Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present

– Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Future. This study aims to exam the power of narratives in educational research. It discusses inaboutwith studies on school everyday life (Alves, 2008), following the examination of the modern production of knowledge in Western modernity, based on the ideas of Santos (2000, 2004, 2006) and Adichie (2019), acknowledging, at the same time, the importance of recognizing other rationalities and the place of narratives in this process. We assume the narratives (Ricoeur, 1994; Benjamin, 1994) of singularsocial experiences (Reis, 2022) as the theoretical-methodological-epistemological and political approach to the production of our research.


Introduction
The colonized could never have been seen and portrayed by the colonizers as cultivated, capable, intelligent persons worthy of their liberty, or, for example, as the producers of a language that, because it is a language, advances and changes and grows historico-socially.On the contrary, the colonized will have to be barbarous, uncultured, 'nonhistorical' persons -until the arrival of the colonizers, who 'bring' them history.They speak dialects, not languages, fated never to express 'scientific truth', or 'the mysteries of transcendence', or the 'loveliness of the world' (Freire, 2011, p. 151).The Freire's quote that begins this text offers clues about the processes of social invisibility to which peoples from different origins, both individuals and groups, are subjected, which disqualifies and delegitimize their knowledge, social practices, beliefs, and ways of being.
Among the consequences of such process, we point out the production of a single story (Adichie, 2019) as a process that takes off the plurality, loveliness, and charm of the history.In opposition, we offer the concept that knowing the stories narrated by the different subjects who inhabit the world can help us understand the inexistence of "barbarous, uncultured, nonhistorical" peoples.To make this opposition possible, exercising epistemologies that recognize different knowledge, stories, and origins as legitimate beyond what is hegemonically validated is required.
We focus on the tessitura of a more democratic world, in which different groups, subjects, and societies exercise solidarity, listening, dialogue, and sharing.We bet on this possibility since it helps us to act in our research practices and because we want this tessitura to flourish.This, however, would require perceiving others as legitimate (Maturana, 1999) since only they can tell us who and how they are, how they live, and what they feel, think, and do.We need to know their different stories to understand the diversity of knowledge and cultures circulating in the world.Thus, we must recognize we are the subjects of stories and that we both weave them and are continuously formed by them.
Therefore, narrative processes that involve narrating, listening, feeling… emerge as a way of knowing and recognizing others' beliefs and experiences and, by them, thinking about a broader present, breaking with linear time and diving into the identity Bragança (2012, p. 114) claims "[…] also consists of a narrative of the self, which is constructed from images of past and future projects, blooming, between 'inherited identity' and 'targeted identity'," together with experiences and stories that enable us to expand our understanding of what exists and, thus, help us think and weave a possible future from the possibilities inscribed in the present, which are unpredictable or domesticated by what lazy reason 1 (Santos, 2000) understands to exist.
It is necessary to recognize others' knowledge and stories beyond the hegemonic to dilate our perception of the present.Only then, we can think of social justice as a project of the future since The struggle for effective social justice requires commitment and historical patience as it constitutes the greatest confrontation of humanity.It requires committing to the collective process and the global reality (i.e., a detachment from exclusively personal development) and establishing an ethical relationship with the struggle for everyone's quality of life.[…] We will be nearer to the world of "loveliness" proposed by Paulo Freire when all children attend school, when women, Black and Indigenous people, and those with disabilities or dissident sexual options have the same rights as white men; when everyone's daily life include going back at the end of a working day to a home worth inhabiting, with food on the table and basic sanitation; when older adults can enjoy a safe and healthy old age; when all citizens have access to education at all levels; when culture and art are shared realities in everyday life; when people have the opportunity to choose their own paths, guiding their decisions by liberating critical thinking; finally, only when all people on the planet have obtained these basic rights (Arelaro, 2021, p. 28).
Thus, from my place as a professor-researcher 2 who believes in a world of "lovelinesses", I believe we must defend the plurality of knowledge and cultures so we can learn different realities from these narratives and thus weave, in the present, possibilities for a more democratic future.
Therefore, this text aims to discuss the power of narratives in education research, the place from which I speak.This discussion is based on the understanding that by listening to and reading students, teachers, and other educators and researchers, we can come to know the diversity of knowledge produced in schools and other education spaces.
For such, we discuss studies on/in daily life based on Alves (2008) since we find we must immerse ourselves in the research spacetime with vigilant senses to perceive the minutiae of everyday life and consider every event as research data source.For this, we must also mind ways of recording what is learned beyond what modern scientific writing entails.
Next, we will discuss the production of knowledge in modernity and its unique way of seeing the world based on Santos (2000; 2004; 2006) and Adichie (2019) due to the importance of recognizing other rationalities and the importance of the narratives themselves in this place.
From these discussions, we point out socialsingular narratives (Ricoeur, 1994) and (Benjamin, 1994) experiences (Reis, 2022) as a theoretical-methodological-epistemological and political contribution to the production of our research.
Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present Finally, we bring the narrative of a teacher as a way to evince our discussion using empirical experiences.

Diving into Research in Daily Lives
What kills me is the day-to-day.I only wanted exceptions (Lispector, 1978).
The word day-to-day refers to the idea of routine and repetition, as in Clarice Lispector's quote above, in which the author claims to only want exceptions since everyday life kills her.Few people would deny the feeling that the term carries, in common-sense language, "[…] every day she always does everything the same way" 3 since " […] we learned that what is relevant in our doing is a 'what' liable to be measured, quantified, regulated, and controlled" (Alves;Oliveira, 2005, p. 86).
However, studies on/in everyday life have sought to understand its complexity, highlighting the "[…] 'how', which varies in a more or less anarchic and chaotic way and is therefore neither subject to quantitative analysis, normative control nor even precise regulations" (Alves;Oliveira, 2005, p. 86).
This perspective understands daily life as a field of diversity, conflicts, clashes, and production of diverse knowledge rather than just a dynamic of repetition without creation.So, as a way to study daily life "freed from normative control", we learn from Nilda Alves (2008) that we must mind some necessary movements.
The author points out the need to dive in everyday life with sharpened senses, researching with and together something, rather than about it.Alves names this movement "the feeling of the world".
When immersed, we realize that what we thought we knew no longer serves, i.e., we must free ourselves from our certainties.Our exercise will involve "turning ourselves upside down" (Alves, 2008, p. 23) and try not to judge, suspicious of what we imagine knowing a priori.According to Oliveira (2003, p. 71-72), "[…] truths are, from this point of view, enemies of learning".
We must, then, reflect on the need to recognize these multiple sources of knowledge, considering feelings, touches, smells, and listening, i.e., "[…] drink from all sources" (Alves, 2008, p. 27).Thus, we should think about other ways to record our learning, narrating life and "literatizing" science (Alves, 2008) so we can say, discontinue, and ask more than we answer.Alves (2008) tells us that what "[…] really matters in research inaboutwith everyday life are people; practitioners, as Certeau calls them" (1994, p. 46).Thus, in a later text, the author recalls the "ecce femina" (Alves, 2008, p. 46), a name given in the feminine, "[…] because it is more appropriate to the daily lives of our schools" (Alves, 2008, p. 46).
Thinking about these five movements and realizing the need to know what pulsates in everyday life, we understand that this is only possible if we immerse ourselves in it with all our senses and drinking from all sources, rather than seeking absolute truths.
For such, we assume narratives as a way of doing research with daily life since researching narratively imposes us revisiting theoretical-methodological-political-epistemological perspectives since we understand that sensitively writing-reading-listening narratives helps us to know and understand that its practitioners must tell us of the complexity of their everyday lives, leaving the hegemonic patriarchal, white, Christian, and colonial place to produce knowledge based on other rationalities.

In Search of Other Ways to Understand the World
Boaventura de Sousa Santos criticizes the production of knowledge in modernity, helping us to think about the need to produce research involving the diversity of knowledge in the world.He states that this produced knowledge is "disenchanted and sad" (Santos, 2006b, p. 53).
We call modernity (the age of reason) the set of transformations beginning from the 15th century in Europe with the discovery of the New World and involving its culture (the Renaissance), politics (the emergence of national states), and economy (capitalism), beginning in the 16th and 17th centuries and becoming hegemonic from the 18th century.It is the age of reason since it replaces theocentric explanations, according to which God knew and revealed his knowledge to a few, by the advent of valuing the human capacity to know by its own rationality (Reis, 2014, p. 125).
Knowing by observation and explanation produced a model that became hegemonic and dogmatic.This rationality linearly represents and explains time.Santos (2004, p. 787) calls how we conceive time in modernity "monoculture of linear time".This monocultural way of explaining time leads to two discussions: the first concerns the idea of progress as evolution, i.e., the only way to conceive the future.That or the one coming out of this place of infinite progress is put in a backward position, thus creating the impossibility of coexistence.Some societies "[…] are transformed not only into different, but into needy, archaic, primitive, traditional, premodern societies" (Lander, 2005, p. 34).
This conceives the world as "this or that".We believe, based on research with narratives, in a time of "this and that" without thinking the world by hierarchies in relation to the idea of progress as evolution which creates that pair of opposites -evolution and backwardness.We want to research life in its complexity rather than reducing it to a stereotyped model.
Our second discussion involves thinking that the monoculture of linear time concerns the present and the need for its expansion.

Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present
By proposing another model of rationality (which he calls cosmopolitan reason), Santos (2004, p. 779) founds 'three sociological procedures […]: the sociology of absences, the sociology of emergencies, and the work of translation.'For this, he points to the need of finding that 'the understanding of the world far exceeds the Western understanding of the world' (Santos, 2004, p. 779) since this limited comprehension only partially and inadequately views the set of social experiences underway in the world, creating and legitimizing a time-and temporality-related social power since contracting the present and expanding the future constitutes its most fundamental characteristic.The contraction of the present occurs when, from a linear conception of time and a planning of history, we live to achieve a future which expands indefinitely, making the present, the time of the experience, a fleeting and nonexperiential instant (Reis, 2014, p. 127).
For Santos (2006a), we must abandon what he calls lazy reason -a model of rationality that impedes us to perceive the social richness in the world -in preference of what he calls cosmopolitan reason -which requires dilating the present -, beginning with the sociology of absences.Thus, we will be able to undo the invisibility of the social richness in the world today, recognizing the infinitude of the plurality of knowledge.
We seek to think narrative research in this perspective of seeing the world based on ecologies (instead of monocultures), the expansion of the present, and contraction of the future, as per the sociology of absences.Thus, we exercise the non-waste of socialsingular experiences to stress that the history of the world exceeds its telling in a single way and by a single people since it is plural, consisting of several ways of lookingfeeling-thinking.According to Adichie (2019, p. 26), "[…] the single story creates stereotypes.And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.They make one story become the only story".To "expand the present" to get out of a single story, we must narrate in the perspective of multiplying and "uninvisibilizing" the different singular social experiences since […] overcoming the conception of totality […] by overcoming monocultural logics or modes of production of non-existences proposed by the sociology of absences seems a way to reevaluate these experiences which, as they are shared, can be expanded and made concrete as a project of the future.Gallo (2003, p. 71), from his studies on Negri, claim that 'more important than announcing the future seems to be the daily production of the present to enable the future' (Reis, 2016(Reis, , p. 1341).
Thus, we can think of socialsingular narratives as ways to expand the present, pointing out existing experiences rather than wasting them.

But why Socialsingular Narratives?
We have seen that modern science deems only partially recognized knowledge as common sense, disqualifying all its possibilities and powers.
We chose to work with this unrecognized knowledge.Hegemonically constituted science rejects that stories narrated by everyday subjects constitute sources of research.Thus, Bourdieu (2005, p. 74) says that research involving the narratives of life stories is "[…] one of those common-sense notions which has been smuggled into the learned universe".This contraband resembles Certeau's (1994) tactics, entering the enemy's field, taking advantage of occasions, and highlighting the importance of thinking of other ways of producing knowledge by leaving the modern hegemonic matrix.
Research in narratives of lived stories seem to us loaded with emancipatory possibilities.We have learned that, by looking at ourselves and understanding that our learnings relate to the networks we weave in personal (singular) and collective (social) experiences, we can open ourselves to the possibility of perceiving how much others' stories are also weave throughout their lives, allowing a living in difference without hierarchization.As Maturana (1999) teaches us, look at others as a legitimate other.
We understand that lessons such as these can greatly refine our way of perceiving daily life, providing knowledge about us and others that can help us evaluate how much we invest in the past and have experienced to extend our present and weave a possible future.
Thus, we understand that narrative research is fundamental in the process of expanding the present since we need to tell the stories of our experiences in a way that allows us to ponder and expand them since they gather and organize the events of our existence, giving meaning to heterogeneous and polysemic life stories.
Therefore, thinking about schools in this research, teachers' and students' narratives helps us ponder what Alberti (2004, p. 26) calls the "fascination of the lived", a "[…] recovery of the lived as conceived by those who lived it".Alberti calls the singular experience "fascination" since "[…] the act and art of remembering never cease to be deeply personal" (Portelli, 1997, p. 16).Thus, subjects' memories "are like fingerprints; there are no two alike".
However, we should consider that memory is both unique and socially woven since the networks and contexts constituting us elaborate our experiences.In this sense, we claim that memories are socially experienced in a unique way, i.e., socialsingular.

Narrating Lived Experiences
The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work -the rural, the maritime, and the urban -is itself Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present an artisan form of communication, as it were.It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report.It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again (Benjamin, 1994).
We have seen that narrating (from the Latin narrare), which etymologically means "to make known" (gathering and organizing events), may expand the present, as proposed by Santos (2004).By narrating socialsingular experiences, we may expand them in the present, challenging the waste of experiences that has characterized the production of knowledge in modernity.From a Benjaminian perspective, Reis (2013, p. 9) tells us that […] the narrative intends to break with the isolation of the contemporary man and the impoverishment of human experience, which according to him, took place with the advent of capitalism in the modern age.Following modernity, we have seen the emergence of forms of communication other than narrative, but information.
With this perspective of the duty of expanding the present and leaving the place of information with a narrative, we bring Ricoeur (1994), who offers us the idea of a threefold present: a present of the past things (memory), a present of the present things (direct perception/vision), and a present of the future (expectation).He seeks this concept from his studies on St. Augustine's Confessions.This idea helps us to think of narratives as a possibility of expanding the present and contracting the future since, in the present, we narrate past memories, weaving possibilities for a more concrete future.For Ricoeur, time and narrative are inseparable, i.e., experiences are temporal since remembering the past and expecting the future are woven in subjects' networks.
We have been training teachers since 2010 from this idea of expanding a threefold present.Narratives of life stories and lived curricular experiences have been our motto.We realized, in the present, that teachers train themselves by their interrelationships.i.e., heard, told, written, and read narratives have trained them in the relation between time and narrative.As we hold roundtables, organize training courses 4 , set collective planning projects 5 , watch licentiate students meet teachers from the schools in which they work or offer the books and films 6 we have produced, we note that the exercise of sharing experiences generates reflections on participants about themselves and others.
In this process of narrating life, we realize that teachers can (re) invent it, choosing, in the past of memory and expectation of the future, what seems important to them for their training process, which is always reflective.We claim, in our studies, that training takes place at all times, and we have appointed this process as a continuous training (Reis, 2014).The socialsingular narratives of these processes can redirect their path and change routes.
I bring, as a lived experience, excerpts from a story narrated by Professor Edson Gomes, who narrates a socialsingular experience by telling his story (which, like all stories, is collectively experienced), thus helping us to think broader ways of seeing the social world from a singular experience.17 years ago, in a municipal school in Paracatu, Minas Gerais, a short skinny boy, with his black hair millimetrically combed to one side and full of fixing gel, watched his Portuguese teacher eagerly predict the future of his classmates.She would tell one of them 'Oh, you'll be a doctor!' to another: 'You'll be a lawyer', 'football player', 'model', and on she went.His turn seemed never to come until, overcome with anxiety, he provoked her: 'What about me, teacher?What about me?!'Not too thoughtfully, she answered surely and with a smile: 'You… fabric salesman!'All those who heard what she said obviously laughed and the boy, who was me, also laughed complacently.I was 14 years old at the time and in eighth grade.This tragicomic episode, which belittled me before my class, would be just one of several which I could collect from my first nine years of schooling.In addition to the fabric salesperson', that class had other students who would not even have the courage I had to provoke a response from the teacher.Me and other colleagues were marked by our grades and behaviors but, above all, by our Brown or Black complexions, by our family histories, which were socially summarized to separations, aggressions, single mothers, illiteracy, precarious housing, etc. Future physicians, lawyers, and engineers were mostly white students who lived up to school expectations or who, even if they didn't, could be framed as members of the ideal picture-perfect family (Gomes, 2021, p. 71).Now Edson is a professor.His narrative reminds us that only those familiar with recognized knowledge (in which schools turn into appropriation of teaching contents) will have a place at the top of the social tree (Alves, 2000).We may now retrieve the idea of monoculture knowledge (Santos, 2004), which only recognizes scientific knowledge as valid.This is a hallmark of its hegemony and social sovereignty.We find social groups with greater access to this form of knowledge and those whose "ignorance" become their marks since the knowledge inhabiting them is deemed invalid.Many either ignore or fail to recognize what schools expect of them and are thus unable to progress since they lack the "proper" access to knowledge.
What made that teacher think Edson would be a fabric salesperson?He or any other student could indeed sell fabric in the future.Rather than the issue involving the profession, it deals with disqualifying it in relation to the other previously mentioned professions.We would like to retrieve the idea that, due to the absence of criticism of the hegemonically constructed models of student, school, family, etc., Edson's Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present teacher reinforced exclusion processes.Perhaps she never realized how much this way of being a teacher is excluding since her perception of the world is rooted in her.This, perhaps, is one of the cruelties of this rationality, i.e., reproducing its logic without explaining or seeing the exclusion it causes and naturalizing historical inequalities; a social inequality often characterized by a supposed ethnic inferiority.
Edson closes his text thus: Now that I am a PhD and a professor at one of the most traditional schools in Rio de Janeiro, I became more distant from the prophecy announced by my former teacher.But I still had to deal with my social brands: the need to daily strive to recognize and remove my persistent white masks has imposed itself as never before; a commitment I made to my students, public education, and myself.An explosion of pain and joy, no doubt, but which needed to be converted into sufficient energy to engender pedagogical practices of social transformation.
In the context of the pandemic, my practice as an educational advisor remains inevitably focused on actions committed to training all in a critical perspective toward curricula, which includes focusing on practices capable of potentiating the possibilities of students' experiences and learning, especially when they are in a socially disadvantaged situation.It is to be expected, therefore, that social inequalities, further widened during the pandemic, cause me much distress.But positioning myself like this is hopeless.It implies defending inclusive practices as a moral, political, and ethical principle.Moral because I feel compelled to contribute to a better public education than I had access to and make it equally more accessible.Political because this understanding demands facing positions which are not always consistent with the democratic character of public education and thus silently designed as exclusionary and segregationist.And ethical because it eminently occurs by complex and non-linear processes which can never lose sight of the commitment to effective practices favoring training and transforming students with whom I work, the school, and, consequently, myself.
As I look at my trajectory, I realize that it would be incoherent not to have this understanding of my role as a professor.Today, acting as an educational advisor, I still work with pedagogical management, working with families and with students' training, remaining attentive to all the issues I lived during my school education.And, at that moment, I live all this in confinement, having to divide myself between the work I perform (in all its complexity and anguish) with household affairs and caring for my pregnant wife and my four-year-old daughter.
In any case, and despite the calamitous moment we are experiencing, I think that, just by being where I am today, I subvert the structural and institutional racism present in our society.But one has to work, and a lot.And feeling prevented from it makes me agree, in part, with my Portuguese teacher.After all, maybe I've really become a salesperson… Not of fabrics, tools or furniture but of utopias that move me and sew themselves in the daily life of public schools (Gomes, 2021, p. 75-76).
To what social brands does Edson refer?He speaks of structural and individual racism, two concepts Silvio Almeida (2020, p. 35) explains well.The author offers three concepts of racism: individualistic, institutional, and structural, based on racism and subjectivity, racism and state, and racism and economics.
Almeida (2020, p. 37) points out that individualistic racism individually blames subjects as if racism were only a matter of education, ethics or psychological support.It reinforces the importance of individual sanctions since "[…] racism is immoral and a crime".However, it points to the fragility of thinking about racism outside the social issue.That is, it is necessary to think of racism as a characteristic of a society.He claims: […] what can be seen so far is that the institutional conception of racism treats power as a central element of racial relations.In effect, racism is domination.It is undoubtedly a qualitative leap when compared to the limited behavioral analysis present in the individualistic conception (Almeida, 2020, p. 40).
For the author, institutional racism is based on the "[…] establishment of discriminatory parameters based on race that serve to maintain the hegemony of the racial group in power" (Almeida, 2020, p. 40).This concept constitutes an advance in race relations, but it still fails to think of racism in its completeness.Thus, the author tells us about the importance of thinking about racism as a structure of society, including individual and institutional responsibilities."[…] on the contrary: to understand that racism is structural, and not an isolated act of an individual or a group, makes us even more responsible for combating racism and racists" (Almeida, 2020, p. 46).In other words, we must understand that racism naturalizes inequalities, or, as in Santos (2004), a monoculture of difference naturalization.
We can infer throughout the discussion Edson offers that he aims to leave this place, exercising an "ecology of recognitions" (Santos, 2004) by seeking to transgress the monoculture naturalizing differences (Santos, 2004) the moment he seeks "[…] practices capable of potentiating the possibilities of students' experiences and learning, especially when they are in a situation of social disadvantages" (Gomes, 2021, p. 75).
By searching for more inclusive ways of doing things, Edson shows us that his concerns are based on morals, ethics, and politics, inseparable issues to perform a work that recognizes the different and the differences.
In his conception, by being where he is today, a professor at the College of Application at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, he Narrative Research as a Possibility to Expand the Present already subverts the racism structuring society, leaving the place in which his teacher placed him a long time ago.
Edson seeks in his past (memory) stories that help him broaden the present (vision) with his daily work, in search of a more inclusive (expectation) future.That is, his narrative explains the idea of a threefold present.

What we have been learning: almost initial considerations
Narratively immersed in researching daily life and exercising the non-waste of experiences has highlighted plural stories supporting the importance of leaving the place of a single story and seeking other rationalities.Language plays a marked role in constituting our lives, and through it, we can perceive socialsingular ways of narrating lived lives.
By exercising narrating-hear-telling-writing, we exercise the non-waste of multiple, plural, and non-repeatable experiences since subjects experience them in their daily lives, weave them into their networks, and carry Ricoeur's threefold present: a present of the past things (memory), a present of the present things (direct perception/vision), and a present of the future (expectation).
We can infer that narratives constitute a borderless spacetime that allows movement between what we are and what constitutes us.Thus, we can always think of redoing since the act of being aware of our posture as subjects structure this posture before the world and can change our paths.In Pérez's (2003, p. 6) words, we may "[…] rescue dreams that need to be dreamed through the practice of a sociology of absences, which enabling us to know what does not yet exist in a reality that, by being so ours, escapes us".
Narrative research with the daily life of schools has helped us to unlearn the rigid truths that hinder us realizing the complexity of the world.According to Queirós (1996, p. 10), it is necessary "[…] to reduce the size of the mystery, open doors to receive new lessons, unlock windows, and peek further".Our theoretical-methodological-epistemological and political choice of working with socialsingular narratives and "diving without a float" (Alves, 2008) have helped us to learn a lot about schools and education.
Narratives also provide learning from the other, opening up possibilities to see, hear, and feel what we are unable to by ourselves.We enlarge the present, perceive the complexity of everyday life, and can then think of solutions (even if provisional) to the dilemmas experienced daily in schools by narrating.
Narrative research reveals "ways of doing things" (Certeau, 1994, p. 152) that allows us to find gaps and flaws in the conjunctures that are opening up in the surveillance of power, criticize the production of knowledge in modernity, and think from other more ecological and non-excluding rationalities, as Edson teaches us. 2 Research in everyday life uses the "principle of joinability" of words when two or more of them assume a different meaning from those they had by themselves when written together.
of Western rationality that reproduces forms of thought perpetuating undemocratic practices since they deem social experiences as irrelevant.