E-ducate the eye and the gaze: audiovisual narratives, school context and supervised curricular internships¹

Abstract

This text is part of an investigative project in the field of teacher professional cultures. It aims at thinking about the processes of (re)construction of teacher identities that take place during the initial teacher training courses, especially among the teachers-to-be who are undergoing training in the Teacher’s Training Degree in Nature Sciences at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of University of São Paulo (EACH-USP). During this period, the students carry out compulsory internship activities in schools. We asked the intern/students to elaborate audiovisual narratives that would unveil aspects of the interactions observed in classroom situations. The theoretical stake opened up two fronts: the education of the eye and the education of the gaze, aiming at the denaturalisation and deconstruction of contemporary gazes by encouraging different discursive orders about the schools. As a research hypothesis, we suppose that, as the type of language employed in the discursive production is changed, also changed is the education of the gaze via the education of the eye, allowing for invisible topographies, such as the processes of teaching and learning, to gain visibility by means of audiovisual language. The short films were analysed in the multiple languages employed: body, verbal, visual and sound, mobilising, in the students/interns, different ways of presenting how they lived the moment of their training. The conclusion is that the immersion of the interns/students in a single school, during one semester and a half, up until the production moment of the audiovisual piece, allowed them to experience the denaturalisation of concepts about what a state public school might be, grounded on their experiences with the production of short films.

Teacher identities; Professional cultures; Audiovisuals; Cinema; Supervised internship

Resumo

Este trabalho insere-se em um projeto investigativo no campo das culturas profissionais docentes, com a finalidade de pensar sobre processos de (re)construção de identidades docentes que ocorrem durante os cursos de formação inicial de professores, especialmente professores em formação, da graduação em licenciatura em ciências da natureza da Escola de Artes, Ciências e Humanidades da Universidade de São Paulo (EACH-USP), no período em que realizam atividades de estágios obrigatórios nas escolas. Solicitou-se aos/às estudantes-estagiários/as a elaboração de narrativas audiovisuais que dessem a ver aspectos observados por eles durante o acompanhamento de interações ocorridas em situações de sala de aula. A aposta teórica deu-se em dois flancos: a educação do olhar e a educação do olho, com o intuito de desnaturalizar e desconstruir miradas em curso na contemporaneidade por diferentes ordens discursivas acerca das escolas. Como hipótese de pesquisa, supomos que, ao se alterar o tipo de linguagem empregada na produção discursiva, modifica-se a educação do olhar via educação do olho, possibilitando que topografias invisíveis, como processos de ensino e aprendizagem, ganhem visibilidade plástica por meio da linguagem audiovisual. Os curtas-metragens foram analisados por meio das múltiplas linguagens empregadas: corporal, verbal, visual e sonora, mobilizando, nesses professores em formação, diferentes maneiras de apresentar como vivenciam o momento de sua formação. Conclui-se que a imersão dos/as estudantes-estagiários/as em uma mesma escola, durante mais de um semestre e meio, até o momento de produção do audiovisual, possibilitou-lhes desnaturalizar concepções do que possa ser a escola pública a partir de suas experiências com a produção de curtas-metragens.

Identidades docentes; Culturas profissionais; Audiovisuais; Cinema; Estágio supervisionado

Introduction

Do we suffer the burden of an excess of images? No we don’t. The excess lies in the fact that the information system “does not operate through an excess of images but by selecting the speaking and reasoning beings who are capable of ‘deciphering’ the flow of information about anonymous multitudes” (RANCIÈRE, 2009, p. 96). What is questionable is the type of pattern employed in the edition of images, words and sounds, as stated by Jacques Rancière (2012, p. 94 [2009, p. 96]):

[...] An image never stands alone. It belongs to a system of visibility that governs the status of the bodies represented and the kind of attention they merit. The issue is knowing the kind of attention prompted by some particular system.

We decided to begin the text grounded on the paragraph above in order to prepare the ground to be covered in the intern/students’ journey as they elaborated audiovisual narratives during their compulsory internships. In the wake of Alfredo Bosi, Carlos Miranda (2001) makes a distinction between the education of the gaze and education of the eye. The former regards “education of the internal movement of being” (p.29), tributary of reflections of literature in the education field, referring both to the importance of the students’ access to the diversity of products generated by the cultural industry, and the creation of teaching methodologies employing moving images and sounds, be it in basic education or in higher levels.

Still according to Miranda, (2001, p. 29) “the expression ‘Education of the Gaze’ has become, therefore, current in the texts intending to approach, generally, the relationships between school and culture”. The education of the eye, in its turn, swerves away from the pedagogical concerns as it problematises the production of images and sounds:

[...] as part of a visual educational programme, which precedes to the technological development of the industrial production of images […]. By Education of the Eye we are trying to think the historical origins of the industrial production of culture, considering the latter as part of a political/aesthetic programme wider than the moment of its industrial configuration. Such programme precedes the technological development of the nineteenth-century, necessary for the consolidation of the industrial culture. (MIRANDA, 2001, p. 29-30).

As Miranda mobilised such distinction, he aimed at perceiving the specificity of the nineteenth-century regarding the eye and the gaze, that is, the gaze carried out by means of apparatuses. According to this author, the novelty of that century regards:

[...] possibility of producing and reproducing images by devices, and also in an industrial form and scale […]. After all, this is the century of photography and cinema, and, we can say, of the construction of industry of the moving images and sound. (MIRANDA, 2001, p. 30).

We are interested in that which regards transformations in the “forms of visibility of the real that the devices’ gaze provokes” (MIRANDA, 2001, p. 30), because such changes are not only the result of a technological possibility, but, above all, are “part of a wider visual educational project, which can hark back to Renaissance perspective and to the Cartesian ‘gaze’ (MIRANDA, 2001, p. 31).

Jan Masschelein (2008) in his turn, proposes the importance of educating the gaze, not as in educare (to teach), but “e-ducere: to lead outwards, go outwards, take outside” (p. 36), so that “e-ducate the gaze does not mean to gain a critical or liberated vision [..], but, instead, to became alert, means to pay attention” (p. 36), understanding it as the opening of a “space for a possible self-transformation” (p. 36). That is: “e-ducate the gaze requires a critical research practice that carries out a practical” change in us and in the present we live, and is not a flight (towards a better future). (p. 36).

Practices that may interpellate us to go to the streets, that move us, that shift us, that allow for our exposition. E-ducate the gaze, for the author, can mean an invitation for walking, for, as we walk, we shift our gaze and this movement allows for an experience, “not only as a passive living experience (of being commanded), but also as a kind of trail of the passage along the road” (MASSCHELEIN, 2008, p. 37).

The act of walking is not necessarily linked to changing the geographic position of the body, but, above all, challenge this bodily position, throw it into the game, leave it out-of-kilter, so that the geography of the roads may lead us, command us. This command does not refer to “the power of a tribunal, it is not the imposition of a law or principle […], but the manifestation (learning) of a force that puts us in motion and thus opens the way”, pushing us “to move from where (who) we are” (MASSCHELEIN, 2008, p. 39). The power of the road³ that arrests us, takes away, leads outwards. Other places, other passages.

We carried out an exercise with the students/interns of the teacher-training graduation course at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP). We sought to encourage, through the production of audiovisual narratives, the creation of educational spacings by means of the practice of walking as a being alert exercise, leaving the invisibilised topographies of the schools to lead the film cameras.

One is talking about spacings, other topographies, nearly imperceptible roughness, small nothings that compose the strength of the roads, rendering evident the tenuous frontiers produced by often imperceptible shifts. Shifts between an education of the gaze, an education of the eye and the e-ducating of the gaze – constituents of visibility devices. Mobilisation made by the students/interns as they share a common sense, here understood as:

[...] a common sense’ is, in the first instance, a community of sensible data: things whose visibility is supposed to be shareable by all, modes of perception of these things, and the equally shareable meanings that are conferred on them. (RANCIÈRE, 2012, p. 99 [2009, p. 102]).

The visibility device, for this author, is nothing more than common sense, that is, “ a spatiotemporal system in which words and visible forms are assembled into shared data, shared ways of perceiving, being affected and imparting meaning” (RANCIÈRE, 2009, p. 102), i.e., we all have the capacity to feel and learn.

We operate, then, an overlap of the education of the gaze, of the education of the eye and the e-ducating of the gaze, with the aim of having the teachers-in-training reach beyond figuration: the illustrative and the narrative (DELEUZE, 2007). As interns, it was expected that such teacher-training graduate students would cease to be observers alienated from the school context in order to become agents immersed in the daily life of the school. In this way, the proposed exercise was meant to problematise the pre-conceived eye regarding the school as an institution and have these teachers-in-training experiment the school by means of sound and image information (ALMEIDA, 2004). It was no longer about school, but about working with the people who animate it grounded on their own experiences, i.e., to have the interns/students them look at the school from within. Once immersed in the school context, the interns/students’ choice of images built part of the audiovisual narratives carried out with the school’s students, teachers and staff. Such students carried out a true immersion in the schools – the spaces, the people, time – where they did the internship, not seeking to find the right image to collect and compose an audiovisual narrative portraying the institution in question, but, instead, to select and edit images and sounds to fiction the composition of another school altogether.

We believe that this immersion in schools exercise, by means of the education of the gaze, leads the intern to think about his or her own role within what will be their professional field, thus contributing to the awareness of their own professional identity being formed.

For Maurice Tardif (2002), complexity is a feature of a teacher’s training, given the multiplicity of factors converging for it to unfold, from personal and professional experience to the contact with different cultural spaces and sources of socialisation, among others. As recalled by Claude Dubar (2005, p. 136):

[...] identity is nothing but the result at once stable and provisional, individual and collective, subjective and objective, biographical and structural, of the diverse socialisation processes that, together, build individuals and define the institutions⁴.

We believe that the gaze directed towards a school institution through an audiovisual narrative may serve as a bridge linking multiple factors that represent the school and teacher, leading the intern to problematise his or her own training as a teacher. Under this light, we analysed the interns’ audiovisual narrative pieces seeking to answer the questions: where are the gazes of the future teachers directed towards as an audiovisual narrative about the school/field is built? What are the experiences and conflicts that emerge in the construction of such narratives? What languages and metaphors are used to overcome technical challenges in the construction of the narrative?

Our hypothesis is: when the kind of language employed in the discursive production is changed, also changed is the education of the gaze by means of the education of the eye, inducing the motor-sensorial schemes – which always link us to the organic representation of what means to learn – to be intercepted by other forces. This has shifted the suspension of chronological time in our interns into another time frame: that of the event – impossible to be portrayed, captured. Below we present what we understand by audiovisual narratives so that we can sketch out our methodological procedures.

Of audiovisual narratives

In order to present to our students the proposal of carrying out audiovisual narratives about the school where they carried out their internships, we sought inspiration in one of the methodological clues presented by Rancière in the Emancipated spectator:

[...] The point is not to counter-pose reality to its appearances. It is to construct different realities, different forms of common sense – that is to say, different spatiotemporal systems, different communities of words and things, forms and meanings. (RANCIÈRE, 2009, p. 102).

In this sense, João Moreira Salles (2005)’s and Arthur Omar (1978)’s formulations about documentaries were important, because both authors denaturalised the production of this type of cinematographic language, placing it as a tributary of narrative fiction, so that the object of its construction is very similar to the fictional film.

Salles (2005) states that the documentary can be many things, among them: “the product of the businesses and institutions that make documentary” (p. 60); “the manner in which the spectator watches the film” (p. 60); “a specific type of rhetoric” (p. 65). Further, he considers that every documentary has two distinct natures: they are “the record of something that took place in the world” (p. 64) and of a “rhetoric built on what was recorded” (p. 64). For this author, there is a traditional documentary formula: “I speak about you to them. There is the documentarist (I), there is the character (you), and there is them, the spectators” (p. 67). The characters, for Salles, are countless, however, the person filmed is only one.

Omar (1978), in his turn, states that the documentary film does not exist as autonomous language, and that which we call documentary “is a by-product of narrative fiction, devoid of any formal or aesthetic apparatus that may allow for the fulfilling its hypothetical minimum programme with independence: to document” (p. 406). Additionally, “in order to be a documentary, an exteriority of the subject and object is needed […]. One only documents that which one does not participate in” (p. 410). For the author, there could emerge “types of anti-documentaries that would relate with their subject in a more fluid way and would constitute open-ended objects for the spectator to manipulate and reflect” (p. 408).

Omar is not stating that the documentary does not exist, but he advocates the idea that “the mode of appearance of its object, the mode of building an existence for this object is rigorously identical to the fiction film, and, therefore, does not constitute a real option in the face of it” (p. 406).

Resulting from the notes by Salles and Omar, our approach of the exercises for the eye and gaze were intended more in the educational context of audiovisual narratives or short films, as proposed by Moletta (2014), than of documentaries’, for the latter is situated in the polemic frontier between fiction/non-fiction. Besides, the very concept of fiction finds diverse approaches in contemporary thought, and, briefly, we present the one we aimed at, tributary of Michel Foucault. The French author stated that he only wrote fictions:

I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or “manufactures’ something that does not as yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth. (FOUCAULT, 1994 [1977, p. 193] apud RODRIGUES, 2007, p. 44).

This was the notion that drove us, allowing the interns to produce their audiovisual narratives in the schools more like potencies that, even if thinly, fracture/shift, the naturalised discourses about themselves, than that which is lacking, the absence of life potency. For Bondia (2002, p. 21), “the experience is what cuts through us, what happens to us, what touches us. Not that takes place, not that which happens, or that which touches”.

This idea of experience alluded by the author, converges with what we expected to take place with the interns during the compulsory internship in Basic Education schools. Thus, as we followed the activities developed in school, as we observed the various dimensions involved in the interactions inside the classroom, our expectation was that something would take place with the interns, something so that they could, indeed, live experiences that would contribute to their transformation as teachers-to-be. We expected, then, that the interns were “subjects of the experience”, which, according to the quoted author, is defined as a “territory of passage, something as a sensitive surface that is affected by what takes place somehow, produces affects, inscribes some marks, leaves traces, some effects” (BONDIA, 2002, p. 24).

For some teachers in training, the internship activities, in themselves, allowed for experiences, since, as personal traits, this opening was already present in them. Notwithstanding, for others, different stimuli were necessary so that they became subjects of the experience, since they were used to superficiality in the information and the speed with which things happen (BONDIA, 2002). The request that the interns produced an audiovisual narrative allowed for all to experience, beyond the opportunities provided by the observation tasks in the schools, another transforming experience, given by the production process of the audiovisual narratives.

Thus, to meet the demand of producing an audiovisual record about some aspect related to classroom interaction observed in the schools where the internships were taking place, the teachers in training, above all, made choices and made decisions. This demanded that they reflected deeper about what they had experienced so that, grounded on this, they were able to create their own narrative. This process fits into the dimension of the education of the gaze, since it was associated to the experiences that the interns had in the school’s daily life and that has affected them, directly interfering in such choices. But this process also related to the education of the eye as it demanded from the interns appropriations and recreations of the realities observed as they composed, by means of sequences of images, sounds and texts, a single product of their authorship, allowing transformations, both in them and in their colleagues, who, as they were faced with this other reality, could also live experiences.

In the sense of the education of the eye, what interested us the most to investigate was the way in which the audiovisual narratives produced by the interns were felt as experiences both regarding the origin (observation of classes in a basic educational context) and the process through which they are produced, a process that is, in itself, an experience. Regarding both the education of the eye and the education of the gaze, we sought to understand how the choice and experiences of the interns reflect and are reflected in the construction of their teacher identities, i.e., how the audiovisual narratives relate to the training of teachers.

Part of the internship timetable was organised in such as way as to contemplate the preparation of students/interns to produce images, preferably in movement, about the interactions taken place in classroom situations. Based on these audiovisual pieces, our expectation was that, by means of the cinematographic language, the student/interns produced other ways of saying and of rendering visible the school context, pointing at potencies by means of a thinness that which is, habitually, considered the school’s reality.

This research is part of a wider investigation that has involved the collection, cutting and selecting of the audiovisual pieces produced during the course in 2012. Of the total 21 pieces produced, we selected three narratives, after analysing the visual, verbal and sound languages employed. This selection was a result of the particular ways in which the students/interns dealt with the thickening in the act of teaching, in a formal context of education, by means of its presentation in an (for them) unfamiliar language, in a context of teachers training: the cinematographic.

This peculiarity regards the first choice of the use of body languages⁵ as the students/interns presented their audiovisual narratives, also rendering visible other modes of being in the school context, now attended as interns and in a training situation. These many dimensions of being in school have allowed the students to e-ducate the gaze in another way, one which refers not to anything in any particular way, but, instead, to e-ducate the gaze by means of shifts operated between resistance and the possibilities of disturbing educational habits when understanding school as a space of training – of pupils, teachers, teachers-in-training, inspectors, cooks, cleaners etc. - and a space of the training of sensibilities.

The body languages of educational gestures are, necessarily, ingrained in us. We understand the human being and our corporeality as “naturally the site of images” (BELTING, 2014, p. 79), natural in the sense that “a living organ for images […]”.

[...] all the devices that we employ today to store and export images, and even if such devices supposedly set the rules, the human being continues to be the place in which the images are received and interpreted in a living sense (therefore ephemeral, not easily controlled etc. (BELTING, 2014, p. 79)⁶.

Body languages imbricate with image choices and with the montage carried out by the interns, who carried out contingents to aesthetic choices, because the rules of the game imposed not to film bodies in full. Recording faces was especially ruled out. Rules that, expounded at the beginning of the process, bungled the initial filming processes. It was up to the interns to mobilise strategies and languages, privileging certain parts of the body and other modes of making seen the context of the school where they carried out the internship. They resorted to strategies like pasting masks onto the faces of the pupils filmed, unusual procedure in our visual repertoire, often crystallised in certain types of cinematographic and photographic takes.

We have sought to identify how the interns made their decisions, via audiovisual language, in order to tackle issues such as the care in preserving the identities of the pupils and other technical difficulties. Furthermore, the stake on an education of the eye and an education of the gaze, as presented in the Introduction of this text, was ingrained in the selected audiovisual pieces, rupturing, even if thinly, with the Platonic-Christian⁷ representation philosophy – of which we are tributary, especially when this kind of experimentation is carried out in a teachers’ training course that, in general terms, is attached to such philosophy.

Our intention was less to present methodologies of how to deal with cinema and more to provoke “movings” in thought about what cinema can do in a Science teachers’ training course, whose area of knowledge finds in visual language one of its foundations. And, in this case, what can cinema do in the interface with education? As stated by César Leite and Rafael Christofoletti (2015, p. 40): “to indicate possibilities of a montage of the senses”, as the ways of framing, editing, “seeing, watching and affecting one another imply practical policies for the management of life, the control of existence, ways of seeing, watching, feeling and being in life.” (LEITE; CHRISTOFOLETTI, 2015, p. 42). There resides the imbrication of an education of the eye with an education of the gaze. The first linked to the emergence of a visual culture, participative of the visual education that has to be planetary, ordinarily subjectifying us to mediate our relationship with the things of the world via the production, profusion and dispersion of a given visual and image order. The latter, in its turn, is related to the governance of the gaze, with its aesthetic gestures that seem to move our bodies through different topographies, however, without shifting thought and, therefore, modes of life, petrifying homogenising ways of seeing the roughness of the geographies, necessarily intempestive.

Of the education of the eye and of the gaze in audiovisual narratives

Part 1: hands like maps of our intempestive roughness

[...] drawn on the palm of the hand, imprinted from birth by the course of the years, the lines of life render explicit for those who can read: heart, head, life and destiny. And they revitalise subjectively the red energy of the Equator. The hand, its palm kneads the bread while the open fingers seek to reach what is beyond the Brazilian human and geographical horizon. Hands, lines, colours. There the map of the world as it is placed within the reach of artist Adriana Varejão and the images she produces. (SANTIAGO, 2011)⁸.

As one intern interviewed, in basic school, teachers and pupils who did not authorise the recording of their faces, the solution was she found was to frame only the hands in a close up while they talked. One by one, the same question was made: “What are your feelings in the classroom?”. In the beginning of her short film, the intern choose a high viewpoint for the take, leading our gaze to the cement corridor that gives access to the school, then redirecting the spectator’s eye to an open gate, whence the sequence of images leads us to see other spaces of the school.

The choice of shots is interesting: long shot and counter high-angle shot. As she made this choice, the intern shifts our imaginary about what is a school equipped with classrooms, sports courts and other structures. The diversity in pairs of hands is interesting. Some “finish in secret” (PESSOA, 2002, p. 20), others are single and varnished. There are those that are similar to maps, whose lines are the ones of life.

The reflections carried out by us about the first of the selected short films initially regard the (aesthetic and political) choices of the author, leading us to remember Silviano Santiago’s lecture, especially as he states that his interests in study and reflection have turned to simple artistic objects, such as for instance, the human hand and body. The writer and essayist refers to various art works that have inspired him. One of them (Figure 1) is that of Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão:

Figure 1
– Photograph typesetting Contingente (2000)*, by Adriana Varejão.

Santiago states:

Adriana takes a photograph of her own hand against a wall as if equipped with the eyes of a geographer and of a soothsayer. There she first supplements the lines drawn by life with a red line in the middle, named Equator. The type setting machine [used to make the line] reminds us of a cartographic image of the world that is subjectively dense and strong, since devoid of the allusion to the small and objective cubicles where the names of continents and nations are inscribed. (SANTIAGO, 2011)⁹.

Like Santiago, intern Patrícia¹⁰ states in an interview, when she edits her audiovisual narrative, that the hands are maps of our roughness – fruit of experimentations, be it when one chooses a soft way of life, be it when a strong one is chosen. According to her:

Of the interviewed teachers […], there are those whose hands ended up completely still on the table, as if, with their hands, they tried not to expose themselves, but expose they did. When the image of the hand fuses with orality it is as if the roughness of the whole body was presented in the movement (or non-movement) carried out by the hands: the tight corners, the angst and, chiefly, the desire of teachers and students who have never met in the classroom: the teachers’ desire of teaching and the students’ desire of learning¹¹.

During the interview with Patricia, between one reflection and other about the hands and of their roughness, about the meetings between pupils, teachers – subjects whose bodies were, are and continue to be strongly marked by school culture – the author of the audiovisual piece also related about the difficulty of narrating, by means of the audiovisual, the accommodation of these different generations and their trajectories in the processes for the building of knowledges and non-knowledges by teachers and pupils. According to Patricia, there is a strangle point in educational processes when the triad desire-potency-transgression ceases to be produced in the breaches of a majoritarian education. How to say so employing audiovisual language? A complex and difficult exercise, according to the student:

In university we are used to written language. In daily life we are hit by a large amount of images, at the same time as we produce part of them, at least the people who have the means to do so. It seems easy to produce an audiovisual piece but it is not a simple task, for it demands the recording of a great amount of images (either static or moving), and sounds. The production of a film and, in this case, a short film, can only be carried out when we start to edit/fictionalise the image repertoire, be it what it may¹² .

These are the intern’s aesthetic, political and poetic choices that, with a plunge onto the cement at the school’s entrance, let us glimpse at a space that is used in another manner: the existence of extremely tall trees, a deduction from the choice of the counter high-angle shot. The branches and leaves are penetrated by solar light, criss-crossing the frame. We are reminded, in this moment, of when an artist-photographer told us: see that the sun drop on the lizard’s skin is more important than the whole of the sun on the body of the sea (BARROS, 2010, p. 109). This is the result of a double movement: the education of the gaze and the education of the eye.

In this sense, “the importance of something has to be measured by the enchantment that the thing produces in us” (BARROS, 2010, p. 109). In other words, the framings and edition carried out by Patricia in her audiovisual piece are the result of deliberate choice, but also of a wider ongoing visual education, with the aim of actualising virtualities.

Information, knowledge and expectation need to be left at the entrance, and the cartographer must be guided by a sensitive attention, so that he or she may, at last, find what was not previously known, although it had been there, as virtuality. (KASTRUP, 2009, p. 48-49).

And what about the intern did not know? What took place with Patricia during her internship and that was unveiled by means of the presentation of her teachers’ hands?

Although we have no answer about what has taken place, there is no doubt that something did go on in her, contributing to her training as a teacher.

School spaces and the school’s subjects did not go unnoticed to this intern and her way of telling us renders evident that she has thought about the school and the teaching profession. With which hands has Patricia identified herself? Were there hands that could, in fact, render visible her expectation about her own teaching work?

We do not aim to answer such questions, but, through them, state afresh, once more, that the formation of teachers’ identities is an ongoing process, since this identity is transformed in the course of the whole of life. Thus, the transformations that took place in Patricia as she elaborated her audiovisual piece compose just a small part of such trajectory.

Part 2: Meetings with the author as a motivation for reading

The second audiovisual narrative we studied presented a very interesting and arresting picture, about a didactic sequence in the Portuguese language class, in which the 6th grade pupils carried out the reading of a book, as preparation for the visit of the author to the school.

The interns appropriated the oral language narrative as a strategy to present the context and approximate the spectator to one of the school’s reality featured in the video, appropriating some elements of the literature book, such as the main female character and title of the book, which composed part of the video’s title.

Before we analyse this visual narrative, it is worth mentioning a fact that preceded its elaboration: in one of the internship’s subject classes, the interns sought a teacher for help, saying they didn’t know what to do, because they didn’t have much in terms of technological resources, they did not know a lot about video making and editing and did not have the authorisation for the recording of the Basic School’s pupils’ images. The teacher replied that the interns should release their imaginations and exercise their creativity, so that the narrative would be told in the best possible manner, despite all difficulties.

The liberation of imagination, stimulated by the teacher, seems to have made a lot of difference in the final result, since, the interns became confident and motivated to do the piece. One of the interesting aspects of the preambles of the audiovisual narrative’s elaboration amounts to another important element of school culture: the teacher’s role in the regulation of the pupils’ actions, which leads us to Lazzarato’s text (2014), as we analysed this episode under the light of enunciation. By means of the teacher’s authorisation, the interns produce an enunciation in the form of truth telling (parrhesia) since:

[...] does not presuppose any status; it is the enunciation of “anyone at all.” Unlike performative utterances, it “opens up an unspecified risk,” “a possibility, a field of dangers, or at any rate, an undefined eventuality”. (LAZZARATO, 2013, p. 305 [2014, p. 234]).

Furthermore, the teacher’s liberation seems to have shown to the interns that their experiences (observation and elaboration of the audiovisual piece) were valued in the academic context where they found themselves, which has encouraged them to dive into the expressive experience that was being requested of them. From that moment on, the elaboration of the audiovisual piece really became an experience (BONDIA, 2002), since they allowed themselves to intensely live the creative production process and present what happened following that internship experience. That was resignified with the elaboration of the video.

The acceptance of the challenge of opening up to the indeterminate risk of producing one’s own enunciation, to be at the mercy of one own imaginal productions, using audiovisual pieces as means to this imagetic-verbal enunciation, allowed the interns to build their own sense of that which they observed and lived in the school.

For Vygotsky (2000), the brain’s creative or combining function consists in the creation of something new from past experiences (recorded in memory), i.e., creative production takes place by means of the recombination of elements of reality, which yields the emergence of a unique and particular reality. Thus, we did not expect with this work to analyse the vision that the interns had of reality, but, instead, get to know this new reality that is an audiovisual narrative and the revelations that it presented about how the teacher identity of these two future teachers is being constituted.

Hans Belting (2014) highlights the fact that the means (support) through which images are produced and dispersed is, at the same time, instituting realities. It must not go unmentioned the importance that the audiovisual medium (and not other) should be employed. The search for a connection between narration, presentation of photographic images, moving images and written text became evident in the course of the whole audiovisual piece.

The fact that there is a large amount of photographs in which the pupils have their face covered – so as to circumvent the problem of the lack of authorisation by guardians – did not compromise the message, since it was possible to visualise the kind of activities performed and the bodies’ stances. In the situation where faces were not covered, facial expressions led the spectator to the impression that the pupils were motivated and happy.

The video features the statement by a Basic School pupil who emphasises her happiness in meeting the author. The teacher’s testimonial, in its turn, reveals that, even when the expectations regarding the behaviour of pupils were not met, the occasion of the author’s visit was an event of great importance and satisfaction for the pupils and herself. It is interesting to think, additionally, about the concern of the interns of, among all the observations carried out in the classroom, highlighting aspects that considered the shifts that problematised the environment of such institution.

The internship allowed them to live a pleasurable and fruitful experience of observing how the teacher mediated important aspects of literate culture, such as reading, interpreting, thinking about what has been read, elaborate questions, besides, of course, the moment of the visit itself, in which the pupils were able to directly interact with the author. As they emphasised the motivation experienced by the teachers and pupils, the interns also revealed their own motivation: make public a work well made, giving credit to the teacher, who, in this moment, was in a place that will soon be taken by the interns themselves.

Considering that the internship period is an important step in the training of future teachers, the results of such experience, rendered explicit by means of the audiovisual piece, indicate aspects of the initial formation of the interns’ teacher identity. Unlike the other videos that featured denunciations and criticism of the problems found in the classroom (not analysed in this work), this piece features a positive view of the school and of teaching work. The editing carried out by the interns, pasting happy faces, can indicate the belief that it is possible to carry out good work at state public school when there is the effort from the teacher in motivating the pupils and organise the activities in a significant and motivating manner.

Belting (2014) mentions the analysis of ritual facial paintings by Lévi-Strauss, emphasising that “the face becomes a social bearer of signs only by means of masking, whose function it executes” (p. 49). Even if the nature of the masks used by the interns to cover the pupil’s faces is completely different from ritual masks, we believe a parallel can be drawn between them as social bearers of signs that, in this case, refer to an ideal of a happy school – at least regarding the interactions between the teacher, pupils and the knowledges approached in the video. Thus, the biological bodies of the pupils that were decapitated of identity, for their faces could not be shown, gain identity inside the enunciation becoming social bodies full of meaning.

Still according to Belting (2014, p. 51):

[...] the representation of the subject is closely linked to the issue of the mask that it wears, therefore, with the image this mask projects. The mask is simultaneously the means and imaginal entity, so that our gaze is unable to distinguish them in the image they produce¹³.

The pupils’ bodies covered by the masks created by the interns became, at the same time, the imaginal identity of the happy school and the diffusion means of this idea.

Part 3: Writing and drawing woven into the audiovisual narrative

The third audiovisual narrative analysed in this work focussed on a project developed by the school’s English teacher, who used the contents of the Science course to approach the learning of the English language. The audiovisual piece alternates images of interdisciplinary work and the 4th Grade of Fundamental School I English project. In the sections featuring the English teacher’s class, it is evident that the interns gave much importance to the corporal movement strategies involved in the association of the English vocabulary with actions of movement, expressed by the verbs uttered by her in the course of the class.

The choice of this focus by the interns was a result of the enchantment with the teacher’s work, who was able to vanquish the pupils’ resistance and implicate all, including the interns, in the learning process. This enchantment is translated in the legends that the interns wrote for the video. For them, the project stood out as it broke with the idea of a “pew education” (“educação bancária”, FREIRE, 1996) and brought in an ideal of participative learning that is desirous in the formation of the interns’ teacher identity.

Overlapped on the images of pieces of work by the pupils of the Science course, composed by images of concepts studied and English words, there is the interweaving of the representation of concepts worked in the form of drawings and writing in the English language with the teacher’s body movements, which gave meaning to the new words learnt by the pupils. All these interweavings of means, body and image are further intensified by the written language that the interns added in the form of legends: “The English (extracurricular) project intends to spark the pupils’ interest, not only in the learning of English, but working as a stimulus both to the regular subjects and to life”.

This stimulus for life, which the students refer to, is present in other parts of the audiovisual piece, as they seek words and images associated to participation, to the bond between participants, to feelings: the word dedication follows as the legend for a specific moment in the class of the teacher leading the project; the word commitment appears as a legend of the testimonial by the school’s pedagogical coordinator; the words bond and love are selected by the pedagogical coordinator to express in “one word” the importance of the project for the school.

All this imagetic construction vouches for Belting’s (2014, p. 36) idea of an analogy between bodies and means, in the sense that the fabrication of images is affected by the evolution of the magic image up to the rational representation of the world, so that:

Such obscurity adheres to the image that it can only be overcome by the illustrated light: in this evolution, what had been the image in the archaic sense would be clarified either as language (with its use of symbols and metaphors) or as art¹⁴.

For the author, it is necessary to break with the idea of a return to the belief in images by the introduction of a historical anthropology as an investigation methodology of means and cultural symbols employed in the production of the image itself. Thus, besides the interweaving of means, image and body, the sounds ties are added by the choice of the song Oito anos, by Adriana Partimpim¹⁵, that accompanies the presentation of panels and the parts in which many images alternate.

From the choice of the song to the framing of the participants in movement and interaction, the authors sought to give the spectator the idea of a school that transforms people’s lives more than just pushes content. For us, this choice reflects the formation of the teacher identity discussed by Dominguez et al. (2015). The search for a transformative school and the role of the teacher appear, strikingly, both in the narratives presented in the work of Dominguez et al. (2015) as in the audiovisual pieces by the interns.

Under the light of the audiovisual piece, the school ceases to be a space of hierarchy and bureaucracy to become a place where learning is treated horizontally, producing interactions and bonds between pupils and teacher. The English teacher takes up the role of the protagonist of the learning process and leads the pupils in the activities. But this protagonism is carried out in a fluid manner, not imposed by a power hierarchy between teacher and pupil, but carried out by someone – the teacher – who is aware and confident of her role and who, as such, naturally becomes the leader of the process.

As recalled by Lazzarato (2013, p. 316 [2014, p. 246]):

[...] To take care of the self, to work on the self and on one’s own life, means concerning oneself with the ways of doing and saying necessary to occupy the place allocated to us within the social division of labour.

In the audiovisual piece this “taking care of the ways of doing and of saying” appears as the main guideline of the teacher whose work inspired the interns. This inspiration is linked to the teaching ideals that the interns have, where the teacher figures as transformative agent who participates in the life of pupils by the creation of bonds of affection, and that, thus, leads them to a new life level, as illustrated by the legend at the end of the video:

The development of this project provides the more active and positive participation of pupils, both in the classroom and outside!

The work shows that with small gestures we will be able to transform a near future!

Thus, there is a coherence between the images presented and the words used in the legends they used in positively building an image of teaching work, the possibility of transformation that the teacher holds over the students’ life and the construction of the interns’ teacher identity.

Final considerations

We do not seek in this investigation to evaluate what took place in the Basic Education school in itself, but, instead, what was revealed about the internship involving classroom observation by means of the audiovisual pieces produced. In the videos analysed, the school is presented in more potent way, particularly in the last two audiovisual narratives, which stand out of the recurrent discourse that usually appears in the initial internship discussions, devaluing the pedagogical actions observed in the school regarding teaching.

Asking the interns to produce an audiovisual narrative allowed them to live, besides the experiences provided by the observation in the schools, another experience provided by the elaboration of audiovisual narratives, reinforcing our initial hypothesis that when one changes the language employed in the discursive production, one changes the education of the gaze via the education of the eye, difference that has been detailed in the beginning of this text. Such experiences are made possible by audiovisual language itself, because it changes the way of seeing, cutting and framing situations that are supposedly familiar to us. It is worth mentioning that the time limit of the video has also provided an important synthesis exercise. The need to chose images and build narratives within the allotted time has stimulated the reflection about how to articulate text, images and sound to carry out a video that would reveal what they thought about the school observed.

The three audiovisual narratives selected by us, resulted from the interns’ aesthetic preference, i.e., lenses trained at body languages (employed by the teachers of the Basic Education schools), unreachable by deschooling processes – a very widely disseminated apology nowadays¹⁶. In this sense, the choice in question interested us in the context of teacher training, because the invisible topographies of such environments could gain plastic visuality by means of audiovisual language. Invisible not because such topographies are inexistent, but precisely the opposite: invisible because our gaze is used to see, watch and understand the world mediated by asphyxiating discourses and exhausted cliched images, due to supposedly inventive repetition of these discourses and images, as if in jaded loops, even when churned out in tonalities and sounds of innovative promises.

The discussion of Patricia’s work is good for exploring the metaphors of the eye and the gaze and experience. The education of the eye is reflected in the choices made by the intern in search of her images: since the recording of faces was not allowed, Patricia sought for another part of the body that, despite not revealing the personal identity of the interviewees, revealed nonetheless the personalities by means of the gesture captured in the hand movements. On the other hand, the reflections featured in Patricia’s video indicate the construction of her process of educating the gaze, insofar as she thinks about her own training as a teacher when she observes the movement of the hands and their language. Thus, the ideas about what the school as an institution, and its actors is, are thought afresh by the intern during the construction of her audiovisual narrative. Evidence of the transformation of her teacher identity is recorded in image choice and in the verbal and body languages of those interviewed.

The two last narratives direct the gaze and lived experience towards what is most potent in school. This is clear in the second piece, where the idea of a positive experience of the author’s visit to the institution is imprinted in the happy faces that cover the pupils’ faces. The interns’ gazes is geared towards what is robust in pedagogical actions, reflecting their own expectations of what teaching work might be. The experience chosen for the construction of the audiovisual narrative shows a desire for the school to work, be the stage for significant experiences, revealing their own expectation in being teachers, and thus interfering in the building of their teacher identities

In the third audiovisual piece, in its turn, the education of the eye is presented in the form of written text and drawings, by the observation of the teacher’s body in movement and by the choice of a song to compose a successful experience of pedagogical action. The education of the gaze, revealed in the legends that accompanied the construction of the narrative, show, as in the second piece, an expectation of positivity in the pedagogical relationships and actions. The idea of the teacher who transforms appears throughout the narrative, unveiling the teacher ideals previously discussed in the process of teacher identity building in Dominguez et al. (2015).

We believe that the interns’ immersion in the same school during over a semester and a half, up to the production of the audiovisual piece, allowed the them to denaturalise the conceptions of what a public state school might. According to Lazzarato (2013 [2014]), the formation of a subject is constituted by the word and by reason articulated to discursive practices. Therefore, the construction of the interns’s audiovisual narrative regards what they experienced in the schools, as well as the creation of educational spacings previously blocked, instead of seeking the ideal school and teacher.

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• 3
  The word road here could be replaced by the notion of archive, in its Foulcaultian meaning (FOUCAULT, 2013 [1972]). The selection of the materials/documents (images, films, books, comics etc.), the so-called “back files” or permanent archives, if transformed into archives, can gain a fresh life. In this sense, the archive deals with this paradox between our (announced) death and our life (made present). If it leaves nothing behind, it is as if there had not been someone’s/something’s life and death.
• 4
  Note from translator: translated from the Portuguese.
• 5
  Here understood as educational gestures forged in the relationship between teachers, students and school contexts; and tributary of a discovery of “the body as object and target of power” (FOUCAULT, 1999 [1995, p. 136], p. 117), in the mid-eighteen-century. This attack on the body emerges simultaneously with the emergence of the disciplines: “[...] the moment when an art of the human body was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely” (FOUCAULT, 1999 [1995, p. 137-138], p. 117).
• 6
  Translator’s note: translation from the Portuguese.
• 7
  We understand this thought record as attached to a representative aesthetic that seeks correspondences between the image produced via audiovisual language and the respective analogies in what the interns conceive as the school reality, waiving attempts to mirror the real in order to produce and show one truth of the what goes on in the school. Detailed dialogue about the Platonic-Christian representation philosophy can be found, especially, in the writings of philosophers Miguel Spinelli (2003) and Bento Silva Santos (2003). In Deleuze, art and philosophy [Deleuze, a arte e a filosofia], by Roberto Machado (2009), there is a part dedicated solely to the Deleuzian interpretation of Plato’s philosophy, “The birth of a representation”. In his Foucault Vocabulary, Edgardo Castro (2009) presented the entry “Plato” to mention two texts Foucault studied: Politics and Alcibiades. From the former “to draw the conceptual line on the sand between these two forms of exercising power, the political and the pastoral” (CASTRO, 2009, p. 321); and from the latter to deal with the care of the Self.
• 8
  Excerpt of a conference by Silviano Santiago delivered in12/11/2011, part of the Delicate Seminar, carried out at Princeton University. Available at: <https://vimeo.com/42441658>. Acessed in December 10, 2017.
• 9
  Excerpt of a conference by Silviano Santiago delivered in12/11/2011, part of the Delicate Seminar, carried out at Princeton University. Available at: <https://vimeo.com/42441658>. Accessed in December 10, 2017.
• 10
  The intern allowed the mentioning of her name here.
• 11
  Excerpt of the transcript of the interview carried out with the intern on 28/05/2015.
• 12
  Excerpt of the transcript of the interview carried out with the intern on 28/05/2015.
• 13
  Translator’s note: translated from the Portuguese.
• 14
  Translator’s note: translated from the Portuguese.
• 15
  Available at: <http://www.adrianapartimpim.com.br/um/>.
• 16
  See Quando sinto que já sei [When I feel I already know], a Brazilian documentary of 2014. In Aquino (2017), one will find oportune critique both of the documentary and the apology of de-schooling.

• 1
  Research funded by Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP), process 2015/06329-0 (from 01/08/2015 to 31/07/2017), under the coordination of Professor Luciana Maria Viviani (EACH-USP). Translation by Gavin Adams.Contact: [e-mail].

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Aug 2018
• Date of issue
  2018

History

• Received
  11 Dec 2016
• Reviewed
  23 June 2017
• Accepted
  25 Oct 2017