This paper arises from the framework of my doctoral thesis, that pretends understand how students engage with school spaces in a participatory way. The main objective of this thesis is study about sensitive processes in production of a new kind of knowledge. It means that symbolic and sensitive relationships of students with school spaces in their perceptions of use of it.

The research took place in a secondary school with a group of ten students. I proposed to young people the use of technologic multi-modal forms to approach to the school spaces and a subsequent representation of these 'realities'. So, they began to produce and collect an extensive and diversified range of multimodal data: texts, recordings, scale models, drawings, photographs, videos and material samples, from study field. I wanted that school spaces must be examined from various points of view and perspectives of young people. These data were carefully collected on an extensive portfolio. To understand these results I could not separate that data from its multimodal nature or remove them from their real context.  

Now in the process of looking back and writing my thesis, this proposal put in evidence the possibility of school spaces leave deep impregnations in student´s live, during their research process, not only by “material marks” (physical architectural space: school model, form and functions) but also from memories that by relationship they have established with those spaces. That become part of their identity, we refer the “intangible point of view” (George Berkeley´s philosophy).  The subject in focus in this paper gained importance when I confronted myself with some discursive fragments of the students in two moments of sharing the representations resulting by the way "revisiting memories": what kind of ideas, thinking and perceptions are survive in their mind about some school spaces of their past  and of their parents/grandparents’ time? What perspective they remember of their schools?

-The school: "First is a place of learning, a place that makes us to be people, and to have knowledge; Secondly, it is a space to make friends and to be with them; Third is a space that includes various functions [...] a second home."(Student, P.).

-"It was good to remember a time when we might be happier than we are now. Because childhood is always better than having now obligations to study [...] was more important the friends at that time than the school itself, the classes" (student, A.).

-"I did this dialogue with my parents. I started with my father, [...] I already knew that he would be playful with me during the enquiry. And soon he told me that his first school was a very small white room with a hall where bicycles without pedals were left (laughs), they played with tires and sticks that guided them” (student, E.)

In this context it seemed appropriate some considerations: "Our senses are the doors through which we get the information that allows us to understand the urban space where we live and in this way, we become more critical and participatory, ultimately citizens" (Porfírio and Ramos, 2006:111). Meeting constructivist and developmental theories in what concerns the structuring of the personality, this search is translated with experience, confidence, manipulation of materials and means, being "an expression of the self" (Lowenfeld and Brittain, 1977:28). According to Lowenfeld and Brittain (1977), experience maintains a significant influence on social, intellectual, emotional and psychological changes in development and growth, because the answers that children give, identify their experiences.

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