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Educ. Rev. vol.37  Curitiba  2021  Epub 08-Abr-2021

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.75571 

DOSSIER - The biographical dimension as formation process, self comprehension and world understanding

Temporalities in the life and self-education of a professor-researcher1

Marlene de Alencar Dutra* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5347-1381

Jacques Therrien* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5458-365X

Silvia Maria Nóbrega-Therrien* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7511-2507

*Universidade Estadual do Ceará. Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação. Fortaleza, Ceará, Brasil. E-mail: marlene.dutra@ifce.edu.br. E-mail: jacques@ufc.br. E-mail: silnth@terra.com.br


ABSTRACT

We have outlined as the objective of this study to apprehend the temporalities in life and training in the learning itinerancy of a professor-researcher as a self-education dimension through the self-narrative. The theoretical framework is based on the formulations of authors such as Pineau (1983, 1987, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2012), Josso (2004), and Souza (2006). We constituted a descriptive investigation, nuanced by the (auto)biographical approach, narrowing to a training-research. The self-narrative of a professor-researcher, taken as a critical hermeneutic corpus, results from a heuristic and reflective movement within a research community. In a cognitive ecology that constitutes and is constituted in the autopoietic exercise, through (auto)biographical investment in which we apprehend the narrative of oneself in the process of critical reflexivity, we recognize a complex structure of the dynamics in temporalities in life and training in movement of the intercomprehension of flows and circulation of knowledge and expertise. This unveiling of a training-research in self-organizing, collective, and shared processes led us to a research action in undertaking the senses and meanings beyond the academicist bonds, finding the time for our self-education, which puts us in an encounter with an anthropoformative paradigm in the constitution of the teaching identity.

Keywords: (Auto)biographical approach; Self-education; Temporalities in training; Self-narrative; Professor-researcher

RESUMO

Delineamos como objetivo deste estudo apreender as temporalidades na vida e na formação na itinerância aprendente de uma professora-pesquisadora como dimensão autoformadora pela narrativa de si. O aporte teórico está fundamentado nas formulações de autores como Pineau (1983, 1987, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2012), Josso (2004) e Souza (2006). Constituímos uma investigação descritiva, matizada pela abordagem (auto)biográfica, com estreitamento para uma pesquisa-formação. A narrativa de si, por uma professora-pesquisadora, tomada como corpus hermenêutico crítico, resulta de um movimento heurístico e reflexivo em uma comunidade de pesquisa. Em uma ecologia cognitiva constituinte e constituída no exercício autopoiético, pelo investimento (auto)biográfico em que apreendemos a narrativa de si no processo de reflexividade crítica, reconhecemos uma estrutura complexa das dinâmicas nas temporalidades da vida e da formação, em movimento de intercompreensão de fluxos e de circulações de conhecimentos e saberes. Esse desvelamento de uma pesquisa-formação em processos auto-organizáveis, coletivos e partilhados, levaram-nos a uma ação pesquisante em empreendimento dos sentidos e dos significados, para além das amarras academicistas, encontrando o tempo para a nossa autoformação, que nos coloca em um paradigma antropoformador na constituição identitária docente.

Palavras-chave: Abordagem (auto)biográfica; Autoformação; Temporalidades na formação; Narrativa de si; Professora-pesquisadora

Times, seasonings and introductory conversations

Teacher self-education is understood from the meaning transactions with “others” (hetero-education) and the eventful elements of Life (eco-education) creating a dialectical environment of multi-referenced tensions in the perspective of educational autonomy, which can promote the emancipation of the person and the teacher from a reflexive autonomy and the reflection on the autonomy (JOSSO, 2004; PINEAU, 2005). The encounter with the other favors the alteration of oneself, the alterity.

Transactions of meaning, in the course of life, reveal the learning itineraries about the temporalities of education (PINEAU, 2004), from a three-pole process: the self, the other, and the environment (PINEAU, 1983, 1987, 2006) important for the access to the dialectical reality of a (trans)formative becoming, of understanding oneself and the world, in an autopoietic movement (MATURANA; VARELA, 2001). The word Life is endowed with strength. As stated by Bachelard (1996, p. 154, our translation), “[…] any other principle pales when it is possible to invoke a vital principle”.

This is the meaning that we assume as the object of the pedagogical and research action: The life and self-education of teachers, which are inscribed in and over time, understood “as a measure of movement”, not only the time of its “[…] accounting, its average, but also its tuning, its rhythm, its tone, its quality, its sense” (PINEAU, 2004, p. 13, our translation).

The autopoietic exercise that led us to an (auto)biographical investment of thinking about the constitution of being a professor-researcher, life transactions, and self-education, started from reflections woven into the Doctoral course, starting from the Academic Writing and Critical Hermeneutics of the Doctoral Course in Education, in the Graduate Program in Education of a public university, in the academic semester of 2018.2, in which we questioned ourselves: What does the (auto)biographical investment reveal in the constitution of being a professor-researcher in a self-education process? How do the temporalities of life and education mark the itineraries of professors-researchers, removing from them the fruitful experiences that delineate the heuristic, methodological, scientific, and epistemological paths for recognition and identity belonging?

Putting in motion the questions that surround us, we set out as an objective for this study: To apprehend the events and temporalities in life and education, in the learning itinerary of a professor-researcher, as a self-education dimension through the narrative of herself. We refer to the term learner, as explained by Josso (2004), emphasizing the point of view of the learner and her learning process. In this investment of the singular-plural relationship, we carried out the writing process of this work emphasizing the narrative in the singular (I) to explain the professor-researcher’s transactions in her self-educational constitution and we expanded the plural learning relationships (We) in ideation of a reflective and collaborative writing (DUTRA; FERREIRA; THERRIEN, 2019) with the other (co)authors.

In other words, in metaphorical entanglement, we unveil the temporalities of the life cooking and teacher self-education of a professor-researcher, whose memories-references (JOSSO, 2004) signal the smells, seasonings, times, tests, unpleasantness, that confer a sense of sustenance, magic, alchemy, adventure, strength, and resistance, in a thinking adventure of experimenting knowledge and flavors. In this way, we savor a concrete or visible dimension based on our perceptions, or social images, and an invisible dimension, which appeals to emotions, feelings, meaning, or values.

Theoretical-methodological processes in ebullience

We constitute a descriptive investigation, nuanced by the (auto)biographical approach through the narrowing to the research-education, in which “[…] each stage of the research is an experience to be developed for whoever is engaged in it can participate in a theoretical reflection on education and the processes through which it makes itself known”, Josso (2004, p. 141) teaches us.

The narrative of the self, made by a professor-researcher, is taken as a critical hermeneutic corpus, resulting from a heuristic and reflective movement from a research community made up of Doctoral professor-researchers, at the Graduate Program in Education, whose availability to “feel-think” (MORAES; TORRE, 2018) the events and temporalities in life and teacher education produced interrelationships between dialogical knowledge and the rationality of praxis (THERRIEN, 2006), leading us to the sensitive materialization of the process of constituting the narrative of oneself, through a reflective biographical diary that led us to the questions presented in the previous section.

That being said, we wish to highlight events and temporalities in life and education, as records of expressions of what was experienced through the narrative of oneself made by a professor-researcher, whose elaboration took place due to particular sensitivities in a given period (JOSSO, 2004). On the expressions of the lived, Delory-Momberger adds that:

The perception and understanding of the lived go through representations that presuppose a figuration of the course of their existence and the place that a singular situation or event can occupy in it. This biography activity appears as practical hermeneutics, a framework for structuring and signifying the experience through which the individual attributes a figure in time, that is, a story that he reports to himself. These biographical space-times are not, however, spontaneous creations born solely of individual initiative: they bear the mark of their historical and cultural inscription and originate in the models of narrative figuration and in the forms of the individual’s relationship with himself and with the community, elaborated by societies they subscribe to (DELORY-MOMBERGER, 2008, p. 27, our translation).

In this way, the apprehension of events and temporalities in life and education through the narrative of oneself, of the professor-researcher, evoke a relationship of social praxis, as subject-author, they structure and signify the lived experience, marking her historical and cultural inscription. We used, for the analysis of the narrative, the figuration of “reading in three times” proposed by Souza (2006, p. 79, our translation), considering the time to remember, narrate and reflect on the lived experience. And we present as thematic reading, inference from the units of descriptive analysis: The cooking of life and its interiors, implications of existence and subsistence in childhood and adolescence; The life and cooking of a researcher professor: Organized implications of resistance in adult life, whose interpretive-understanding investment moves in the sections that follow, and in which we assume the verbal voice of the Self, emphasizing the singularizing dimension of the professor-researcher, but not losing sight of the plural, which consists of notes/reflections of introduction and (in)conclusion.

The cooking of life and its interiors, implications of existence and subsistence in childhood and adolescence (1973 to 1989)

Where were you born? “In grandma’s bed”. This is my naturalness. Even today, when someone asks me this question, whether in public offices, online registration, or informal conversations, that is the answer that comes automatically to my mind. On May 16, 1973, at 1:00 pm, I was born in my grandmother’s bed, which brought me the strength and warmth of a Pernambuco woman who took care of me, pampered, punished, and collaborated with my education as Grandma’s Girl. It was with her that I first recognized maternal love since my mother did not have the maturity for this experience, which usurped her youth and imposed the reality of building a family.

Thus, a granddaughter of a woman from Pernambuco, Brazil, daughter of a woman from Bahia and a man from Rio de Janeiro (a Carioca), still very young, I started to understand the regional diversities of this immense country in a small town in the hinterlands of Bahia, that my child’s eyes defined as the world. Santa Bárbara (Bahia) not only gave my world a name, but was it a patron and, for it, all the honors and tributes. Mother of the Dusk, as it is also recognized in ‘candomblé’2, Santa Bárbara is greeted in this way: Oyá, Iansã!!! Warrior and strong woman who, with her board, raised her children selling delicacies in the market.

Surrounded by the strength and determination of these women, it was from the bed of my grandmother that I went to live my childhood and youth in the kitchens of “my mothers”, whose plural represents the maternal duplicity about the relationship of the Self. These kitchens are demarcations of spaces that allow “three-dimensional time (past, present, and future)” (FREIRE, 2019) in search of being more: the smelling cakes, the ambrosia sweets, pastéis (a kind of stuffed and fried dough) bananas-reais (a kind of banana), requeijão de corte (a kind of semi-soft cheese), goiabada cascão (guava paste), doce de leite (dulce de leche) ... were prepared daily to supply the Bar and Restaurant Recife, in which my grandmother raised six children. It was also in this “roadside bar” that my grandmother separated an area and gave it to “mom and dad (mainha and painho we say) to constitute our family with dignity, without depending on her.

It was there in the kitchen that I always appreciated the huge pots, the cauldrons, the shelves full of aluminum, which shone more than a mirror. Picking beans was one of my tasks. I confess that, in the first kilo, it was good, but when I thought I was going to finish, there was another one, then another one, until I completed five kilos, placed in parts so that the task would not be immediately rejected. But the best part was the blandishments.

With these small services, we were given (the cousins) pieces of meat, vegetables, and spices, to prepare our stew. Then, the yard became a party because it was on the woodstove, at the back of the house, that we made our first recipes. I do not remember if we ate, but I keep my soul nourished by these adventures. The strategy of measuring the given tasks, challenging the limits, and guaranteeing reward was not an act of those who studied behaviorism or other learning theories. They were strategies of mothers who always said they were preparing us for life. Being born and growing up in the kitchen of a roadside restaurant did not just bring me the enjoyment of cooking. There, I was raised, among employees, beggars, travelers, and a multiplicity of stories, that only those who are raised in a transit place can understand and feel the strength and influence of communication, silence, and being silenced.

Time passed and, among spices, smells, flavors, sweets, likes and dislikes, that accompanied the seasons and the seasonal harvests, which guaranteed juicy delicacies every year, which yielded profits for the budget complementation, as joys and adventures for all of the cousins - that we called ‘primalhada’ (there were many cousins, and all the neighbors on the street, houses stuck together and played daily from dawn to dusk).

There was time for doce de umbu (sweets made of a fruit named umbu - kind of Brazilian plum). This implied harvesting the ‘umbuzais’ (umbu trees), which are now extinct. Bags were filled and taken to be washed, children’s work. Then, the dough was cooked, mixed with sugar, in the measure of two to one. Now, yes, the pot was ready to go to the fire. And in the fire, the magic happened there was a mixture of anxiety and fear awakened by the senses of the sweet smell scenting the house, involved in the expectation of scraping the pan and feel that sour taste invading the papillae and hitting my brain.

We had the time of the doce de umbu de corte (a semi-soft sweet made with the fruit umbu), transparent and green, the cashew sweet (with thick syrup and hard pulp), the homemade rennet cheese (that we call queijo de coalho) when the milk was plentiful, the cassava cakes, the pamonhas (a paste made from sweet corn, boiled and wrapped in corn husks) in June festivities, Swiss sausages produced with pork meat from pigs raised in the yard, seasonal fruit ice cream, liqueurs... and here the memory is fixed on the liqueurs, and the list which I try to compose gets lost, but as I know that I will be able to resume these memories-references (JOSSO, 2004), I will soak up the memories of the liquor.

In the early years, I thought it was strange that liquor was being made at home to sell. An alcoholic drink that had nothing to do with the foods, sweets, snacks, seams, and crafts that invaded my childhood like games and life lessons. This is because, with each new experience and learning that the craft taught, I started to value the little things, take care of the details, the delicacy and think about the other, respect those who would, in some way, appreciate, or even embellish themselves with our arts. Once again, my mother’s presented, for me, “the craft without knowing” (GAUTHIER, 2014), which awakened in me the aesthetics, ethics, and the contradictions of life.

But what about the liquor? My grandmother never drank it and was proud to work in a restaurant bar and never to have put “a sip of alcohol in her mouth”. In fact, in her 92 years of life, I have no memory of any party she drank, not even the glass of Holy Week wine, in the Easter period. And the contradiction? To make the liquor, she needed to taste, appreciate, and get to the right point of the cachaça (a distilled spirit made from fermented sugarcane juice). It bothered me it was a marginal act, even because, as a child, I needed to get out of the kitchen because only the smell made us drunk.

The smell of jenipapo (Genipa Americana tree whose fruit is a thick-skinned edible greyish berry), which stayed in infusion for a year, cajá (hog plum), passion fruit, tamarind, muscatel, and red roses. Yes, roses. We picked the roses in the garden at home, and she prepared an alcoholic infusion capable of perfuming the breath of those who drink too much. This was a certain income, every year because we sold a lot of liquor, and the tradition remained. Of all the arts and feats, this was the one she preserved until the end of her life. The liquor no longer tasted the same, Alzheimer’s gave different points and tones to the drink, which continued to be bottled. The tasting mattered little, but her loyal customers bought her liquor and had little chats (we call dedo de prosa) that were served together.

Now, I return to my other mother’s kitchen, mainha’s! She was the mother of my brothers, of course! But she was and always will be My Mother. A true warrior, who made her gifts and magic in the art of cooking the strength to raise her children and build a marriage. That was her horizon. Nobody cooked like her, everything she prepared had a lot of flavors, she knew how to take the most exotic ingredients and turn them into delicacies. From salty food to party sweets, she was always called for preparations. My Mother’s kitchen was a party, always plentiful with many inventions, which she tried to learn. I don’t remember her teaching me how to cook I have always been in the kitchen treating chicken, cutting, seasoning, salting meat, rolling the pastry, beating the cake, desalting the cod, or simply looking, helping, and keeping company. Well, yes, we were companions, accomplices, and friends we didn’t seem to be sixteen years apart in age. The teaching was not for systematic and intentional classes but sharing, respect, and complicity. That was how I felt when I was next to her.

My Mother’s intensity overflowed in everything she did. And the exaggeration was present in the kitchen, she never managed to make little food because she always had someone to feed, with whom to share even in our most difficult financial times, she shared and welcomed anyone in need. Thus, my house was also a space of transit and a rebirth of human dignity: the young woman that her father threw out because she was no longer a virgin; the boy, a homosexual who had no job in the small town and was hired to be the caregiver of my younger siblings; the cousin, also bisexual, that the father had thrown out of the house; the child who had nowhere to stay because the mother had to go to São Paulo to make a better life. Everyone in the house had shelter and understanding.

These realities encountered me and differed from me, with my childhood and youth. I grew up among travelers, wanderers, beggars, socially marginalized, people in search of dignity with their multiplicity of stories.

Solidarity, indignation with social injustices, respect for diversity and, above all, for the human being, I was constituting my being not by beautiful words or moral lessons, but, above all, by example, by perception and reflexivity, which presented themselves in contradictions and clashes of generations between My Mothers, because my “grandMother” (Vó-Mainha) blamed so many “lost people” (that’s how she defined the marginalized), that walked into my house and lived with us, and My Mother pondered, argued and was also silent, but continued in tough disobedience.

That was my home. A place of welcome, sensitivity, and support in the face of injustices. There, I always lived with respect and tolerance for differences, recognizing the value and importance of imposing myself in a macho and patriarchal society. Despite all my father’s brutality, to impose myself, I recognized that it was my mother who led the order and construction processes of our being. She did not know that.

My Mother was a reference of struggle and courage, however, not of a teacher, because despite having also a High School level teaching degree (that we call Magisterium), she never practiced the profession. I remember when she first enrolled me in school. I was only five years old. It was 1978. Upon returning from school, she proudly told me that she had also enrolled, as she needed to overcome the relationship of superiority and power that my father had over her because he had an education. So, I had the pleasure of attending the fifth grade and studying in the same building and time when she was in her last year of the teaching degree. I shared recreational moments with her and her classmates and, on the way to and from home, reciprocal pride has always accompanied us. A whirlwind of feelings fed this complicity in the mother-daughter relationship. And it was remarkable in my literacy process.

It did not matter that my Literacy teacher did not know the psychogenesis of the written language, the image that she was the best literacy teacher in the world followed my imagination throughout the initial period of my teacher education. She brought me a world of dreams, games, and imagination that I did not have in my home.

Discovering reading through mnemonic processes was not simple because it generated in me a feeling of farce that made me restless and anguished. I felt huge guilt, I even cried alone because My Mother and ‘Pró’ (so we call, in Bahia, the teachers in Kindergarten and Elementary School) said that I already knew how to read at the age of five. However, I was aware that it was not true (I don’t know how!). I remember the lessons from the Cartilha Sodré, especially the first one: ‘A pata nada’ (The duck swims). This pseudo-reading, typical of the process of acquiring reading and writing, became, for me, a great torment because of my affective relationship with the Other. Faced with so many lessons and loose words, I understood that I did not know how to read, I had the words trained, in order or out of sequence, and I worked hard on these memorization exercises so as not to disappoint.

My ‘Pró’ (this is how we called the teacher - short for professora), in this process, was proud, but she expertly also made me feel welcomed. I do not remember her words; however, I have a vivid memory of her lap. And even in the crazy movement of frustration, guilt, fear, and shame, they did not immobilize me but made me overcome the barriers of the writing decoding process. Today, I am still like that, I question my knowledge, my provisional truths, and I have difficulty accepting what already constitutes knowledge. A restless and noisy spirit, provoked by the demanding person who is taking on a different rigor (MACEDO; PIMENTEL; GALEFFI, 2009), in the life and profession of a professor-researcher.

So, I keep following my studies, involved in reading and attending the Groups of Mary in the Catholic Church. Catechist in rural areas, only 10 years old, I was already starting my first classes (studying, planning, and organizing every moment of catechesis meetings), New Testament prayers, parables, and stories, which were interpreted and discussed with grown-ups. I got used to having these spaces for oratory. In this context, the normal school student became a natural path.

In the process of unveiling the world, I started studying History of Education, Sociology, Philosophy in a state public school run by nuns and with strong traditional and authoritarian characteristics. In this contradiction, I started not to accept impositions, and I became a “domesticated rebel”. Here, a teacher I had, from High School, played a fundamental role. A teacher from São Paulo who arrived in the Northeast and took a Supplementary Course attended the university and started teaching, by civil service exam, in a city in the hinterlands.

With this teacher, I had the first contact with classic authors from Sociology and Philosophy, and here I discovered that the curriculum is alive. While teaching Brazilian Social and Political Organization (that we used to call OSPB), a discipline imposed by the military dictatorship, the teacher contextualized her role, demarcated criticisms, and redirected the process for the analysis of the political situation in my city and the country, which started a political opening, however, the school, in the year of 1989, still maintained impressions implanted by Law no. 5.692/1971 (BRASIL, 1971) that established the Education Guidelines for the Teaching of Elementary School and High School. Based on the demands and rigor of this teacher, I started to study educational legislation and prepared an internship report without the decorative stickers (a tradition in the Normal School Course), because it was necessary to report, analyze and reflect. We argued a lot because it provoked me to question the teacher’s “authority” and, at 16 years of age, it was one of my favorite targets.

The questioning spirit, restless, and ready for several ruptures, constitutes the primary teacher who became a normal school student at the age of 16, yet to reach the age of 17 (1990). Between the denial of an authoritarian education and the desire to fight against social injustices, I had youth in my favor, to feed my dreams and utopias of transforming the world.

These contradictory feelings have been cooking my life trajectories and feeding the incompleteness of my being. It is also the hunger that remains in the face of the lacking. To Rubem Alves (2002, p. 1, our translation), “[…] it is the hunger that puts the thinking apparatus into operation. Hunger is affection. Thought is born from affection; it is born from hunger”. Maintaining insatiable hunger is an art, and the cook has to know this, to activate desire, affection, the thinking apparatus, and hunger, even in the face of food, the abundance of the banquet. And I? I am building up resistance, being enchanted and re-enchanted with life, unveiling a professor-researcher.

Life and cooking of a professor-researcher: implications of resistance in adult life (1991 to 2020)

In the alchemy of food transformations, time is the lord of knowledge and flavors. Respecting this gentleman, we were able to prepare more intense or mild dishes. In this process, knowledge/cooking helps in managing time.

As it is known, knowledge and taste, in Latin, have the same etymology sapere, sapore, have a taste. Curnonski quoted by Barthes (1996, p. 21) says that, in cooking, it is necessary that “things taste like what they are” and Barthes (1996, p. 21, our translation), to that taste in knowledge, complements that “[…] for things to become what they are, what they were, this ingredient is needed, the salt of words”.

In this context, in 1991, still, at the age of 16, I started the Pedagogy Course, at the State University of the hinterlands of Bahia. The degree in Pedagogy was intense. Since the first year, I participated as a fellow in extension projects in the Literacy area. I was a prefect of the Philosophy of Education discipline, and I could not fail to join the student movement, in the direction of the academic directory. And, for all of this to be justified and to make sense to me, it was necessary to develop it to guarantee commitment and effective participation in the classroom.

The university, in my initial formation process, was and is being the founder of the teacher that I am. I am immensely proud to have graduated from a public institution that taught me the importance of Teaching, Research, Extension, and the Student Movement in professional and personal training.

On the classroom floor, I had extraordinary experiences, even before completing my undergraduate course, because my first state public exam for Elementary School teacher in the initial grades occurred around 1992. With adulthood, I was able to take up the position in another small town in the interior of Bahia.

Since then, there have been more than 25 years of teaching practice involving the dilemmas and challenges in Early Childhood Education, Elementary Education, Secondary Education, Higher Education, Distance Education, and Training of Trainers.

My best teachers were the students who provoked me. They awoke the challenge of understanding the cognitive processes triggered by teaching and learning in different areas. At the same time, they showed me the affective, complicit, ethical, and mutual respect side. At a time of challenge and total difficulty in dealing with the teaching of Geometry, I started my research in the area of Didactics of Mathematics. From this context of teaching fragility, I searched for epistemological, didactic, and methodological elements to develop mediation of authorship in the teaching and learning process in this area. This is because the relations established by the surroundings of each child, when studying Geometry, revealed a subjectivity and enormous complexity, in the constitution of the reality of these boys of only 7 years old and of the teacher, in the reflective constitution.

This experiential knowledge in the classroom promoted the constitution of my rationality of pedagogical praxis, in a dialectical and dialogical movement that is similar to the experiential knowledge of the act of cooking presented by Master Paulo Freire:

The act of cooking, for example, supposes some knowledge concerning the use of the stove, how to light it, how to balance the flame more and less, how to deal with certain even remote fire risks, how to harmonize the different spices in a hot and attractive synthesis. The practice of cooking prepares the novice, ratifying some of that knowledge, rectifying others, and making it possible for him to become a cook (FREIRE, 1996, p. 21, our translation).

In this context, experiential knowledge shows us a path of knowledge and flavors to become more experienced and, in complement to the text I share the understanding of another Master Rubem Alves (2000, p.143), when he says that “[…] the kitchen is the womb of the house: a place where life grows and pleasure happens, hot ... Everything causes the body and the sleeping senses to wake up”.

It is there that I always return (to the kitchen to cook), with the purpose of thinking and rethinking my life, my paths, and redirecting my paths, my horizons. In the kitchen, I still have tasks that are not so good but necessary... That’s because the pots, the dishes, and everything else needs to be washed, and I remember important decisions that I made at the sink, which also washed my soul. With the alchemy of mixtures of flavors, textures, and reinventions in the culinary tradition, as an apprentice cook, I develop my heuristic and creative processes to feed the desire for sharing and enchantment through food.

The path is made when walking, the poet Antônio Machado (1973) already signaled, and it could not be different for this “Grandma’s girl” born in 1973 and who starts walking her path. The researcher’s desire and restlessness are transformed into power to once again realign her professional and researcher’s life with that of mother and woman.

During the defense of the Master’s thesis (2005), I was asked about the continuity of the research and of the potential groups to continue the investigations. However, these calls were not as strong as the desire to live other experiences outside the academy. I wanted to be a mother and intended for it to be intense. At that moment in life, a companion shared my dreams and future projects. Thus, in the diaspora of motherhood, the professor-researcher found bifurcations and went to venture into uncertainties.

Today, my daughters are beginning to recognize that cooking is an act of love, that Mom not only makes food but gives affection when preparing each dish. The knowledge and flavors of the transforming spells that take place in our kitchen are immediately perceived throughout the house. I don’t like doors in kitchens because I understand that the environment should be open, a place of joy, experimentation, laughter, revelry lived by everyone, together. The smell is to annoy and awaken the desire, the desire to experiment, taste, snack and run to me and try to guess the transformation of the foods that are being processed: Mom, are the beans fresh? Will there be a lamb? Did you make feijoada [typical Brazilian food prepared with black beans, beef, and pork]? Frango à delícia [Chicken delicious - chicken cooked in caramelized onion]? Do you have carne de casca [Milanese steak]? And new knowledge is invented in our daily lives.

I restart my studies with perseverance and determination and, without losing pace, I try to reactivate and pursue my Doctorate attentive to the bifurcations that arose in my journey, however, they never made me lose sight of the research horizon.

Thus, 12 years later, after defending the Doctoral dissertation, I am approved at a Public University in the State of Ceará. It’s like coming home, to the State University of Bahia (UNEB), or the State University of Feira de Santana (UEFS), because I am very proudly graduated by the state universities in this country, which, for me, represent resistance and struggle for a Public, Free, Quality and Socially Referenced University. Living the Doctorate at this institution is a pleasure of the maturity accumulated over a lifetime because being a professor-researcher in search of a Doctorate is much more than the exaltation of the academic ego. It is a feeling of happiness and life that is completed and materialized in the challenges that each stage contemplates from its selection process.

Being a Doctoral student represents complicity, and responsibility, which requires a rigorous (other) methodological researcher that, even though I suspect it is possible to exist, I did not know that I was capable of constituting. The audacity to keep my spirit restless and agitated in thinking adventures only comes true because the master (my advisor) allows me to wander, opens the doors of the academic cages, and in a sensitive way, makes me return.

(In)tensely, it is the constant movement of the constitution of the position of this professor-researcher who, in the process of self-education, has been affected by the events of everyday life, both academic and professional, removing from the fertile experiences the heuristic, methodological, scientific and epistemological paths, to recognize being and knowledge in transforming praxis.

Not being removed as an author-actor in the face of research practices, distrusting the monological forms of research, naive interpretations, and the plastering of theoretical-methodological positions has been a constant challenge for sensitive listening (BARBIER, 1998) and self-listening (SOUZA, 2006) of the critical polysemy. The complexity of the task has required a critical and rigorous hermeneutic analysis for the constitution of a dynamic framework with multiple theoretical, epistemological, and methodological tools that enable this researcher to have an interpretive depth in the recognition of the webs of meanings woven and negotiated in the context of the research of the thesis.

In this constant movement of catharsis and transformation of my scientific spirit, I have, in Bachelard, inspiration to align reason with feeling and thinking, since “[…] every scientific culture must start with an intellectual and affective catharsis. There the most difficult task remains: placing scientific culture in a state of permanent mobilization, replacing closed and static knowledge with open and dynamic knowledge” (BACHELARD, 1996, p. 14, our translation).

This desire and permanent movement of wanting to know more boost the capacity to question better, expanding the perspectives of horizons and the scientific spirit, since it will always be possible to vary the conditions and perspectives, leaving contemplation in an interactive movement between subject and object for the dialectization of experience.

I did not learn to cook with recipes. It was always transgressing and developing ordinary ways in everyday life that I started to find my method, my seasoning. I never knew how to measure salt with a spoon because I need my hand to feel the weight, touch the food and, in extension, identify the right amount for that moment, that dish. And it will be without recipes that I will continue to unveil the paths of research to support my Doctoral dissertation.

I have learned, in these heuristic and inventive processes, to overcome challenges, create new adventures, explore bifurcations, take or abandon shortcuts, recognize my limits and those of others, but, above all, I come, in a collective and collaborative process, allowing myself to change my Being with the Other while paying attention to the coherence of the human being, and thus minimizing the fragmentation of the life of a woman, mother, teacher, and professor-researcher, in the invention of everyday life.

Thus, wisdom is necessary, savory science, to unveil the knowledge-flavors of thinking adventures proper to investigations in Sciences. We need to experiment, prepare, produce, and pay attention to the pleasant flavors that bring us closer to ecstasy and to those less appreciated, which tend to be no longer tasted. I maintain the connection with the master Rubem Alves (2000, p. 143, our translation) when I understand that: “Cuisine: life is learned there. It is like a school in which the body, forced to eat to survive, ends up discovering that pleasure comes from contraband”.

In this pleasure of contraband is that Grandma’s girl, Mom’s young lady, Nina and Sara’s Mother, in the alchemy of learning to live, testing different preparations, following intuition, goes back to their starting point, seeks their autogenesis in this set of experiences, to situate the historical concreteness and the commitment to her existence of being a professor-researcher in a permanent constitution.

Flavors and knowledge reinvented in everyday life: inconclusive notes

The existence of human beings in the world is a permanent “becoming.” The need to unveil this world, to know it, is present in all historical moments. For this, the human being needs to interpret him/herself and the world in which he/she lives, seeking the meaning of his/her existence. In this movement to search for the understanding of the unfinished man, the man-world relationship is mediated, the (auto)biographical dimension presents itself, making it possible, through the narrative experience, to configure the moments and periods of life in a story.

We make the choices of the spices of life and training always with great care so as not to overdo or lose the flavor of the food, giving the season time to incorporate and expand the taste lines of appreciation. Faced with the unpredictability of the bricoleur posture (KINCHELOE; BERRY, 2007) of a professor-researcher, we took the boldness to invent, discover the bitterness and sweetness of the temporalities in training, so that we can be surprised by the flavors and knowledge invented in and by everyday life. Maintain sensitive listening, attentive gaze, and taste at all times.

In a constituent cognitive ecology and constituted in the autopoietic exercise, by (auto)biographical investment so that we apprehend the narrative of us in the process of critical reflexivity, we recognize a complex structure of the dynamics in the temporalities of life and education, in a movement of intercomprehension of flows and circulation knowledge and expertise.

Signifying the meaning of life anchored in reference-memories (JOSSO, 2004) is a possibility of identity recognition in a self-training teaching process, since by recognizing the empowerment in the constitution of (auto)biography in its historical and cultural spaces-times they trigger autonomous and reflective actions on “acting, understanding, but also emancipating oneself” (PINEAU; GRAND, 2012, p. 109, our translation). This unveiling of a research-education in self-organizing, collective and shared processes, led us to a research action in undertaking the senses and meanings, beyond the academicist bonds, finding the time for our self-education, which puts us in contact with an anthropoformative paradigm (PINEAU, 2005) in the teaching identity constitution, pointing to the rationality of pedagogical praxis, which is emerging as a change in educational temporalities.

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1Translated by Janete Bridon. E-mail: deolhonotexto@gmail.com

Candomblé - Afro-Brazilian religion developed in Brazil during the early 19th century. It involves the veneration of spirits known asorishaswho work as intermediaries for a supreme being.

Received: July 31, 2020; Accepted: September 18, 2020

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