Encounter with visual and/or textual diaries: a thought-provoking space in the educational experience¹

Abstract

This paper, originated from a doctoral research, aims to discuss how the encounter with classroom diaries happens in an educational experience, offering an overview of them, with them, and beyond them. Thus, seeking to achieve these research’s objectives, the narrative perspective was chosen. This perspective is materialized in the problematization of the visual and textual diaries produced by the students of the Visual Arts degree at Federal University of Santa Maria and in the networks of affection which have or have not potentialized the thought about the teaching experience. Therefore, intending to meet the demands raised by the narratives produced in the diaries, the research proposes a dialogue with the concept of event. In this approximation of one’s own narratives to others’,, it was possible to draw new perspectives and to think teaching as a process in constant renovation and invention.

Keywords
classroom diary; educational experience; problematization; event

Resumo

Este texto, recorte de pesquisa de doutorado, intenciona discutir como ocorre em uma experiência educativa o encontro com diários de aula, oferecendo um sobrevoo sobre eles, com eles e para além deles. Dessa forma, buscando atender aos anseios desta investigação, optou-se pela perspectiva narrativa, presentificada na problematização dos diários (visuais e textuais) produzidos pelos acadêmicos do curso de graduação em artes visuais da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria e nas redes de afetos que potencializaram ou não o pensar da experiência docente. Assim, com o intento de dar conta das exigências suscitadas pelas narrativas produzidas nos diários, passou-se a dialogar com o conceito de acontecimento. Neste tangenciar de narrativas próprias e alheias, foi possível desenhar outras paisagens e pensar na docência como um processo em constante renovação e invenção.

Palavras-chave
diário de aula; experiência educativa; problematização; acontecimento

A brief overview...

This text, originated as part of a doctoral research, aims to present an investigation of the visual and textual diaries produced by the professors and students from the Estágio Supervisionado III [Supervised Internship III] and Estágio Supervisionado IV [Supervised Internship IV] classes from the Visual Arts degree of the Federal University of Santa Maria (UFSM). The internship is more than a class; it is also an important educational moment as it allows teaching degree students to be introduced to theoretical-methodological instruments and gives these students the opportunity to act in the school environment. The internship is a time for learning in which, for a certain period, students dedicate themselves to a place or an occupation in order to experiment the profession. In the case of the teaching profession, internship presupposes a pedagogical relationship between a more experienced individual (the schoolteacher) and someone who is beginning at the teaching and learning profession.

Beyond the classes, UFSM also offers guidance for interns to develop a Teaching and Research Project with lesson plans, class observations, visits to the school institution intending to observe how these interns act in the classroom, and individual meetings when needed. Most of the interns included in this research also participated in the Programa Institucional de Bolsa de Iniciação à Docência (Pibid, Institutional Scholarship Program for Teaching Initiation) for Visual Arts, and thus had some previous experience in schools. This particularity contributed to the force of the group’s questioning and for the sharing of experiences.

In the classes, students reported on the research and the experiences they were developing at the schools, texts were studied, and images and films were seen. These activities aimed to promote the reflection about the teaching experience. As Deleuze and Guattari (1994) point out, thought is not something inherent or acquired; thought needs to be provoked, because we only think when thought is coerced, forced, violented.

Based on an agreement with the involved parts, diaries were individually produced during the semester by the students and also by us, the classes’ professors. We have chosen this method because we believe that the diary can be a narrative space for thoughts, expressing in a textual and/or visual manner the impressions we had during the interventions in the work performed at the school or in the study encounters at the university. This narrative environment could allow us to think about the activities, broadening the discussions and producing other resonances from the encounters with teaching.

It is in this sense that we seek to question, in this article, the narratives and the sensations shared which derived from the study, from the production process, and from the presentation of the visual and textual diaries, exploring the network of affection which potentialize or not the thought about the teaching experience. Hence, some questions have accompanied this investigative process: What do the diaries impel us to think? What convergences and differentiations are provoked by the diaries? What constructions of meaning are promoted by the diaries? What impacts were the diaries produced by the students and by us able to provoke? What resonances were propagated by this collective construction?

Therefore, aiming to achieve the objectives of this research, we have opted for the narrative perspective, materialized in the production of the visual and written diaries. According to Martins and Tourinho (2009), those who narrate revisit their experiences, making it produce new meanings for the presented situations. The narrators listen to themselves, establishing connections which were previously not necessarily clear. This immersion can provide a moment of contact with the events and things built during one’s life. It also provides an extended look over determined moments, enabling new arrangements.

When we study a group’s narratives, we chart through unknown worlds, because different thoughts and impressions are entangled. This multiplicity contributes for the activation of new compositions.

The importance of the narratives resides in that which they provoke us to think and in the other connections they challenge us to make. Thus, we can say that, by opting for a narrative investigation, we are also taking in consideration the acts of crossing and of sharing, because both contributors and investigators are involved in this process.

Each methodology takes hold of the researchers, welcoming them and capturing them. Method is constructed during research, taking part in this process from an experience which is displaced. Meanwhile, researchers also begin to constitute themselves in this investigation.

Educational experience: the horizon where the diaries traverse each other

The investigation of the educational experience aims to highlight the empirical field of the lived experience in an everyday manner (Van Manen, 2003, p. 9). The investigator’s daily experiences become the corpus of the research, offering a fruitful material to think about education. It is a singular research, creating the opportunity for participants to present what they have built based on their own experiences in the personal and in the academic contexts (as professors, students, and researchers).

In this study, we have taken in consideration the experiences and the individuals, the questionings raised, the narratives constructed, the relationship with the visual and textual materials, and what was possible to produce from all of this. It is in this intense field that multiple voices are traversed, that knowledges are shared, and that other perspectives for education are opened.

When we are approaching new encounters, we become, as Van Manen (2003, p. 47) posits, sensible observers of the subtleties of everyday life. The challenge, perhaps, lies in resting our eyes in each of the encounters so we can place ourselves in the position of learning from them, letting ourselves be overtaken by the occurrences which we do not know, which cause us terror, which challenge us to think differently, and which topple our certainties and dogmas. This is the price of intensely living what we experience.

The research of the educational experience elicits the discussion of the ability to visualize and to think the possible landscapes we can compose from the everyday incidents, from the infinitesimal, from that which at times is shunned and discarded in our daily lives. This long pause makes us encounter the forces which entice us to perpetuate what we do, placing us face to face with our constraints and limitations.

Immersing ourselves in our own educational experiences allows us to think about our actions in the pedagogical space, thus paying more attention to our choices, to what we do not bring to the discussion, to what we highlight, to what we conceal, and to what we mask. We have always been interested in focusing on what, at first, we wanted to hide in the personal diaries, for we believed that there we would find a powerful material to investigate. Even if, by writing our diaries, many times we have tried to cover our strangeness, our vulnerabilities, and our fear, those were the bottlenecks which resonated with and affected us the most, enticing us to carefully enter each of them and to think beyond them.

We have become, thus, attentive to the echoes produced by the diaries in the students and in ourselves. We have sought to think about what we have learned in this process, about how we moved in this crisscross of our own narratives with those of others’. The force which triggers the visual and textual narratives of the diaries has captured us and has begun to inhabit us, provoking us to think about the educational experience and to review and question our predefined and conforming convictions.

Foucault (1984, p. 390) affirms that problematization must be understood “not as an arrangement of representations but as a work of thought”. By problematizing, we are moving and provoking thought, challenging it to question the hegemonic meanings and the certainties which accompany us. To Foucault (1990, p. 257), problematization

doesn’t mean representation of a preexisting object, nor the creation by discourse of an object that doesn’t exist. It is the totality of discursive or non-discursive practices that introduces something into the play of true and false and constitutes it as an object for thought (whether in the form of moral reflection, scientific knowledge, political analysis, etc.).

Truth is imbricated in plays of power and interest; it is a truth of time and is “the pure force of time which puts truth into crisis” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 130). We produce and are produced by these “truths of time”, which we believe in and which we take as models. Nonetheless, this also makes us think that single and eternal truths do not exist, because they can be broken, reviewed, and actualized. When problematizing, detachment from what is believed to be the truth and distancing from the problem can open different perspectives and meanings.

The power of problematization lies in its ability to expand the range of what can be questioned and problematized, and lies, also, in the increase of the number of possibilities which can sprung from a problem or from a set of problems. By glimpsing other aspects of what had always been presented in a certain manner, we can draw new landscapes of life and conceive the world as a creation process.

In this convergence field, in which we see and are seen at the same time, in which we affect and are also affected, we invite you, our reader, to join us in an overview of the diaries, with the diaries, and beyond the diaries. Maybe we will dialogue with this production of narratives, establishing relationships we have not perceived, but which make sense to you, which trigger some not-yet-discussed questions, or, who knows, which were not sufficiently explored.

An overview of the diaries

Isabel Carrillo (2001, p. 51) affirms that the writing of diaries can be seen as a silent space for recollecting the path and visualizing the footprints we have left behind to, at the same time, make us project new imaginations in light of what was, of what is, and of what belongs to the future and is uncertain because it does not yet exist. Through the diary, individuals start seeing themselves in their own narratives, and they can recreate the events they narrate. By allowing themselves to look at past events dislocated from space/time and, also, involved in other forces at play, individuals are driven to establish different relationships, focusing on singular problematizations.

Thus, another relationship with the diary is opened, because we can see it as a space for exchanges, where people, by narrating, establish a dialogue with themselves and the virtual receivers of their reports (Zabalza, 2004, p. 49). It is a space for encounters: with the “self who narrates”, with the “self who is narrated”, with “those involved in the narrative”, and with “those to whom the narrative is addressed”. With the diaries, it is possible to place our singular manner of expressing teaching in perspective, bringing a negotiation about.

The dairy enables us to see from outside how we construct our thought in relation to our investigation object. Zabalza (2004, p. 136) expresses how both writing about what we do and reading about what we did allow us to reach a certain distance from the action and to see things and ourselves in perspective. We are so immersed in our investigation that, often, we cannot distance ourselves from what we do. This distancing can provide knowledge about ourselves and about our actions because we start noticing problems and probable causes.

From the broader perspective made possible by the diary, the elements of the circumstances in which the narrated actions were produced are all taken into account, and thus hypothesis and possible answers for the difficulties met are envisioned. This displacement incorporates a dynamic of reevaluation and potentializes the enrichment of our experiences as teachers.

Experiences gain importance when they are narrated in the diaries since, when we express in a written and/or visual manner the thoughts, challenges, desires, confrontations, disappointments, and angsts which accompany us, we become increasingly and more clearly aware of our own actions. The diary, hence, can be an instrument for us to outline new possibilities of action, simulating modes of being and fictionalizing singular forms of experiencing teaching.

An overview with the diaries

The problematization triggered in the diaries was entangled with the projects and researches developed by the students of Estágio Supervisionado III and IV, with the repercussions of the studies performed in the classes, with students’ interventions as teachers in the schools, and with the sharing of experiences in the group. This connection was made evident both in the production and in the presentation of the diaries.

Based on an agreement between those involved in the classes, some aspects were considered when we produced the diaries and, because of this, some questions were interweaved in the creation of these diaries. We decided that the diaries would be individually produced during the semester and that at least six items should be contemplated. Based on studies by Oliveira (2009, 2011, 2013, 2014) and Zabalza (2004), the diaries should contain the following dimensions.

1. the “dilemmas” from the classes presented during the process—comprehending “dilemma” as any set of aspects which are regarded as problematic and are constituted as a constant focus of concern, uncertainty, or reflection for the teacher (Zabalza, 2004, p. 59);

2. the problematizations of the “teaching self under construction” and the construction of meaning elaborated from the studies and from the educational experiences in the internship—the production of meaning refers to something created in the process and which did not exist a priori, differently from the previously existing meanings;

3. the collaborator from the process—the accounts and/or the images of the school students and the resonances propagated from them;

4. the key concepts of the teaching and research projects (developed by the university students in previous classes) and the authors which contributed for thinking these projects;

5. the tension and the dialogue between text and image, observing that one would not take precedence over the other, nor would represent what was previously shown; and

6. the study encounters in the weekly classes, including the possible relationships which could be produced and problematized with the texts discussed, with the images shown, with the films watched, and with the sharing of experiences with the classmates.

Topic 5, specially, revealed itself as challenging for the university students because they still carried the tendency to reproduce and illustrate what they write or speak. Hence, we sought to explore the diaries and take advantage of the plural nature of the images because, in this multiple nature, images are driven towards other images. This constitutes a model different from the representational one, in which images are directed towards themselves.

When the image aims to represent the textual narrative, it allows for a broadening of meanings, signaling other elements which may have been imperceptible or may have been presented differently. Instead of simply illustrating the text, images can challenge us to establish new bridges and innumerable connections. The image, in this context, takes on a tensor role.

Accompanied by the image, the text, in turn, since it does not strive for an explanatory format, does not address the images, but discusses from the images, with the images, and beyond the images (Hernández, 2013, p. 86). As Hernández (2013, p. 88) points out, this means relating images and the text’s narrative to a place beyond the commentary and the illustration.

Regarding the sharing of experiences, indicated in topic 6, it is worth mentioning that because it takes place in a group of university students with some common desires, but also with expressed differences, the sharing of the produced narratives contributed to the crisscrossing of multiple narratives. This granted an awareness of approximations, but also produced disagreements, breaks, and discontinuities, potentializing the resonation of other forms of thinking the teaching profession.

All the listed topics were considered when elaborating and presenting the diaries, which enabled a broader perspective of what we were doing. The diary offers this outside view, as if we could see ourselves in an amplified manner. Van Manen (2003, p. 91) posits that the practice of writing a diary can contribute to the learning process to the degree that students are encouraged to continue reflecting about their learning experiences and to try to discover relationships which otherwise they would not perceive.

This observation makes us think about how similar the diary is to photography. We can choose the best angle and visualize what the machine will capture, but when we develop the pictures, unexpected images appear, since elements or people can be contemplated without our previous intention to capture them. It is a fresh look to what we had already seen. We could say that the diary provides a renewed experience of what we had already lived.

By producing the diary, we are not the same as before: elements enter the scene and intercessor force us to think about other things in our paths. We are crossed and affected at all times, because we produce ourselves in this journey, making singular relationships become imbricated and problematized.

Surprises—some pleasant, other not so much—take place the moment we start reviewing what we had experienced. At times, we face our own frailties and that which, with a lot of effort, we insist in hiding. Coming in contact with scenes which can produce discomfort and strangeness is part of the elaboration process of a diary, because it is also a space for us to meet ourselves. It is an opportunity for us to listen to ourselves, to visualize that which we have locked away, and to face the “dilemmas” we have created by ourselves.

The presence of the “dilemmas” in the diaries gains another proportion when they are expressed in words or images, since, from grand imaginary monsters, they take other shapes and become smaller. “Dilemmas” can be dealt with not as adversaries, but as allies when we place ourselves in the position of seeing them as triggers for thought, when we spend energy in search of other productions of meaning, potentializing what seemed impossible.

The elaboration and the presentation of visual diaries in the classroom is a practice which has been used for some years in the Estágio Supervisionado III and IV classes. During the time we shared educational experiences with these groups, we noticed that this proposal is accepted with expectation and tranquility. This may be due to the groups’ closeness and familiarity with visual materials, with visiting the expositions of the materials produced by previous classes, and with sharing information with colleagues which had previously, in other semesters, experienced this activity. The visual and textual diaries are part of the curricular proposal of the internships, contributing for students to expect to produce them.

Figure 1
Student A’s diary for the class Estágio Supervisionado IV (2013)

During the classes, the diaries were presented three times, two while they were being produced, and one at the end. Exposing the diaries to the group contributed for making thought clearer and more organized. It enabled a crisscrossing in the meetings, in which a multiplicity of experiences was reported and discussed. We saw ourselves in many situations in our colleagues’ diaries, we put ourselves in their places, and we started thinking about our practices as teachers. This narrative environment of individual’s thoughts contributes for a fruitful exchange play. At the same time, it was a moment of retaking a travelled path, since it was possible to notice what made sense to students, what impressions they had of the classes and of the internship experiences, what conversations they were able to establish between their “teaching selves under construction” and the texts, the poetry, and the images proposed.

Different forms of diaries in textual and/or visual versions were presented: letters, poetry, performances, patchwork quilts, banners, videos, comic strips, PowerPoint slides, radiographies, tablecloths, and albums. The possibility of producing diaries with visual and performative elements allowed for a view of what, perhaps, would remain otherwise unexplored.

The research with other materials in the diaries can lead to the establishment of other relationships, making an increase in perspectives possible and generating new directives. The encounter with differentiated formats encourages us to look for alternatives for the challenges posed by the material. The same subject can be developed in different ways when explored in other configurations.

An overview beyond the diaries

By being crossed and affected by some of the questions raised by the narratives and presentations of the diaries, our power to act was renewed, leading us to actualize, in the present, our relationship with the teaching profession. In this exchange play, new interconnections entered the stage.

The discussions, based on the texts and images worked during the semester, influenced the diaries, enabling us to widen the range of problematizations. This challenged us to seek some concepts which would meet the demands of the students’ narratives, reassuring the repercussions of theory and of practice, since, due to the urgency of the moment, at times we felt the need to research concepts to understand what was happening, while at other times the theory being studied made our looks more attentive and more directed towards certain things which, maybe, would not be perceivable if not for the direction provided by theory. Theory and practice are intensely actualized during the journey.

From this discussion, we will, in this section, present how this encounter drove us to focus on the concept of event and on others which derived from it, such as between-times, recollection-image, and sheets of past. We also observe how these concepts are tensioned in the educational experience.

Diary 1

History poses that events are displaced linearly in time, one next to the other, ordered in chronological sequence and organized without spaces between them. Events, however, are not manifested obeying an evolutive order of queueable facts, since past, present, and future coexist.

Not even our thoughts function linearly, since we establish relationships between yesterday, today, and tomorrow at the same time. When we think, ruptures, gaps, and unfoldings take place, because we add, subtract, and overlap elements at all times.

To accommodate every event, continuous time becomes limited and insufficient. According to Pelbart (2010, p. 20), from the timeline to the entanglement of time, from the river to the earth, from the flow to the mass, from the mold to the modulation, from succession to coherence, from the time of consciousness to the time of hallucination, from order to infinite variation—this is the direction of the Deleuzian theory of time, distancing itself completely from the images of time solidified by tradition.

The Postcards diary provided a narrative space for Student B’s thoughts, contributing for the problematization of the views which were naturalized in his educational experience. From this perspective, the act of narrating is not limited to a description of facts, situations, or relationships. Narrative weaves meanings and constructs truths from the interconnected flux of forces. Blanchot (2003, p. 6) affirms that

Narrative is not the relating of an event but this event itself, the approach of this event, the place where it is called on to unfold, an event still to come, by the magnetic power of which the narrative itself can hope to come true.

Narrative does not intend to reconstruct what has already happened, but to activate what is alive and persistent. The present takes advantage of this and actualizes the forces of the past, intensifying them and inventing ways which accept the activation of the becomings. In the event, the dispute states are at play and the forces gain power when, in a widened conflict of favorable and unfavorable circumstances, they are crossed and affected by new combinations of forces.

Figure 2
Student B’s Postcards diary for the class Estágio Supervisionado IV (2013)

Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 156) state that “the event is not the state of affairs. It is actualized in a state of affairs, in a body, in a lived”. In this movement, things are acquired, lost, and displaced, and a field of incidents is constituted to accommodate the particularities. In the event, the instant is actualized and it ends up producing another moment, since different weavings become interconnected and establish unexpected relationships.

Hence, the event can displace thought itself, since it deals with the crisscrossing of fluxes of forces which obey the unexpected, questioning new arrangements and provoking different intensities. Thought, in this sense. Is not previously defined in preexisting, fixed, and rigid structures: it is found in an attitude of constant opening. When, in the educational experience, we do not have a script directing and hampering us, we contemplate the possibility of reinventing this experience every day.

Diary 2

In the production of the diaries, the greatest challenge was writing in a non-linear and non-chronological format, while trying to establish connections and developments. We think in a rhizomatic manner, but we insist on writing in an arboreal manner. We seek to structure our thought in a sequential way, fragmenting it in in drawers with set dates and times, forgetting things which escape, overflow, and breach, because multiplicities do not allow themselves to be directed by and conformed to a structure.

The “rhizome is precisely one example of an open system” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 32), always about to happen, to escape, to overlap. That is why the possibility is opened to sprout from the middle, to begin “between” things, in displacement, in oscillation. Preciosa (2010, p. 37) affirms that sprouting from the middle means opposing a destiny which progresses in the direction of something, it means flirting with risks, accumulating successes and resounding failures, it means infiltrating in a neighborhood and establishing connections.

Thinking about the educational experience “in between” places our attention in what happens “in the middle”, in movement, not prioritizing the origin or the end points. It is in the interstice where we are crossed, touched, produced. It is also where we have the conditions to invent ourselves, opening up the possibility to tell an retell our stories as many times as we need.

During the making of the Patchwork Quilt diary, Student C from Estágio Supervisionado III used pieces of fabric to highlight the aspects which made sense to her and which were relevant when thinking about teaching. The patches were displayed in a way to distance themselves from a chained report, but to represent the conversations and the connections which were produced based on her educational experiences.

Figure 3
Student C’s Patchwork Quilt diary for the class Estágio Supervisionado III (2013)

The class’s participants were invited to intervene in the quilt, by drawing, writing some considerations, or registering questionings in the patches. In the diary presentation, depending on how the fabric was folded, new arrangements and connections could be established, triggering unique relationships.

Diary 3

Based on Student D’s Teaching Journal diary for the Estágio Supervisionado III class, it was possible to think about how much memories can be actualized when the past is contracted and distended to the present. Hence, some considerations must be exposed and problematized.

Figure 4
Student D’s Teaching Journal diary for the class Estágio Supervisionado III (2013)

Student D’s intention was to intervene in an education journal from 1964 which had belonged to her grandmother, a former teacher in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The student’s intention was to make the textual and visual contents of the journal provoke the thought of her teaching experience. During classes, she reported on the emotional relationship she nurtured towards the journal, due to the recollection-images it evoked. She also mentioned how difficult it was to interfere in the pages, which she regarded as an “untouchable material”.

When producing the diary, the student discussed the difficulty in establishing a dialogue between the questions she wanted to address and the content of the journal. In her presentation of the diary to her peers, it was possible to observe how the material had become a limiting factor, since, while trying to interact with the text and the images in the diary, she found only rebuttals: the relationships were always on the binary, oppositional level. It became evident there was a distance and a divergence between the student’s thoughts and what the printed material presented and elicited.

This experienced made us recall Deleuze’s (2000, p. 110) affirmations when he exposes that Bergson differentiates two possible situations when we activate our recollections:

past recollection may still be evoked in an image, but the latter is now useless, because the present from which the evocation set off has lost its motor-extension which would make the image usable; or, secondly, the recollection can no longer be evoked in an image, although it persists in a region of past, but the actual present can no longer reach it.

In the case of the recollection-images evoked by the journal, the sheets of past are still activatable and activated. However, the extracted images do not satisfy the desires of the present anymore, resulting in the non-evocation. Education is no longer perceived in the same manner, teachers and students are not the same, new necessities and demands have risen and, because the present has so significantly been modified, recollections are no longer useful for what we currently desire. “The recollections fall into the void because the present has hidden itself and goes elsewhere, withdrawing any possible insertion from them” (Deleuze, 2000, p. 112).

By bringing, to the school environment, texts or images falling back on discussions in which dichotomy is present, we obstruct the possibilities generated by the “and” and focus on polemics with the use of “or”. In the perspective of the “or”, the world is divided in opposing vectors—either this or that, either old or new, either good or bad—bringing about comparisons, categorizations, and exclusions. When we spend a precious time in polemics which hamper the possibility of intersections, of alliances, of invention, we risk limiting ourselves to the recognition or to the exclusion, resulting in the prerogative of identity.

Inventing a world where the conjunction “and” dethrones the rigidity of the verb “to be” and operating the exclusion of the conjunction “or” does not mean creating another world—a more just, perfect, and transcendent one. Resistance is not denying this world but investing in the infinite possibilities which “the others” of our world might offer. Regarding this matter, Levy (2011, p. 100) affirms that it is not a matter of looking at a new world, a world beyond the world, but of focusing on this world, our world, “the best of worlds”—or the “other world” an expression Levy borrows from Blanchot. The challenge, hence, is not in discovering the only possibility of world, nor is it in substituting this world with another, but in investing in as many “and(s)” as required to outline life possibilities in our own world.

Personal Diary

While thinking about all the possibilities of this practice, we, the researches, produced our own diaries during the time we shared educational experiences with our higher education students. This production provided us with a certain distancing, allowing us to visualize and tend to other things, which contributed to our questioning of matters which were naturalized in our teaching practices by examining our choices, actions, and—why not?—ourselves. The distancing exercise consists in having the freedom and the courage to separate ourselves from what we do, from what we believe, from what we hold true, outlining the production of powerful ways to construct the teaching profession.

Beyond the students’ diaries, the production of our own personal diaries, one for each professor, also contributed to our thinking about some concepts and about teaching. This was made present with more intensity when, in order to handle unpredictable elements and different connections, we needed to put our concepts of event in motion.

Figure 5
Diary of Researcher 1 (2013)

When we are provoked by new concepts, different relationships are activated for a greater understanding. In the case of Researcher 1’s diary, textual and visual registries had a crucial role in driving her to think about what she was working with, providing an increased proximity and involvement.

Considering these questions and wanting to produce diaries in another format, Researcher 1 shyly began an experimental research. She used varied material in this process, in which she overlapped transparent layers such as colorless sheets of plastic, overhead projector films, MRI films, crepe and organza fabrics. In the surface of each layer or sheet, visual and textual narratives were produced and superposed, making past and present texts and images coexist.

Some layers were not as clear as the others, since they were covered by other elements which interfered with visualization. Others could no longer be perceived since they were removed from the field of vision. Nonetheless, the layers were all there. The visual and textual narratives from the previous layer were modified as new sheets were placed on top and, due to the transparency of the material, it was possible to notice that they all remained in this overlapping of sheets, but with changes resulting from the mixtures and juxtapositions of elements.

The linear chronology of the diary’s narratives ceased when all layers became juxtaposed one over the other. As Researcher 1 affirms: “it was at this moment that I understood that, to encompass every event, a continuous, linear, and evolutional time becomes limited and insufficient” [our translation from Portuguese]. Past, present, and future are not chronologically organized, the three times coexist in the event. Deleuze (2000, p. 100) explains this by referencing a commentary by St Augustine: “there is a present of the future, a present of the present and a present of the past, all implicated in the event, rolled up in the event, and thus simultaneous and inexplicable”.

During the investigation, Researcher 1 experimented with digital diaries, seeking to overlap visual and textual narratives in the PowerPoint software. She realized that, by doing this, the previous layer was blocked due to the saturation of elements. It was necessary to invent voids, breaches, and gaps between the images and texts from the more recent layers, making room for ventilation and dialogues between the sheets. When everything was filled, some sheets were not seen anymore, even though they coexisted in this overlapping. Hence, Researcher 1 understood that empty spaces are fruitful for intersections and alliances to occur, creating breaches for interference and invention.

By presenting our diaries to the Students of the Estágio Supervisionado III and IV classes, we had to organize our thoughts and this exercise made us also think about the concepts we were working with. When we verbally exposed our diaries, we where provoked, by the group, with questionings and considerations, and, as Oliveira (2010, p. 17) posits, what was merely a text or an image overcame the silent plane of the textual and of the visual and gained shape when dimensioned as the verbal. The interventions by the group members reverberated into new relationships, since the sharing of experiences between the participants triggered a prolonging of the meanings of what we were investigating.

Time for a pause, even if a temporary one…

The problematization of the diaries could be experienced as a broad field which encompasses all the possibilities which thought is able to invent because it allowed itself to be crossed by different compositions, some of which were unexpected, paradoxical, realistic, fictional. Since the participants used these other particularities to mobilize the fluxes of thought and to overcome limits, these experiences became a favorable context for a dialogue with education and for the problematization of our own educational experiences.

It is in this sense that the sharing of the narrative experiences performed by the students and professors in their diaries can be seen as a thought-provoking space, not with the intention to incite a single and homogenizing thought, but a thought which has the power to disperse. Each of the participants had their own particular manner of being affected by and of entangling themselves in this interweaving of relationships.

We defend that more than fixating on the differences we could notice, it was important to realize how the approximation of our own narratives to those of others’ reverberated. Moreover, it was relevant to notice what was possible to be thought based on this sharing, which resonances of this collective echoed, how they affected and had the power to produce things which we did not imagine.

It was in this plural and unquiet context that we felt provoked to compose, albeit shyly, some interpretations. We believe there has been a contagion, an effect, a mixture of bodies. Does multiplicity not refer precisely to this? A composition of dimensions which displace and prolong themselves, which relate to each other aiming to generate power? Each incorporating all the others in another condition, to another degree?

It is thinking about this, dear reader, that after having presented overviews of the diaries, with the diaries, and beyond the diaries, we invite you to go a little further, making new thoughts and new fields of meanings rise, inventing new lives and producing yourselves in every one of them.

• 1
  English version: José Pereira Queiroz - [e-mail]
• 2
  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Andressa Picosque (Tikinet) – [e-mail]

Referências

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  02 Dec 2019
• Date of issue
  2019

History

• Received
  24 May 2017
• Reviewed
  11 Dec 2017
• Accepted
  26 July 2018