NARRATIVE REFLEXIVITY AND SELF (TRANS)FORMING POWER

Abstract

Biographical approaches in education, despite their diversity, have as a common assumption the transforming power of the action of narrating the lived experience. They admit that narrative reflexivity gives the person who narrates the possibility of giving meaning to what he did not have before and, by ordering the events, he (re)constructs another version of himself and of his formation. One of the great concerns of the research consists in examining the ways in which the action of language allows one to operate provisional versions of oneself and of the narrated experience. The objective of the article is to contribute to the studies on narrative reflexivity as a human capacity to operate these versions of self and its formative power with language. I will discuss the notions of autobiography and heterobiography in the articulation with narrative reflexivity and its incidences on human formation. I question the emergence of the self and the hesitant entry of subjectivity into qualitative research, adopting the perspective advocated by Dilthey (2010), who considers inseparable the links between "life, lived experience and science". The vitality of the subject is considered based on the notions of empirical subject, epistemic subject and autobiographical subject, as dimensions of subjectivity, whichare constituted by narrative reflection in the processes of production and reception of narratives of experience.