Letters to teachers – Letters to ourselves

Abstract

This article presents reflections produced from an activity developed in the course “The (Auto)biographical Method and Teacher Education”, linked to the Graduate Program in Geography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (POSGEA/UFRGS), in 2023. The proposal consisted of writing letters addressed to teachers who had marked the participants’ school and academic trajectories, all of whom were teachers or future teachers. Taking these narratives as analytical material, the text seeks to understand how experiences lived throughout the formative trajectory shape the constitution of teacher professionality. From this perspective, narrating experiences implies producing meanings about one’s own trajectory, mobilizing processes of reflection, resignification, and self-formation. The letters reveal that teacher education cannot be reduced to the appropriation of knowledge and pedagogical techniques, but is deeply marked by the bonds established, by relations of listening, by forms of presence, and by the ways teachers are inscribed in the subjects’ memories. The analysis shows that, when writing to the other, subjects also write about themselves, revisiting memories and narratively elaborating experiences that remain active in teaching practice. Thus, the (auto)biographical method constitutes a powerful formative device, enabling an understanding of teaching as a continuous process of self-construction, woven through the articulation of memory, experience, and relationship.