Abstract:
The key role of oral history is to identify narratives which may be used in several ways. This text deals with the experience of the Oral History and Mathematics Education Research Group (GHOEM), which works with oral history and, as such, uses narratives as the core element of its investigation practices. The objective of this chapter is to debate the concept of “narratives,” as well as the ways they can be created/built and how they can be analyzed. Other topics are also approached such as sources, attentive listening, multiplicity of truths, form, and content (form-as-content), and the need to motivate/promote different sensitivities which are not common within academia when scholars search for new ways of thinking and building knowledge.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, when her teacher asked her what school is for, Marina, 4 years old, answered: “To go to school.”
- 2.
These are visual aphorisms which express a thought or a feeling under the view of daily “witchcrafts” or “charms.”
- 3.
In this sense, we must point out an excerpt from the most recent book published in Brazil by Alessandro Portelli (2016). Writing about his relationship with Dante Bartolini, a member of Italian anti-fascist groups, Portelli stated: “The relationship among intellectuals and members of the working class in places such as Terni, can be very complicated. In the archives of the Communist Party, I found a report from 1927, when the party was being forced underground. This report stated that comrade workers were frustrated because they were being silenced by people with formal education who were joining the party and knew how to speak the political jargon better than they could. In fact, the workers were being silenced by us. …Dante inverted the relation: his comrades and he were in command, and in fact they used me. With Dante, I learned that the idea which we were ´giving a voice´ to someone who had no voice is meaningless. Dante was not a person who had no voice, but I was. I could not sing, I had no stories to tell, and I could write only because people like Dante gave me a voice. I returned the favor by hearing and amplifying their voices.” (pp. 31–32).
- 4.
This happens, for example, when former teachers, now retired, suggest we search information for research in school archives, because they believe that they have nothing to contribute about educational practices they used to perform for decades.
- 5.
This is what a 4-year-old child told the teacher while (subversively) drawing beyond the lines of the composition which had been previously provided.
- 6.
A proper way of using language, based on the discussions proposed by Wittgenstein (1999). “A major point in the midst of these provisions is that for this second Wittgenstein, there is not something common and essential to all languages, but only similarities which can vary from one “language game” to another. For this author, every form of life has its own way of using language. It is language use which makes a particular form of life constitute itself as such, for each form of life establishes how words, expressions and gestures are used and how meanings are consequently negotiated for those words, expressions and gestures. Everyday expressions can be easily found to be used in different ways, depending on the environment and the situation. Merely consulting a dictionary will show countless uses of any given word” (Garnica & Pinto, 2010, pp. 207–244).
- 7.
Textualizations are the edited form of the written record of interviews. According to the canonical procedures of oral history, the interviews are recorded and later transformed into written text (at first, the recordings are transcribed). The textual elaboration after transcription is called textualization. Textualizations—not recorded tapes or transcriptions—have been the sources for our oral history research and interventions. Interview scripts can be created in many different ways. Some researchers opt for scripts composed of more targeted queries, others opt for more open questions. The scripts directly focused on a situation or specific moment of the interviewees’ experience (their experience as a teacher, for example, or as an agent of public policies related to education) characterize a modality called “thematics oral history,” while broader scripts with no specific restrictions characterize what has been known as “oral life stories.” Other chapters in this book deal with this differentiation and terminology, specific to oral history work, in more detail.
- 8.
Transcription and textualization are made available to interviewees to be verified and, in case of written records, complemented or corrected before being effectively included and analyzed in the research papers. Usually the interviewees choose to check only the textualizations, and it is these texts that researchers have effectively used as their main sources for their work.
- 9.
Available at http://www2.fc.unesp.br/ghoem/index.php?pagina=hemera_filtrar.php. The last search was conducted on October 30, 2018.
- 10.
The reader should note that in Portuguese, adjectives as well as nouns have plural. In the specific case of the term matemática, the plural is matemáticas. The plural of matemática moderna (modern mathematics) is matemáticas modernas. This is important because the plural, according to the intent of the group, manifests an idea of diversity and plurality, which the present chapter seeks to highlight.
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de Souza, L.A. (2019). Narratives and Their Power Against Silencing in and by Scientific Research. In: Garnica, A. (eds) Oral History and Mathematics Education . History of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16311-2_7
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