The differences between Oral Testimonies and Free Association Narrative Interviewing is a very interesting reflection for investigations that use oral testimonies in History of Education. First of all it should be pointed out that the main difference between testimony and narrative concerns the structure of the discourse that makes up testimonies and this is an aspect that is almost always a little confusing, depending on the type of data available and the data collection structure (semi-structured interviews, narrative, biographical, etc.). Whereas testimony is reduced to a direct answer to the question, narrative presupposes an account in the form of a story told. It is in this sense that free associations should be observed, as it is natural that emotional aspects overlap with rational ones in the construction of the narrative. In these cases, for the analysis of the data, the methods applied in areas such as linguistics, psychology and sociology can be considered. I recommend this book by Hollway and Jefferson: Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method.
Tag Archives: memory
Preprints in Social Sciences
Which platform may be the most indicated for a preprint submission in the field of social sciences?
Among the platforms researched, I observed that OSF, Scielo and Elsevier preprints offer a reasonable structure for preprints submissions and analysis. In this sense, I kindly ask for suggestions on which platform may be the most indicated for a preprint submission in the field of social sciences.
The remembrance, history and school as heritage of the social memory of the village of Ponte de Lima.
Based on the understanding that the past and its memories add value to the present and is projected into the future, this work aims to reflect on remembrance, history and school as heritage of the social memory of the village of Ponte de Lima. Using a bibliographic and archival research, we verify the social and educational dynamics in the Village regarding events, spaces of memory and the elementary school. We also used some excerpts from narratives of the individual memory of the village and the school. The theoretical argument is based on the understanding that the village, events and celebrations, the public spaces and its school, compose the scenarios where the individual and collective memories are built. These memories make up the symbolic universe of a social identity, allowing the memories to be signed and resigned in a sociodynamic movement where the past is present in dialogue with the stories and memories of people and places.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352817737_A_RECORDACAO_A_HISTORIA_E_A_ESCOLA_COMO_PATRIMONIOS_DA_MEMORIA_SOCIAL_DA_VILA_DE_PONTE_DE_LIMA
Histories and memories of the school during the Estado Novo period in Portugal.
A look into the sociodynamics of Moles and the social memory of Halbwachs
Starting from the thesis that social memory is sociodynamic and that remembrance reflects asocio-spatial-temporal mnemonic movement of biographical events, we propose reflections on how schooltime memories manifest themselves and what meanings are attributed to them. From semi-structured inter-views applied in 2017 to teachers who taught during Estado Novo, we call upon qualitative analysis for thetreatment of collected data. The narratives revealed that the memories emerge paradoxically nostalgic andcritical to the contexts associated with the Regime, announcing a narrative in constant dialogue of the pastwith the present, especially regarding the notion of authority and the teacher-student relationship.
Sociodynamic perspective of memory
Abstract
The historiography of education has increasingly used oral testimonies to understand school culture and the social microcosm of a school in its historical and social dynamics – as, through oral testimonies, past experiences can be evoked and resignified in the narrated present. This paper thus aims to explore oral testimonies of former Portuguese teachers about their memories of school during the Estado Novo using a set of semi-structured interviews conducted in 2017. These interviews explored teachers’ perceptions of their teaching career, childhood and the school’s historical, political and social context during the Estado Novo. The data were then clustered into “Individual accounts of professional experiences” and “Memories of childhood from Estado Novo”. Taking a sociodynamic perspective of memory, the analysis shows an ambivalent perception of the past with regard to the political, economic and social contexts. For example, although some perceptions were negative when talking about discipline in the classroom and the punishment of students, participants also pointed to the higher level of respect given to the teaching profession. These autobiographical memories show that oral testimonies allow a mental journey in time, combining assumptions of episodic memory with semantic and autobiographical memory as the experiences resignify the past in the present, revealing a sociodynamic perspective of memory.
Article published – Paedagogica Historica – https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2022.2065882
Memory policies and memory pedagogy
Memory policies promote places, monuments and even objects as memorial records of a past that should be remembered and celebrated as registers of a culture and identity. Through activities framed in pedagogies of memory, schools insert in their didactic activities the visit to places of memory. But is the pedagogy of memory dependent on memory policies established in educational policies or encouraged by national educational strategies? Can we say that memory policies pave the way to the establishment of memory pedagogy in school activities?
Education and politics of memory
Politics of memory at the school
Although this is not a new theme, the phenomena of “memory manipulation” and “politics of memory” always seem current to us. Even though they are different terms, they are close from a semantic point of view. Memory policies resort to manipulating memory using conditioning actions that, in some aspects, recall Skinner’s reinforcement schemes. Authoritarian and totalitarian regimes have adopted this strategy in the iconography of classrooms and the contents of school textbooks. Thus, we can point to the school as a space where the propaganda of non-democratic political regimes intensified their politics of memory? Can the same phenomenon also be observed in democratic regimes?
Memory – School Policy – Propaganda – Advertisement – Education – History – Social Control Policies
Context and memory narratives
How does the context influence memory narratives?
The memories of the events, biographical or not, are reconstructed in the memory narratives. In this way, the recollection, or at least, the recollection narrative is influenced by the context (past and present). But, how does the context influence the registration of the biographical event and the narrative of remembrance? How can Context Theory help us to understand the influence of time on narratives?
Biographical memory and narrative memory
The narrative of memory dialogues with the ‘time of the ‘experience recorded’ and the ‘time of the narrative of remembrance’. Paul Ricoeur in “Time and Narrative” indicates the paradoxalities of the hermeneutic circle between the act of narrating the fact (remembered) and temporal dynamics. What can be understood about the plasticity of time in the dialogues of memory? Something that Ricoeur himself will later explore in “Memory, History and Forgetting”. But would this temporal plasticity be a relevant factor in the transformation of non-biographical memory into biographical memory?