(Re)invention of the past as a gesture to (de) compose Pedagogy

Abstract

The processes of recording the past in education commonly forget their pedagogic power, thus paradoxically contributing to nostalgic, fossilized accounts. However, the matrix junction of narrative research and critical pedagogies fosters the composition of stories that invigorate and inhabit a more sensitive past —one which is more polite towards life. We hereby aim at disturbing the classical perspectives of History of Education with the partial, fluent and provisional intention of intervening in coloniality and the normalization of the legitimacy of “the” educational narrative. Specifically the objective is a (re) of a past —the past of Argentinian high schools— from a methodology of narrative research —which weighs both the data of the field and the reflections on what is done with them—; by the abolishment of its forms and the inversion of its enunciation as a means to fostering gestures leading to what we call a (de) composition of pedagogy. Preoccupation that becomes paramount to stop interpreting it as a social science that studies education, because in this way it is usually relegated to its systemic, technical and disciplinary use. The stories collected from the Argentinian high schools, dislocate it from its classical notion to try to understand it as a narrative in which human relations of education are verbalized in an extended and vital sense. In short, they activate a discursive power as a condition to restore other ways of knowing, being and knowing.