ABS315 - Educational memory and senses of learning: the construction of a documentary as subjective reconfiguration

This research was conducted from within a pedagogical project developed throughout the year 2013 in a fifth-grade classroom of an Elementary Public School in Brasília, DF. Young students aged between 9 and 12 years-old produced with their teacher a video documentary called "Our history in the school".  The project’s goal was to recover student’s educational memory. In order to understand the singularity of learner’s subjects in their processes of recovering educational memory, we opted to use the Theory of Subjectivity in a Cultural-Historical Perspective (González Rey, 2002) as the theoretical basis. Group’s autonomy in decision-making and dialogical interactions, through which tensions, contradictions and disagreements were settled, were main aspects of the video documentary production. These aspects bind to the principles of the Qualitative Epistemology (González Rey, 2005), that is, the interpretative-constructive principle, the dialogical guidance and the orientation to singularity in knowledge construction; principles which organized the research methodology. In this way, in addition to oral instruments that allowed conversational dynamics throughout the process, other instruments, such as child’s play, school activities and interviews were created by the group to characterize their process of schooling. The opportunity was given to students to decide what to do in planning and executing the script and the filming of their school lives allowed the emergence of learner subjects who configured new subjective senses, as symbolic and emotional productions, about the process of learning and the school itself.