Los y las diferentes en la relación educativa: Investigación narrativa con una maestra de primaria y sus criaturas

Abstract

This paper comes from a qualitative research carried out in a school sponsored by a public voucher system and located in Raval, a neighborhood of the metropolitan area of Barcelona. When I developed the study, Raval was a social context where the lives and voices of its citizens were usually silenced due to the vulnerability of the people who inhabited that area. In this sense, the purpose of the inquiry was to explore how life and relationships might unfold in the daily life of a particular classroom. For a year and a half, I was alongside the teacher and a group of children who were 8 and 9 years old. Through deepening into the pedagogical goals set by the Elementary teacher, and using a hermeneutical, phenomenological, and narrative approach, the study focused on accompanying the teacher and three of the children as a way to understand how they were composing their lives. The diversity of the class spoke about their cultural and geographical differences. It was through the observation, formal and informal conversations, and participating in their class activities and games, that I discovered a world whose meanings and senses -sometimes hidden under educational standards- required a pedagogical disposition to be recognized. A disposition that the teacher pointed out in our time together and that showed me how the children can be placed, in our educational landscape, outside of what we expect or desire. This might locate them in a position where they are “different”. Thinking and analyzing the shared stories and lived experiences, allowed me to understand how the “principle of order of the just medium” (Milstein y Mendes, 1998) is still present in some school and classroom dynamics