Abstract:

Researching in education means reflecting on educational facts. The multi-referential nature of educational facts should be studied from different perspectives: the educational research wants to shed some light on a given educational situation, culturally, spatially and temporally restricted, on the descriptive and the experimental level. The research goal can be the mere description of a situation and/or can be the abstraction of general rules; in this sense, the specialist literature recognises research with an idiographic intent and research with a nomothetic intent. Idiographic research generally uses narrative method of data collection. Starting from Bruner's reflections on narrative mode of thought, this paper address the issue of autobiographical narrative and its possible pedagogical implications. The first part of the paper emphasizes the importance of narrative practice in the construction of one’s own existential biography and the possible educational value. In the second part, these authors reflected about autobiography as a method for knowing, understanding, and interpreting human being. We propose a relationship between narrative approach and educational research. In the conclusions, will give some food for thought about interpretative research and the tendency to use private and personal meanings that derive from the autobiographical method.

Keywords:

Storytelling, autobiographical method, education, empirical research, knowledge.