Between trajectories, sources and subjects: research in education and the use of oral history

Abstract

This article is a commentary on oral history, presenting reflections about the collaborative position of the subject in researches, and some of the consequences of this singular position. As an illustrative contribution the article starts from a study previously carried out, which refers to the political and religious disputes that preceded the sanctioning of the 4024 Law of National Education Bases and Guidelines of 1961. In constructing this study, oral history was used as a methodology dedicated to recovering information and the very constitution of the collaborative subjects based on their social locus and on the relations and reactions to the fact narrated. Centering the reflections on the position of the subject as a source for the research - without discussing or going deeper into the episode mentioned -, the article considers that reconstructing the memory of that period also meant to rekindle caricatures, contradictions and conflicts present in the particular interpretations of each one of the collaborators. The text also presents excerpts from narratives used in the empirical research, which demonstrate that the description of the facts by the participating subjects did not lose its statute of a personal perception, constituting a representation of the social group to which the subjects believed to belong. In conclusion, the article suggests that the capturing of memory is always a referential task: at that moment and under those conditions the narrative made those nuances possible.