Teaching records as technologies of the self: writing, experience, and some deployments in the cultural curriculum of physical education

Abstract

This text, of a theoretical-essayistic nature, aims to problematize the meaning of the act of recording-writing to which teachers are convoked in contemporary times. In a first movement, it describes how pedagogical discourse frames teacher documentation as a bureaucratic instrument of control, linked to a normalizing perspective of assessment, subsequently re-signifying it as a device for pedagogical reflection aligned with a formative conception of assessment. In a second movement, it draws on foucaultian contributions to disengage from the evaluative-reflective apparatus and to suggest that teacher documentation be conceived and mobilized as a technology of the self, enabling the teacher-subject to act upon themselves through writing, placing it on a path of transformation and effacement of the self, expressed through the notion of experience. Finally, it addresses the cultural curriculum of Physical Education, identifying within it both the activation of teacher documentation according to a modus operandi derived from the evaluative-reflective framework and the opening of a gap-latency which, although tensioned by epistemological incongruities, may potentiate the emergence of documentation as a technology of the self within this curricular theory. In conclusion, it argues that affirming teachers’ writing as a technology of the self implies, at the same time, affirming teaching as an ethical and inventive way of life, as a practice of freedom.