CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN RESEARCH AND ORIENTATION

WALKING BAREFOOT IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL

Abstract

In this article, we propose to think research in education through the reflections of a doctoral student and her advisor about two unique processes: the relationship with the school that is produced in the encounter with its inhabitants and the orientation relationship that accompanies and sustains this investigative path. The participant observation research, carried out for 18 months in a municipal school in Duque de Caxias, followed teachers’ work on the literacy cycle considering the evidence offered by children of what the practices produced in them. Entering the field with openness, so that research could be built collectively, demanded thinking about university trough the intersections between knowledge and experience, thinking about the relationships that take place there beyond the logic of productivity that seem to colonize it today, to think about freedom as a way of existence, openness to others and to the world, which implies abandoning the comfort of established positions and facing the risk of the unknown. This openness was also present in the research group meetings and in the individual orientation meetings where forms of relationship with particular research objects were experimented and the instituted and naturalized modes of knowledge production were questioned. The formative experiences and the writing process itself played an important role in the development of the research. From this experience, we sought to produce shifts in the paths of research in education and in the ways in which the role of orientation in the process of training researchers in education has been understood.