The autobiographical method and teacher's life hirastoiiessbxiesthe issue of subjectivity

Abstract

This article deals with theoretical and methodological issues related with the (auto)biographical approaches. It considers that since the 1980s there has been a shift in the studies about teacher education, whose emphasis on the person of the teacher has favored the publication of a large number of works about teacher's lives, careers and professional tracks, teacher's autobiographies or their personal development (Nôvoa, 1982). Seeing more than just a fashion in the approaches that have endeavored to explore aspects of teacher's subjectivity, the text seeks to understand what has been the cause of their widespread acceptance. Within this perspective, the article discusses how the human sciences since the early decades of the 20h century have broken away from conventional research methods, and attempts to show how subjectivity became the nuclear and articulating idea of the new theoretical propositions that have thenceforth sustained various fields. The text then examines the specific features of the biographical method (Ferrarotti, 1985), underlining its heuristic value to the investigation of the relations between social and individual histories. In its last part, the article introduces a characterization of the studies with teacher's life histories, highlighting the following points: the current need to build up a theory of adult education (Dominicé, 1990); the potential of such studies and approaches, and the methodological difficulties that result, on the one hand, from the great variety of uses that have been made of these approaches and, on the other hand, from the newness and immaturity of the field itself.