Collecting experiences: formative maps in initial teacher education

Abstract

This article analyzes formative maps produced by Pedagogy students in the context of a study on initial teacher education, taking them as documents of experience and cultural artifacts. It is grounded in the understanding that teaching is constituted through open-ended paths composed of encounters, choices, displacements, memories, affects, and institutional conditions that shape the process of becoming a teacher. The aim is to understand how these maps produce meanings about emerging teaching identities, giving visibility to the ways in which students narrate and organize their formative paths. The empirical research was guided by performative ethnography and developed within a course unit of an undergraduate Pedagogy program at a federal public university. The corpus consists of three formative maps, selected for the analytical strength of their modes of inscribing formative trajectories. The analysis was conducted from the perspective of cultural analysis, observing recurrences, emphases, silences, relations among words, images, colors, paths, and empty spaces, as well as the subject positions mobilized and the social conditions that make certain narratives possible. The analysis shows that the maps operate as narrative and analytical devices by making visible subjective landscapes, social fractures, bonds, repertoires, and ethical, aesthetic, and political choices. It concludes that collecting experiences involves selecting marks, assigning meanings, and composing provisional archives of teaching in the making.