masschelein and Simons (2014). In this perspective, also the idea of teaching as a test or methodological experimentation emerges as a possibility when assuming openness of thought to the event and to risk. Dias and Rodrigues (2020, p. 35) refer to this mode of teaching as “displacement teaching”, which implies not only a conceptual work but also an ethical one, insofar as it constitutes “an attitude, a way of doing that brings us closer to transformations, problematizations, and experiences”.

This way of understanding guidance, in this relationship with research and with this teaching displacement, tenses and suspends both the rituals and the usual ways of understanding the professor, or the advisor, as one who responds, who transmits, who directs, “repositioning it in immanent practices” (DIAS; RODRIGUES, 2020) which take place within the very movement of the accompanying research. In this sense, guidance practices “are affected by a radical contingency; that is, of a fragility, of a non-necessity, of a material character that is always subject to transformation” (p. 38).

The relationship of guidance - understood in this logic of openness to what moves and makes the research move - in which the supervisor and the student participate when based on practices of freedom and autonomy, moves away from a relationship of obedience or conformation. Understood in this sense, guidance is linked to a logic of emancipation in the figure of authority and mastery of the advisor, placing oneself in a relationship of sufficiency and autonomy. A space for listening that is crossed by questions and concerns shared between advisor and advisee, taken from an essential position of otherness that allows the construction of other ways of relating to research and guidance. As far as the advisor is concerned, it is not about transmitting knowledge but about authorizing and arousing in his/her mentor the possibility of learning and creation through the promotion of openness to the event and experience. That implies a transformation of their usual modes of subjectivation—hence the possibility of guiding even when the student works with something that the advisor does not know or knows little about. As Suely Rolnik states:

In this type of 'pedagogical' practice, the relationship between professor and student is on the order of complicity, made of a loving belief in the possibility that the student has to develop his work in this way in thought, a no less loving belief in the efficacy and value of this work as a potentiator of the ability to affirm life (ROLNIK, 1993, p. 249).

Clarissa:

On the last day of the elective course, a wide range of materials was arranged on a cloth on the floor: fabrics, ribbons, threads, and wool of different colours; needles, scissors, glue; and, printed on pieces of fabric, black and white photos of each of us. We were told to use the material the way we wanted and somehow represent what we had lived in the discipline. Around my image, I sewed a path made of orange ribbon, a path with curves, straight lines, and ups and downs. I also made a heart and sun with yellow and orange lines. I sewed affections. During production, as we looked at what colleagues were doing, ideas emerged. In the end, we arranged the productions one next to the other. What caught my attention was the creative power of each participant and the diversity of construction possibilities with the same available materials. As with research, there are always endless possibilities. This was the path chosen by me, the path that made sense to me, the path that made me feel.

To end the conversation, I could not fail to mention another Tim, who also always touches me and my classes. Tim Tim, presented by Genifer Gerhardt (2014), is a baby who shows us the importance of a watchful eye and teaches us “about paths, walks, and destinations, that arriving is not more valuable than walking, that meeting it is precious and necessary”.

SOME FINAL NOTES

Throughout our text with two voices and four hands, we rehearse a way of understanding research and guidance as practices of freedom based on a research experience developed with a public school. We explore the resonances of this process in the teaching and research practices of the doctoral student and the advisor, thinking of both research and guidance as paths that are traced from a shared lack of knowledge, based on an exercise of freedom which operates through displacements and transformations. It opens up other possibilities for thinking and practising the relationships between teaching and research, research and guidance, which may allow one to keep one's mind open to the untimely encounters that take place there. In this process, the virtuality of the research process is found with the ethical-aesthetic-existential dimension that emerges from the orientation and that we materialize in this text in the questions: 'What can an advisor do? What can a researcher do?' It is a research and guidance process based on the mutual and transformative implications between researcher and advisor that emerge from the transforming force of the research.

Teresa:

As a supervisor, I risk rehearsing answers to the questions posed above, stating that, in addition to the institutionally defined roles or those commonly assigned to the supervisor, supporting and accompanying ways in which research can be an instance of experimentation and transformation, maintaining its openness to the untimely through these encounters that take place during the supervising process, can contribute to expand the field of possibilities and allow us, and our students, to continue to dream their research at the university. A research-supervision relationship understood in this way, with its hesitations, concerns, and uneasiness, despite previously delimited problems or established ways of doing things, places the orientation process and the role of the supervisor in a place of beginnings that do not cease to configure themselves in each orientation, and we cannot predict where they will take us. Far from being an isolated, solitary, or even individualistic process, this adventure is a shared one. Starting with Clarissa on a journey of transformation, which is a path of no return, and writing a text that thinks about guidance in this relationship that is established through the uniqueness of her research process, constitutes a challenge and an invitation to incorporate other dimensions into both the research process and the mentoring relationship that accompanies it. It is a way of distancing ourselves from certain forms of relationship with the knowledge that prevails at the university and of claiming an ethical commitment to the transformation of oneself in the relationship with the world that our work in undergraduate and graduate courses can provide and what advisors and advisees can do in their practices and in the relationships they establish with research and guidance.

Clarissa:

Teresa and I rehearsed writing as a meeting place. Walking with free feet, holding hands, and attentive eyes, we experimented with writing as a place of study and formation. Revisiting the research process and narrating it allows me to understand it better, to review it from another place, from another point of view. Looking back without the butterflies in my stomach, without the fear of making a mistake, makes me believe that this educational research was possible because it had presence, attention, and freedom as its guiding elements.

Ingold (2018) dialogues with readers at the end of his book, saying he hopes that his work has opened some doors for research which were closed by most discourses on education. He explains that he sought to produce the key to open such doors. His wish came true. In the middle of the research path, I found this key book to enhance my methodological choices, strengthen my journey, and open doors to (re)think research, education, and school. There, a space was constituted in which it was possible to unlearn, in which an ethical-political attitude towards research was exercised, in which we sought to build other ways of living. The lived experience makes me firm in the belief of walking hand in hand with doubts to claim, with Larrosa (2011), what science usually despises: subjectivity, uncertainty, the body, sensitivity, and life.

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• 1
  Research approved by the Research Ethics Committee in April 2019.
• 2
  Excerpt from the song Alguém me avisou by Dona Ivone Lara (1980).
• 3
  The principal calls me a Mariana because that's what the teachers call each other and that's what the school is called. In the thesis, I risk becoming a Mariana, too, by participating in that community.
• 4
  Slam is the name given to the spoken poetry battles and recited genre at these events. It was invented in Chicago in the 1980s by poet and civil builder Marc Kelly Smith, with the aim of popularizing the art. The battles are open to anyone who wants to participate if they recite one of their own compositions, and the public is asked to collaborate in the performances, encouraging the participants.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 Sept 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  20 June 2022
• Accepted
  02 Feb 2023

• This document has a preprint version
  https://preprints.scielo.org/index.php/scielo/preprint/view/4112