Narrative and poetry from a communitarian project. Experiences within the Urban Boundaries Project

Author(s):

Ana Paula Caetano(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

29. Research on Arts Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

29 SES 06 A, Images and Narratives of the Self

Paper/Video Session

Time:

2017-08-23

15:30-17:00

Room:

W2.06

Chair:

Alejandra Pacheco

Contribution

It is about experience and from experiences that we speak, experiences told in narratives and poems and analyzed in a reflexive way, evoking multiple voices from inside and outside the communities involved. We bring up a few experiences from the Urban Boundaries project and organize these experiences in constellations of concepts, integrated by initial letters, weaving together a network of intelligibility to help understand this particular and fruitful human experience.

I – Interculturality, Interdependency, Inclusion

From the marked invisibility and individualism to the imperative of overcoming barriers, we assume a transversal interdependency in the Urban Boundaries project, through acting, interacting, and timidly entering into intimacy. We strengthen our own integrity and identity in a forever unfinished path of interculturality and inclusion. This means working not in an abstract and distant way, but with the emergent issues and own prejudices promoting a collective creativity, where differences are acknowledged and valued while being relativized and integrated into the common (Abdallah-Pretceille 2005; Diaz-Aguado 1997).

D – Dialogue, Diversity, Dilemmas

To dialogue is to assume the diversity, and face the difficulties and eventual misunderstandings that come with the difference, but it is also to assume the possibility of convergence. It is a dynamic process that implies, first and foremost, openness and the willingness to listen (Bohm, 1987), confidence that dilemmas will be overcome with the others, disidentification from ideas and feelings, flexibility to create something new.

L – Love, Liberty

Intimacy is a love path that leads to us and to our individuality. Love – the ultimate reality in current need of rescuing, for the sake of ethics as well. In order for love to deepen, we need to set it free: “True love perceives the loved one as equal and free; as Tagore says: “tyranny excludes as much as hierarchy’” (Morin, 2004, p.119). And we are still far from it in our societies, where “It seems risky to speak of contemporaneous love as a repository of personal freedom and decisions. Love is a social product not always consummated with a posture of freewill but one of institutional standardization” (Neves, 2008, p. 103).

Since we were aware of this phenomenon, we strived to be attentive to the relationships that were being established, and we craved this freedom as “it is no longer the unequivocal and abstract freedom that is sought, but the practice of interstitial freedoms” (Maffesoli, 2003, p.136). We assume here a wide meaning, by which love can be more than caring and implicates commitment to the other, here portrayed as connectedness (Sternberg, 1988).

T - Transdisciplinarity, transcendence, transformation

T as the initial letter of words such as transdisciplinarity, transformation, transcendence. Trans as the sense of widening, embracing without dividing, expanding, keeping the horizon open. An open horizon, as Panikkar (2001) would say, dynamic, mobile, without barriers to prevent us from walking. Although the going can be an inter, when the borders are in the middle, even if invisible, even if they do not prevent us from moving forward. They are in the middle, but they can be knocked down by the conscience. An expanded consciousness, a consciousness that can experience the oneness of what appears to be separate (Weil, 1989).

Trans as conviction and utopia, which transports us beyond appearance and allows us to understand and act more broadly. But the beyond can already be here, as Dufour-Kowalska says, "the sovereign well does not reside in a far-off and inaccessible, lies in us, hidden, is true, in the deepest of ourselves" (1996, p.231).

Method

Centered on the communitarian education, the Urban Boundaries project presents itself as a critical ethnographic movement focused in the development of an emancipatory educative policy through participant observation of knowledge in multicultural communities. It involved three communities: one academic community composed of researchers and educators of several disciplines, universities and scientific organizations; one multicultural community mainly composed by immigrants and a local fishermen community. We choose to select a few meaningful events concerning human relations where poetry played a relevant part (Caetano & Afonso, 2014; Caetano, 2016, in press). We assume poetic writing as a way of enchantment, a poetic state brought into the everyday life of the project, favoring the “feeling of overcoming our own limits, of being capable of communing with that which surpasses us” (Morin, 2001, p. 127) . We also see poetry as a tool for political consciousness and for a sensible awakening to the world, the other, the own aesthetics of life and arts where “the sensible make sense. Not a sensible and remote sense but a ‘significance’ within and for the lived moment” (Maffesoli, 2005, p. XVII). In order to do that, we need to open ourselves to others, listen to them, and listen to ourselves. Through listening and attention, we will be entirely sensible, we will possess a “sensibility of our whole being, our whole body – our nerves, our eyes, our ears, and our voice” (Krishnamurti, 2011, p.1981). We will therefore be able to enter others intimacy and allow them to enter ours, in a reciprocal communication. We’’ll present narratives and poems written during the Urban Boundaries research project, some of them written by the author of the present communication, as a researcher and as an educator of the academic community. Others were written and shared by participants of the local communities, some were written in co-authorship with several participants of the local communities, in poetry workshops or in cultural encounters in other sites of the Lisbon city.

Expected Outcomes

"|the narrator| may appeal to his or her own life (which in itself includes not only his or her own experiences but also those of others); the narrator associates to his or her most intimate experiences what he or she learned from tradition. The narrator’s gift is being able to tell his or her story" (Benjamin, 1992, p.56-57). Poetry and narrative are, in this project and communication, are assumed as dialogical processes which brings together multiple readings and joint re-readings. Poetry and narrative are critical ways of transposing the taboos of what is the scientific discourse, used in the elaboration of field notes, in the discourse analysis of the interviews, in the reflection on the educational processes and on the own investigation. In this sense, this communication is an essay of freedom, imagination and creativity, making us critically aware of the limits we impose to others and to ourselves, enabling us to be beyond, favoring the emergence of new, wider and more implied forms of organization. We are aware, however, that it is possible and desirable to go even further, continuing to multiply forms and moments of encounter and deepening the critical sense and transformative reflection that poetry and narrative can carry. "Narrative identity, constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and writer of its own life, as Proust would have it. As the literary analysis of autobiography confirms, the story of life continues to be reconfigured by all the truthful or fictive stories that a subject tells about himself or herself. This reconfiguration makes life itself a woven of stories told". (Ricoeur, 1983, p. 376 – English version)

References

Abdallah-Pretceille, M. (2005). L’Éducation Interculturelle. Paris: PUF. Benjamin, W. (1992). Sobre a arte, técnica, linguagem e política. Lisboa: Relógio d’Água Editores. Bohm, D. (1987). Unfolding meaning, a weekend of dialogue with David Bohm. London: ARK Paperbacks, Routledge & Kegan Paul. Caetano, A.P. (2016). Transpondo fronteiras urbanas. encontros e mediações num projeto de educação comunitária, In C.A. Gomes; M. Figueiredo; H. Ramalho & Rocha, J. (Coords.). XIII SPCE: fronteiras, diálogos e transições na educação . Viseu: Instituto Politécnico de Viseu. Escola Superior de Educação.(No prelo). Caetano, A.P. (in press). Reconstructing intimacy within the Urban Boundaries experience. Narrative and poetry in dialogue. In M. Mesquita, M. (org.). Political flow in communitarian education – Humanizing space. Viseu: Anonymage. Caetano, A.P. & Afonso, J.C. (2014). Trans-inter-multiculturalidade. A poesia como lugar de mediação. In M. Mesquita (org.). Fronteiras Urbanas. Ensaios sobre a humanização do espaço. (pp.45-67). Viseu: Anonymage e IE-UL. Díaz-Aguado, María. J., and Andrés Martín. 1997. Educación intercultural y aprendizaje cooperativo en contextos heterogéneos. Madrid: CIDE. Dufour-Kowalska, G. (1996). L’art et la sensibilité. De Kant à Michel Henry. Paris : Vrin. Krishnamurti, J. (2011). O despertar da sensibilidade. Lisboa: Editorial Estampa Maffesoli, M. (2003). Entre o bem e o mal. Compêndio de subversão pós-moderna. Lisboa: Instituto Piaget. Maffesoli, M. (2005). Éloge de la raison sensible. Paris: La Table Ronde. Morin , E. (2001). Le Méthode. 5. L’humanité de l’humanité. L’identité humaine. Paris: Seuil. Morin, E. (2004). La méthode 6. Éthique. Paris: Seuil Neves, S. (2008). Amor, poder e violências na intimidade. Coimbra: Quarteto Panikkar, R. (2001). Intuição cosmoteândrica. LIsboa: Editorial Notícias Ricoeur, P. (1983).Temps et récit. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. English Version Kathleen K, Mclaughlin, Pellauer D. (1984) Official Translation. The University of Chicago Press, Ltd. Sternberg, R. (1988). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93 (2), 119-135. Weil, P. (1989). A consciência cósmica: introdução à Psicologia transpessoal. Petrópolis: Vozes.

Author Information

Ana Paula Caetano (presenting / submitting)

Institute of Education, University of Lisbon

Institute of Education

Lisboa

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.