Discursive Production of Space-Time in Teachers’ Accounts: Meanings that Redirect Teacher Training

ABSTRACT

This study aims to analyze, in written accounts of training teachers, how these subjects’ life trajectories are actualized in their discourses through references to time-space coordinates. The time-space relations inscribed in the accounts are apprehended, in the analyses, as historical dimensions that direct the representations that these subjects construct from their position in the world. In relation to the teachers who are part of a specific story of migration to a region in Brazil that is still marked by processes of denial of rights, their discursive practices convey indices of this trajectory and should become the basis for the training processes per se, as modes of becoming teachers, teaching, and developing new training processes are forged in those practices. The accounts point to chronotopes that denounce the relationship between the experiences and memory that are ruled by the force of historical conditions and concomitantly provide outlines for the production of identities and subjectivities.

KEYWORDS:
Discourse; Space-temporalities; Training

RESUMO

O objetivo deste estudo é analisar, em relatos escritos de professores em formação, como as trajetórias de vida destes sujeitos se atualizam em seus discursos, através de referências a coordenadas espaço-temporais. As relações espaço-temporais inscritas nos relatos são apreendidas, nas análises, como dimensões históricas orientadoras de representações que esses sujeitos constroem de sua posição no mundo. Em se tratando de professores participantes de uma particular história de migração para uma região brasileira ainda marcada por processos de negação de direitos, suas práticas discursivas trazem índices desta trajetória e elas devem constituir bases para os próprios processos formativos, uma vez que nelas se forjam modos de constituir-se professor, de assumir a profissão, de desenvolver novos processos formativos. Os relatos apontam para cronotopos que indiciam a relação entre as experiências e a memória regida pela força das condições históricas, ao mesmo tempo que oferecem contornos de produção de identidades e de subjetividades.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Discurso; Espaço-temporalidades; Formação

Introduction

This study intends to analyze how discourses conveyed in the teachers’ accounts organize meanings oriented by different space-temporalities inscribed by socio-historical dimensions and how they have interfered or interfere in the training process of those subjects. As to the organization of the accounts, we seek to capture meanings inscribed in space-time relations that are not from the physical level of the absolute time or space, but from the history that provides the subjects with the means to narrate aspects of their lives, taking into consideration particularly those that can interfere in their future professional conditions. Their entire training is affected by space-time coordinates that move different and simultaneous temporalities inscribed by cultural systems.

For this study, we adopt Bakhtin’s studies (1990;¹ 1986;² 1981)³ in dialogue with Maingueneau (1984; 1997) and De Certeau (1988),⁴ particularly their analyses of space-time coordination postulated as the space-time inscription of subjects in their relationship with meaning and history. Without disregarding the epistemological places that each one of the authors occupy, by inserting them in the domain of a theoretical dialogue, we do it because, kept in due proportions, we find interchangeability between the concept of chronotope, engendered and formulated by Bakhtin (1990;⁵ 1981),⁶ the studies developed by De Certeau (1988)⁷ - in which accounts are considered, above all, as time and space practices - and the concept of discursive deixis, defined by Maingueneau (1984; 1997) in the field of Discourse Analysis. In this study, all those formulations on the above concept are seen as productive to delimit space-time dimensions, which we perceive as discursive categories that give rise to possibilities of saying. Our understanding is that the theoretical approach offered by the mentioned authors stands apart from the perspectives considering space-time categories as absolute dimensions related to the physical world.

Our analyses are comprised of 46 written accounts by teachers who were attending undergraduate studies in Arts as participants of the Plano Nacional de Formação de Professores da Educação Básica - PARFOR [Teacher Training Nationwide Project for Primary and Secondary Education] at the same time this research was taking place. During their Estágio Supervisionado [practicum], they were occasionally asked to narrate their training sessions, including life experiences and their academic environment.

The similarity between the teachers’ life stories and their teaching training narratives led us to pose the following question: which meaning reserves result from their enunciations when they were narrating their training sessions, integrating their domestic life, education process, and work? Such question contributes to the apprehension of the discourses that are intertwined in the very constitution of the teacher training of these subjects and that displace them to the domains of teacher training polices. These displacements or meaning reserves achieve visibility in these subjects’ references to space and time that trace back to cultural, economic, and social dimensions, which provide better understanding and reconfiguration of training courses, although nor always contemplated by the public teacher training policies.

1 The Autobiographical Account⁸: A Space-Time Discursive Practice

Every “proper” place is altered by the mark others have left on it.

De Certeau (1988, p.44) ⁹

To understand the events that the autobiographical accounts provide in their discursive functioning, we choose, as a theoretical and methodological basis, the spatial-temporal coordinates, which, marked in language, do not mingle with empirical places in the world nor with chronological time in a direct relationship between words and objects. The materialized space-time discourses lead to discursive events, historical temporalities that are constituted in the dialogue between subject, language, and history.

The phenomenon of temporality-spatiality has been largely discussed in the domain of philosophy, history, and linguistics. Bakhtin (1990;¹⁰ 1981),¹¹ in his architectonics of the dialogic relations, explored deeply the space-time notions from the concepts of outsideness and chronotopy, emphasizing the principle of otherness and incompleteness, of viewpoints located in interactions. According to Geraldi (2010), in Bakhtinian studies, “Perhaps, the best sources to think time are the studies of Dostoiévski and Goethe’s works, particularly because they also lead to the historicity of space through the elaboration of the concept of chronotope” (GERALDI, 2010, p.290).¹² However, he observes that it is in Toward a philosophy of the act that Bakhtin postulates the temporality of human life defined by the possibilities that an interaction provides so that there is “in Bakhtin’s thinking about the dated subject an intertwinement between past, present and future, which takes place concretely in a space that is historicized by time” (GERALDI, 2010, p.291).¹³

Using concepts such as chronotopy and exotopy (outsideness), Bakhtin proposes the dimensionality of time by space. In Machado’s words,

As the dialogic space is manifested by the exotopy of what exceeds the field of vision of the agents involved, the dialogic time can only be understood through the plural and simultaneous temporalities that are projected within this space (MACHADO, 2010, p.208).¹⁴

Because the concept of chronotope provides the relationship between space-time dimensions with balance, it helps us to better grasp the articulation between temporal and spatial coordinates that are inscribed in the accounts as indices of remittals to discourses in circulation within society. Denounced in language, time can indicate the subject’s expectations in reference to places, not properly physical places, but to historical conditions, life expectancies, individual and collective expectations.

Such approach of the dialogic relation between space and time is opposed to a concept of space and time as absolute realities. For Bakhtin (1990),¹⁵ these two realities are defined not in their physical plane, but by an axiological stance guided by historical and cultural conditions, configured and reconfigured semiotically as meaning producers. The act of narrating the world as possibility of creating space and time does not refer to a cognitive return to life experiences, in the psychological sense of remembrance. Memory always operates from a viewpoint of value and completeness. For that reason, for Bakhtin, in life narratives, what really matters is not the material and comprehensive account of life experiences, but the axiological value which allows the aesthetic finish of my life or the life of the other. In the author’s words,

In this sense, one can speak of a human being’s absolute need for the other, for the other’s seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying self-activity - the only self-activity capable of producing his outwardly finished personality. This outward personality could not exist, if the other did not create it: aesthetic memory is productive - it gives birth, for the first time, to the outward human being on a new plane of being (BAKHTIN, 1990, pp.35-36; emphasis in original).¹⁶

Distancing from the concepts that presuppose the notion of a subject who has total control over the narrated experience, Bakhtin (1990)¹⁷ warns that the subject does not become the narrator of his life because he knows its totality, but because he conveys world values that take part in the narrative as a way of structuring the world.

With this self-narrative perspective, we prevent against any theoretical attack against the individuality of the subject as “one’s own master,” even arguing that the subject singularizes himself/herself in the light of the determinants of the broader socio-historical conditions. And yet, singularity possesses the ‘marks’ of plurivocity of valued accents originated from different social spheres, different human interactions. In the cultural world, the subject’s actions are marked discursively by indices of the great time proposed by Bakhtin (1986, p.167):¹⁸ a time situated “in a mobile space, unfinished and not given once for all’’ (MACHADO, 2010, p.223),¹⁹ but constituted in relation to the occurrence of objects in certain spaces.

Although we are able to comprehend that the concept of chronotope refers to axiological positions in the world and in the great time of culture, in which the relations are set as fundamental questions that mold themselves into time and space - as Machado (2010) proposes -, we should not lose sight that the narrative also should be understood as a means of transforming time and space. Such postulation seems to be useful for an analysis which aims to capture, from the verbal semiosis, the narratives produced within space-time relations into the accounts about personal and collective life.

The notions of time and space, although in different theoretical perspectives, are also discussed by De Certeau (1988),²⁰ either as inscribed in a practice of fictional narrative or as accounts about the living world. By approaching the common practices of the subject, the author admits that those narratives are found in the domain of a complex structure of identified procedures as a discourse functioning. By referring to the studies that put in evidence the forms of organizing the procedures of “surveillance” in the 19th century investigated by Foucault, De Certeau (1988)²¹ warns that society is not composed by institutionalized practices only. Although they do not take part in the institutional organization of a discourse, the silent practices keep the primacies or the remainders of (institutional and scientific) hypotheses that do not integrate the logic of institutional structures (De CERTEAU, 1988).²² The author advocates that it is in the domain of the “silent reserve” that the consuming practices should be apprehended as organizing practices of spaces and times. The new logic of technological optimization from the 19th century discarded the processes of singularity from common practices, replacing them with technical rationality in terms of accuracy and “improvement.” In this new perspective, knowing and doing daily practices have been transformed into indefinite, subjective and intuitive knowledge devoid of legitimacy.

In contrast to the logic of technical rationality, De Certeau (1988, p.70)²³ considers that the stories provide the decorative container of a narrativity for everyday practices, finding indices of murmuring expressions from “singularities,” from microhistories devoid of the signature of science. As such, instead of the residual status attributed to narrativities, De Certeau formulates, as a heuristic question, the hypothesis that “a theory of narration is indissociable from a theory of practices as its condition as well as its production” (De CERTEAU, 1988, p.78).²⁴ For him, memory mediated by accounts displaces time to space, whose effect is that of distortion, change between experienced and represented life.

Memory mediates spatial transformations. In the mode of “right point in time” (kairós), it produces a founding rupture or break. Its foreignness makes possible a transgression of the law of the place. Coming out of its bottomless and mobile secrets, a “coup” modifies the local order [...] But this change requires the invisible resources of a time which obeys other laws and which, taking it by surprise, steals something to the distribution owing the space (De CERTEAU, 1988, p.85 - author’s emphasis).²⁵

Conceived by De Certeau as a result of historical forces, memory articulates and organizes time and spaces, under the multiple play of change, always influenced by circumstances.

2 The Role of Discursive Deixis in the Configuration and Reconfiguration of Space- Temporalities

Maingueneau (1997) defines the process of manifestation of space-temporal coordinates of discursive deixis and points to the fundamental distinction between space-temporal coordinates provided by the language system in its reference to the speaker, space and time implicated in the enunciation (me/you - here/now) and discursive deixis, which, as he defines it, points to the meanings that are not manifest at the level of the language system, but in the universe of meanings constituted by the semantic rules of a discursive formation. In this conceptual formulation, the three instances of deixis (speaker, chronography, addressee and topography) do not have direct correspondence with a number of designations in the text; in other words, the instances of the speaker, the addressee, the chronography and the topography not always have specific and distinct terms that are correspondent. There are cases in which a single name recovers all those instances.

As regards to a phenomenon whose global semantics is apprehended in the domain of the discursive memory (interdiscourse) and that of the enunciation (MAINGUENEAU, 1984), discursive deixis has been a productive operational concept in the apprehension of the constitutive relationship between interdiscourse and intradiscourse. In his analyses, Maingueneau (1997) demonstrates that the phenomenon of discursive deixis, marked in space-temporal coordinates, constitutes the first dimension of access to the more immediate scenography, instituted by discursive formation. The founding deixis is located in another dimension and should be understood as already-uttered, inner discourses that provide legitimacy to the current deixis.

This formulation produces the displacement of the enunciation of a historical conjuncture and of a space externally determined to a scene that the enunciation at the same time produces and presupposes its own legitimacy. Maingueneau (1997, p.69) defines the term “enlace” as the inextricable relationship between enunciative coercions and institutional practices. In this sense, text geography coincides with the discursive formation that verbalizes it, reflecting the enunciation itself.

By discussing about the subject and the place of enunciation, Maingueneau observes that, for Discourse Analysis, every subject is correlative of a set of coordinates in time and in space.

Although formulated from different perspectives, the theoretical treatment given to space-time categories by those three authors augments the possibility for a better apprehension of discourses that the accounts put in action. It is possible to say that in the three approaches the common trace for the space-time concept is the operational force that such concept offers to understand interdiscursivity.

The following analysis seeks to apprehend, in the discourses, indices of remittance to people-spaces-times, whose movement produces the effect of place transformation from a bricolage of space-time (De CERTEAU, 1988)²⁶ whose possibilities are conceded in a fortuitous encounter between the act of narrating and the historical conditions of narrative production.

3 Discursiveness Inscribed in Different Temporalities

Taking family stories and educational processes as thematic journeys (GUILHAUMOU, 2009) of teachers’ memory reorganization, we observe that these subjects’ accounts convey, in their linguistic materiality, some specificities of their teacher training paths in an Amazonian region - specificities that derive from representations about the teachers’ own living conditions and that of their relatives. Three thematic paths are chosen as methodological strategies for perceiving discursive procedures within the accounts, observing, along with Guilhaumou (1997), that the choice for thematic paths does not refer

[...] to the thematic analysis as it is practiced by literary critics, nor to its uses in Linguistics. This notion supposes the distinction between ‘the expectation horizon’ - the set of attested possibilities in a certain historical situation - and the discursive event that realizes one of these possibilities (pp.163-185).²⁷

In this sense, autobiographical accounts²⁸ constitute spaces of meaning production that refer to events that are not from the order of an empirical living in the world, but from meaning effects produced in the relationship between what is from the order of language and what is from the order of history. From this perspective, memory removed from history is “played by the circumstances, just as a piano is played by a musician and music emerges from it when its keys are touched by the hands” (DE CERTEAU, 1988, p.87). ²⁹

In the three following sections, we deal with narratives inscribed in three thematic paths.

3.1 Space-Time Disjunction Effects: Parents’ History in Teachers’ Accounts

Our aim here is to analyze the discourses that establish a space-time relationship regarding the life of the parents of the teachers in training, particularly the sequence work-education. By narrating the parents’ life regarding the work-education relationship, the subjects convey, in their discourses, processes of exclusion that seem to be the reality not only of a generation, but also of future generations, such as the children that have paradoxically become teachers, as we shall see in the utterances below.

1. My mother [...], born in Cametá, did not attend school in her childhood, because her parents lived far away, she did not have the means of transportation to school, and also because she began working in the fields at an early age to help her household. My mother is illiterate, at the age of 16 she got married to C., who also worked in the fields. C. had no education, but he knew how to write his own name. Both of them were raised facing difficulties. (A.)³⁰

2. [...] my mother tells me that it was very hard to go to school because they came from a very poor family; both [mother and father] did not have the opportunity to study; then she attended 2nd grade and my father, 3rd grade. The hardships were many and the place was very difficult to get to; for this reason there was no opportunity for them to get their full education. (C. Q.)³¹

3. My mother is from the city of Bacabal in the state of Maranhão. In her childhood she did not have any opportunity to study because she had to help her step parents in the fields; however, when she was an adult she was able to complete primary school. (F.)³²

Going back in time and space simultaneously, the discourses that excerpts 1, 2 and 3 convey address historical conditions that change two pairs of temporalities³³ that, in discourses from the State of law, are necessarily attached: education-work; education-childhood. Work and school are a spatial series that, related to childhood, modifies the supposedly necessary relationship. That is, if official discourses affirm, in their legal systems, the relationship between childhood and education, in the teachers’ discourses this relationship is suspended and presented as incompatible and excluding. Time (childhood) and space (school) coordinates are related, but under the effect of negation or exclusion of one over the other. On the other hand, the childhood-work pair combines itself as a means to justify the separation produced in the childhood-school pair. Thus, time and space are articulated to produce meaning (of junction or disjunction) that refers not only to the historical conditions of the subjects who narrate, allowing them to operate “cuts of memory,” but also to the educational reality imposed to a portion of the Brazilian population. Time marks are found in space, under the effect of scansion: “time indices appear in space, and space is invested with meaning and is measured with time” (BAKHTIN, 1998, p.211; my translation).³⁴

We draw attention to excerpt 1, in which childhood, as a temporal metaphor, is inscribed in the education spatiality under the effect of interdiction and, at the same time, activates the founding discourse (MAINGUENEAU, 1997) of the State of law, based on which education is a right of all people and a responsibility of the State.³⁵ However, the denial of the guarantee of rights (in his or her childhood he or she did not attend school) produces a displacement in the official discourse, showing it from inside out, exposing the fractures that are in the base of the contradictions of a society of exclusion.

This discursive and historical disjunction is reaccommodated, in the sequence of discourse, under the effect of the ideology that produces the illusion of freedom in the subject so that he/she is assigned responsibility for all the social evils: “[...] because her parents lived far away, she did not have the means of transportation to school, and also because she began working in the crops at an early age to help her household.” The indicators of logical-semantic relationships, in every enunciation (because, for, to) attest to the effect of causality in the discursive operation, indicating that living far from school, not having her own transportation, working in the fields are the cause for her parents not to have access to education during her childhood, when actually these conditions are the effects of the denial of rights. Similar to the mother, the father, as he is placed in the space-time of living, also has the school as a chronotope he was denied (he had no education) and the field labor as the chronotope that justifies the negation (“who also worked in the fields”).

In excerpt 2, childhood is the temporality that is also somewhat negated regarding the desired relationship between childhood and school. Both father and mother are represented in the account of C. as the ones who did not have access to school when they were kids. The articulation between temporality and spatiality (childhood-school) and the very living conditions (“because they came from a very poor family; both [mother and father] did not have the opportunity to study”) are presented as barriers to school attendance. In this discursive arrangement, there is an ambiguous play from which the argument of the narrative’s subject can lead to two possible founding deixis: i) the official discourse, in its inside out, as the denial of education, which is a right of all and a duty of the State, is textualized in the accounts; and ii) the prevailing discourse from common sense in which poverty is accepted as an obstacle to her parents’ access to school. This second possibility is the result of an attitude of resignation, the effect of ideology, as the difficult living conditions of her parents are the very result of a historical process of exclusion and not its cause, as one could imagine.

In excerpt 3, the parents’ life experiences are also forged in childhood temporality. Time is transformed by no coincidence between childhood and school - the latter being projected in discourse as great time. The school, as an element of this great time, promotes the values and ideals of the parents, who see it as a place of opportunities for their children, despite all the process of exclusion they faced in terms of access to and permanence in school. In this account, as in the former two, if school constitutes a spatial matrix that mobilizes a negated place in the subjects’ representations, another spatiality is inserted as not coincident with the school universe, which is the spatiality represented by labor and life in the fields. In this discourse, the time of the subjects who produce their existence in the fields - whether because they always had the fields as a place of life production or because, without living conditions in the city, they found possibilities of survival in the fields -, is transformed into a reduced time by spatiality. In other words, the projections of these subjects are limited to the issue of labor as a means of survival. Within the subjects’ discourses there are only two alternatives: they either work in the fields without any guarantee of access to school or abandon their work and the fields in search for access to school in the city. The decision for one or the other alternative changes the space-time relationship projected in discourse.

Thus, in the teachers’ accounts, contradictory temporality representations are highlighted: the parents did not benefit from the unity fields-school-work. This appears in the accounts of their children, who are primary school teachers today, as absence, also present in their current training stories. This non-contingent denial produces negative effects in their teacher training, as we shall see in some other utterances below.

3.2 Temporal Experiences that Reorganize Spatialities

The following excerpts (4 and 5) express the reorganization of space by time; that is, as time advances, it impels a change of place: the negation of school access is actualized in the children’s childhood, which substantiates a non-contingent situation, but a reality that affects different generations. In the light of this reality, the parents displace themselves from one place to another in search for favorable conditions for their children’s education.

• 4. As time passed by, the children were growing up and then the need to send them to school appeared. Staying in the fields was not possible anymore, but as there was only one child who was seven years old, it was possible to leave her at her grandmother’s house during the week, and at weekends my older sister by the name of M. would come back home. In the following year another problem arises, that is, my other sister also had to go to school. Then there was no way out. That’s when at this moment my father decided to buy a house in the city, since he wanted to send all his children to school (F.)³⁶

• 5. As years went by, their three children were born and they were getting at that age when they have to go to school, so they decided to move to Nazaré dos Patos because in that community the school offered primary education. The two older children moved to the city to continue their education. The first daughter finished the secondary school in the city, and the second finished his primary education; after that, they went back to live in their parents’ house and continued their education in the country along with their parents. (M. S.)³⁷

In the analyses of place practices, De Certeau (1988)³⁸ refers to subjects without a proper place, located, however, far away from institutional spheres. This is what we can also apprehend in excerpts 4 and 5, once what is verified in them is that time is focused on the parents’ projections of the subjects of the narrative as a dimensioning (“as time passed by”; “as years went by”) and reorganizing element of actions and spaces. This is due to the fact that the children’s schooling period and the absence of schools in the community are constituted as space-time references for the families to decide to move from one place to another in search for formal education for the children.

Thus, the parents who did not have access to school, as we have seen in excerpts 1, 2 and 3, because of social exclusion, are narrated in excerpts 4 and 5 as subjects who end up facing new temporalities now during their children’s childhood (the teachers themselves narrate it). Those children, similar to their parents when they were children, also find themselves almost hindered from getting their education because in the scenario of Brazilian public policies the concept of ‘fields without people’ prevails. However, it is a place of excluded people from social services, such as education. Despite historically imposed conditions, in excerpts 4 and 5 it is possible to apprehend a discursive movement that is materialized as resistance processes by means of which the parents subvert temporalities and make them superimpose the space that is determined by historical conditions that guide space-time relationships: “Then there was no way out. That’s when at this moment my father decided to buy a house in the city”; “their three children were born and they were getting at that age when they have to go to school, so they decided to move to Nazaré dos Patos.” As in excerpts 1, 2 and 3, in the excerpts 4 and 5 we find the functioning of discursive deixis impelling temporalities that are marked by temporal indicators (“that’s when”; “at this moment”; getting at that age when they have to go to school”). It is all about a discourse that anchors in the voices of common sense that is oriented by the official discourse that refers to attending school at the right age. However, different from excerpts 1, 2 and 3 - in which temporality (time to go to school) does not advance to positively projected spatiality (access to school) because the parents did not have any means to attend school when they were children or teenagers -, in excerpts 4 and 5, the incessant search for a school for the children takes place in the space-time tension.

Therefore, in excerpts 4 and 5 the meaning of urgency prevails. It takes the subjects to advance temporalities towards other places. Sousa Santos reminds us that “the feeling of urgency is the result of the accumulation of multiple questions at the same time and place. Under urgency, hours lose minutes and places are compressed” (2008, p.190).³⁹ The verbal forms send/leave, decided and moved indicate changes of attitude, decision making impelled by the imposed adversity (“send them to school”; “leave her at her grandmother’s house during the week”; “decided to buy a house in the city”; “decided to move to Nazaré dos Patos”; “moved to the city”). The decision making marked in the linguistic forms, such as send them to school; leave her at her grandmother’s house; decided to buy; decided to move, suggest the reorganization of space and time. According to De Certeau (1988),⁴⁰ this is about organizing practices of space that, when narrated, produce “geographies of action” that translate the subjects’ experiences in the world. “Stories thus carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places. They also organize the play of changing relationships between places and spaces” (De CERTEAU, 1988, p.118).⁴¹ This way, temporality captures and reorganizes spatial actions, coordinating changes, producing meanings mobilized within a tense movement of resistances that act as events in language and history. Even when enduring historical adversities, the subjects seize the opportunity (De CERTEAU, 1988)⁴² at the very moment when the children are old enough to go to school.

3.3 Teacher Training: Guiding Deixis for Different Space-Temporalities

In this section, we highlight, in the teachers’ accounts, the meanings related to teaching, emphasizing the discursive functioning marked in the processes of identification that are also inscribed in space-time coordinates. Socially discourses already formulated about teaching direct subjects’ enunciative positionings when their occupation become the object of their discourses.

• 6. I finally finished high school in 1997. I graduated, something I really wanted. After two years I had the chance to work as a primary school teacher for the first time. I taught 1st to 4th grade students in Breu Branco, where I applied for public service. I finished my undergraduate studies in Pedagogy in 2004. This moment was the one I really longed for. I remember my father crying when he saw me wearing an academic dress. (A.)⁴³

• 7. Some years went by and after many difficulties I finally completed my primary education. It was important to me. I was invited to replace a teacher in a multigrade class. I took an exam and passed. When I started teaching, the opportunity to take Magistério⁴⁴ came up. (C. A.)⁴⁵

• 8. The beginning of my life as a teacher wasn’t what I’d wished as a career, but it was what came to me. Even being unprepared I accepted the challenge. I started following my teachers’ footsteps and then I tried to imitate their actions, which I know caused serious damages to many people because my teachers’ actions were repeated in my own, except for punishments and ferules. (S.)⁴⁶

• 9.[...] there was a gap of some years when I did not have a job. Even having graduated from high school, the opportunities were few. It was when my mother asked me to give exams to her students because she got this illness that caused problems in her vocal cords. That was in 1998, and I started working as a substitute teacher. In 1999 I started my undergraduate studies in Teaching and I worked with 2nd grade students. In 2001 I graduated from college. Then I started teaching not because I chose to, but because I needed to. (C.)⁴⁷

Analyzing the accounts as discursive practices, in the process of memory constitution, two dimensions in the teacher training path seem to be at the base of excerpts 6, 7, 8 and 9: the very path of teacher training until they got to the university and their (lack of) choice for an occupation. In excerpt 6, meanings of completeness and accomplishment of expectations regarding their education (finally; really longed for) are textualized. In excerpt 7, there are also temporal indices that indicate expectations concerning the graduation steps (“some years went by”; “I finally completed my primary education”). However, these temporal indices guide us in the search for “other” words that are not textualized, but that, in the absence, produce some other meanings, once a discourse “says” in such a way that another discourse may not be “said” in other words.

Anchored in the time of training, excerpts 6 and 7 say more than the subjects’ expectations for the conclusion of their studies. Above all, discourses that translate the historical conditions of training in a given conjuncture are inscribed in them. If the parents lived a historical moment when the access to school was completely denied, the children live in a conjuncture in which, despite their having access to school, school is not yet effected as a full right. The expectation to compress time with the completion of studies is even more important in these discourses, most likely because the teacher training is present in the discursive horizon of these subjects as the only possibility of work where they live. However, such expectation is not always easily materialized with the training: “After two years I had the chance to work as a primary school teacher for the first time.” The temporal marker after two years expresses the duration of the expectation for work after graduation.

It is worth highlighting, in the excerpt 7, the apparent contradiction present in the teacher training process. The subject who says s/he completed primary school, facing many difficulties, recognizes that the teaching experience he/she had guaranteed, in a way, his/her graduation from high school. In a region where the level of schooling is not always the main prerequisite for a person to take a teacher position exactly due to the limited access to initial education, teaching becomes a possibility for the subject to continue his/her studies while working. The reason for this to happen is not necessarily connected to the teaching position. In a society in which the “labor market” demands new professional profiles every day, the in-service training establishes a new order whose centrality is not the human dimension, but the instrumental dimension that is renewed according to external needs and new devices of teacher subjectivity.

Excerpts 8 and 9 put in action the issue of professional (lack of) choice in a way that the teacher occupation is a matter of the lack of professional perspectives. Both utterances translate this meaning: “The beginning of my life as a teacher wasn’t what I’d wished as a career; there was a gap of some years when I did not have a job. Even having graduated from high school, the opportunities were few [...].Then I started teaching not because I chose to, but because I needed to.” In this discourse it is possible to apprehend the non-identification of the subject with his or her occupation. The search for better living conditions is what impels them to start teaching, a reality particularly present in their accounts. In the latter two accounts, the first experiences in teaching are a result of fortuitous situations, as the only employment opportunity (“but it was what came to me. Even being unprepared I accepted the challenge; I started working as a substitute teacher”). In this discourse, occupation assumes the meaning of provisionality (“what came to me”; “substitute teacher”), which also showcases that, in the context of Brazilian public policies, teaching faces two paradoxical times: if, on the one hand, educational reforms have expanded teacher training modalities, on the other hand, the teacher professionalization has not been taking into consideration the historical, cultural, political and social conditions in which the profession is exercised (LIBANEO; OLIVEIRA; TOSCHI, 2003).

The meanings of teaching conveyed in the accounts point to the complexities of becoming a teacher educator. In addition to social discredit of the teaching profession, degrading wages, difficult working conditions, we should take into account the representations the subjects produce about their profession from the historical conditions that involve not only school education, but life, the cultural and discursive universe in which the meanings of teaching are forged. The analysis points to the need of making new questions about the relationship between knowledge and power based on how the time of teacher education and teaching is discursively relocated in space-time, denouncing metaphors of memory framing in history.

Conclusion

Pollak (1989) reminds us that life stories reconstruct history and rearrange events. This perception is the basis of our analysis, as we sought to apprehend meanings produced in the narratives of the subjects, considering the narratives as a way to interpret the world from certain given conditions. In this sense, the accounts translate the management of a precarious balance between contradictions and tensions (POLLAK, 1989).

During our analysis, space-time categories constituted as important methodological steps to find discursive practices and understand them in dialogic relations that put subjects in touch with history. In our analysis we noticed how space and time are united or transformed, reorganizing meanings oriented by historical conditions of the subjects who produce language.

In doing this analysis, we highlighted three thematic paths configured as modalities of space-time coordinates that touch the history of the subjects in relation to their teacher training process: i) the childhood-school and childhood-work temporality-spatiality that brings to the materiality of the discourses the inscription of incommensurability between life in the fields and the right to basic needs, such as education; ii) temporal experiences that reorganize spatialities, in which the subjects, facing the processes of social exclusion, resist and reorganize their life trajectories, on the edge of chaos; iii) teacher training that orients new temporalities. In the third modality, space-time coordinates refer to the teacher education of the subjects and their professional experience. In these coordinates, the effects of meanings that point to a complex movement of teacher training are inscribed, bringing historicity marked by its own contradictions. The teacher training of the subjects is represented discursively by a recurrence to the living conditions in the fields, characterized by processes of exclusion that start with the parents and include their access to college and their teaching position. These processes inevitably involve teacher training; for this reason, they have to be considered as components of the initial and continuous training.

The meanings that move the narratives show us that no training project - in this case, teacher training - should be implemented without taking into consideration the discursive practices of the subjects about their individual and collective trajectory, because it is in them that the dimensions of the political, economic, cultural and educational, etc. life are inscribed, carrying implications to teacher training per se. Regarding the teachers who are part of a story of migration to a region in Brazil that is still marked by processes of denial of rights, their discursive practices convey indices of this experience and they should became bases for training. We should take into account that in those discursive practices modes of becoming a teacher and teaching are forged. In short, in them, the movement of identities and the constitution of subjectivities that should nurture the very training process occurs.

• Translated by Francisco de Fátima da Silva - [e-mail]
• 1
  BAKHTIN, M. Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity. In: BAKHTIN, M. Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays. Translated by Vadim Liapunov. Texas: University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1990. pp.4-256.
• 2
  BAKHTIN, M. Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences. In: BAKHTIN, M. Speech Genres & Other Late Essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986. pp.159-172.
• 3
  BAKHTIN, M. Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel. In: In: BAKHTIN, M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four essays.. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981. pp.84-258.
• 4
  DE CERTEAU, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.
• 5
  For reference, see footnote ¹.
• 6
  For reference, see footnote ³.
• 7
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 8
  Accounts, autobiographical accounts, narratives, life narratives are assumed here as interchangeable terms, although there are conceptual formulations that consider their distinctions.
• 9
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 10
  For reference, see footnote ¹.
• 11
  For reference, see footnote ³.
• 12
  Text in original:“Talvez, as melhores fontes para pensar o tempo sejam os estudos das obras de Dostoiévski e Goethe, particularmente porque levam à historicidade também do espaço, pela elaboração do conceito de cronotopos.”
• 13
  Text in original: “No pensamento bakhtiniano do sujeito datado um entrelaçamento entre passado, presente e futuro que se realizam concretamente num espaço historicizado pelo tempo.”
• 14
  Text in original: “Assim como o espaço dialógico se manifesta pela exotopia daquilo que excede o campo de visão dos agentes envolvidos, o tempo dialógico só pode ser entendido pelas temporalidades plurais e simultâneas que são projetadas nesse espaço.”
• 15
  For reference, see footnote ¹.
• 16
  For reference, see footnote ¹.
• 17
  For reference, see footnote ¹.
• 18
  For reference, see footnote ².
• 19
  Text in original: “num espaço móvel, inacabado e não dado de uma vez por todas.”
• 20
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 21
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 22
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 23
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 24
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 25
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 26
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 27
  Text in original: “[...] nem à análise temática, tal como é praticada pelos críticos literários, nem aos empregos que dela se faz na linguística. Essa noção supõe a distinção entre ‘o horizonte de expectativas’ - o conjunto de possibilidades atestadas em uma situação histórica dada - e o acontecimento discursivo que realiza uma dessas possiblidades.”
• 28
  In this work, autobiographical accounts, life histories and narratives are interchangeable terms.
• 29
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 30
  Text in original: “Minha mãe [...], nascida na cidade de Cametá, na sua infância não freqüentou escola, devido seus pais morar longe, não tinha meios de transporte até a escola, e também por começar a trabalhar cedo na lavoura, para ajudar em casa. Minha mãe é analfabeta, aos 16 anos ela se casou com C., que também trabalhava como agricultor. C. não tinha estudo, mas sabia assinar seu nome. Ambos foram criados com muita dificuldade.” (A.)
• 31
  Text in original: “[...] minha mãe conta que era muito difícil o acesso a escola devido eles serem de família simples e humilde, ambos [a mãe e o pai] não tiveram muita oportunidade de estudar, de modo que ela fez apenas a 2ª série e meu pai a 3ª série, as dificuldades eram muitas e o lugar era de difícil acesso, por esse motivo faltou oportunidade para que eles tivessem um grau de escolaridade maior.” (C. Q.)
• 32
  Text in original: “Minha mãe é natural da cidade de Bacabal no Maranhão, na infância não teve muita oportunidade de estudar. Porque tinha que ajudar seus pais adotivos na lavoura, porém na idade adulta ela concluiu a 8º série.” (F.)
• 33
  According to Sousa Santos (2005, p.194), “the succession of times is also the succession of spaces that we traverse and that traverse us, leaving on us marks that we leave on them”. Text in original: “A sucessão de tempos é também a sucessão de espaços que percorremos e nos percorrem, deixando em nós as marcas que deixamos neles.”
• 34
  Curiously, this sentence is not present in the English translation of Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes toward a Historical Poetics (BAKHTIN, 1981). For reference, see footnote 3. Text in Portuguese: “Os índices do tempo transparecem no espaço, e o espaço reveste-se de sentido e é medido com o tempo.”
• 35
  “Article 205. Education, which is the right of all and duty of the State and of the family, shall be promoted and fostered with the cooperation of society, with a view to the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship and his qualification for work” (BRAZIL, 2013, p.112). [BRAZIL. Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil: Constitutional text of October 5, 1988, with the alterations introduced by Constitutional Amendments no. 1/92 through 72/2013 and by Revision Constitutional Amendments no. 1/94 through 6/94. Translated and revised by Istvan Vajda, Patrícia de Queiroz Carvalho Zimbres, Vanira Tavares de Souza. 6. ed. Brasilia : The Federal Senate, Undersecretariat of Technical Publications, 2013.]
• 36
  Text in original: “Com o passar do tempo os filhos foram crescendo e surge a necessidade de colocar os filhos pra estudar, ficar no sitio não era mais possível, mas como era só uma filha que estava com sete anos, dava de colocar na casa da avó durante a semana, e os finais de semana minha irmã mais velha chamada de M. voltava pra casa. No ano seguinte surge outro problema teria minha outra irmã que também deveria ir à escola, aí nesse momento não teve jeito, foi aí que meu pai resolveu comprar uma casa na cidade, já que ele tinha um propósito que todos os filhos teria que estudar .” (F.)
• 37
  Text in original: “Com o passar dos anos nasceram seus três filhos e como já estavam ficando com a idade de estudar resolveram mudar para Nazaré dos Patos porque a escola, nessa comunidade, as séries eram até a oitava, Dois filhos mais velhos foram para cidade a dar continuidade nos seus estudos, a primeira filha terminou o ensino médio na cidade e o segundo estudou até a oitava depois seus dois filhos voltaram a morar com seus pais, e continuaram seus estudos no campo junto com seus pais.” (M. S.).
• 38
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 39
  Text in original: “O sentimento de urgência é o resultado da acumulação de múltiplas questões na mesma hora e lugar. Sob o peso da urgência, as horas perdem minutos e os lugares comprimem-se.”
• 40
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 41
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 42
  For reference, see footnote ⁴.
• 43
  Text in original: “Finalmente conclui o Ensino Médio no ano de 1997, fiz a minha formatura que tanto esperava. Depois de dois anos tive oportunidade de trabalhar pela primeira vez como professora de 1º a 4º série do Ensino Fundamental, na cidade de Breu Branco, onde fiz o 1º Concurso Público. Concluí o nível superior em Pedagogia no ano de 2004, esse momento foi o mais esperado, lembro-me que meu pai chorou quando me viu vestida na Beca.” (A.)
• 44
  TN. Magistério was a teacher education program at high school level.
• 45
  Text in original: “Passaram-se alguns anos e com muitas dificuldades consegui concluir o primeiro grau, foi importante para mim, fui convidado para substituir uma professora, a turma era multisseriada, fiz um teste e passei. Quando comecei a lecionar, surgiu a oportunidade de cursar o Magistério me tornando um educador.” (C. A.)
• 46
  Text in original: “O início de minha vida no magistério, não era o que almejava para minha vida profissional, mas foi o que apareceu e mesmo sem preparo aceitei o desafio, e passei a espelhar-me nos meus professores, tentava copiar suas ações e com essas atitudes sei que prejudiquei muitas vidas. Pois a prática de meus professores se repetia nas minhas, com exceção de castigos e palmatórias.” (S.)
• 47
  Text in original: “[...] houve um intervalo de alguns anos fiquei sem trabalho, mesmo com estudo completo as oportunidades eram poucas, foi quando minha mãe pediu que eu passasse provas para seus alunos, devido a uma doença que ocasionou problemas com suas cordas vocais, isso no ano de 1998 e fui trabalhar como professor substituto. No ano de 1999, comecei a estudar o Magistério e trabalhar com a 2ª série e no ano de 2001 conclui meu curso. Com isso entrei na profissão de professor não por opção, mas por necessidade.” (C.)

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Apr 2018

History

• Received
  08 Dec 2016
• Accepted
  08 Nov 2017