Everyday School Narratives and the Bakhtinian Chronotope: An Exercise in Reading

Abstract

In this text, we explore the contributions of the Bakhtinian concept of the chronotope to educational research. Our objective is to consider how the chronotope enables readings of narratives of lived experiences, adopted as a practice of documentation in initial and ongoing teacher training. To this end, we organize the discussion into three parts. First, we outline the principles of the work developed with narratives of lived experiences in educational research and teacher training practices. Next, we revisit Bakhtin's (2018[1937/39]) discussion on the chronotope in literary art and introduce contemporary interlocutors of his foundations who focus on this conceptual construct, considering it even beyond literary texts. Finally, through a reading exercise of a text produced during the pandemic period, we focus on the chronotope to reflect on how space-time relationships produce meanings in the narratives produced by teachers in training. The article highlights the contributions of the concept within a dialogic perspective of language, emphasizing not only the time-spaces taken as the theme of the narratives, but also the sphere to which these utterances are directed – in this case, the academic-scientific field.