Education and Language in Memories of Labour J. Barbosa 2 , J. Caramelo 3 , J. Cunha 2 , A. Ferreira 3 , L. Lacerda 3 , N. Lopes 1 , M. Loff 2 , M. Matias 1 T. Medina 3 , B. Monteiro 2 , N. Moreira 1 , C. Nogueira 3 , R. Reis 1 , I. Ribeiro 2 , J. Rocha 2 , P. Rocha 3 , C. F. Silva 2 , C. R. Silva 2 1 DCC-FC & LIACC-UP 2 FLUP 3 FPCEUP Investigação Cientíﬁca na Pré-graduação, IPG 118, 2007 This project aims to contribute, in a multi-referential perspective, to understand the processes of interaction between work, personal formation and professional identity of workers, in Porto, during the second half of the 20th century, through the analysis of biographical the narratives that are being collected by the Centro de Documentação e Informação sobre o Movimento Operário e Popular do Porto (CDI) of Universidade Popular do Porto. CDI’s goals are the preservation of the social, cultural and political memory, and oral and social history of Porto, during the 20th century, as well as its diffusion. Concerning oral history, CDI has a corpus of more than 80 interviews with workers of different professions and with distinct social experiences. All biographical narratives have been recorded in audio and video, and a transcription of each interview was produced (more than 360 hours of audio recordings and 7000 pages). The research team includes different social science domains and computer science. There were two main research lines. The ﬁrst focus on a linguistic and social-linguistic analysis, the sec- ond one focus on the sociological and educational processes. Both lines were supported with computational linguistics and semi-structured data processing tools. Sociolinguistic analysis The goal was to verify the occurrence of some linguistic pat- terns of European Portuguese (EP), and associate them to non- linguistic categories, namely gender, class, job, age, and educa- tion. Completive, concessive, and temporal subordinate clauses; and coordinate adversative clauses were chosen. The corpus was syntactically tagged, using a tree tagger with special EP rules. Several statistics where implemented based on an compact storage of the tagged text: word occurrences, syntac- tic categories occurrences and occurrences of the syntactic pat- terns. From traditional grammar rules and examples, simple patterns were extracted in order to be feasible a computational search. This was an innovative task and a challenge for both linguis- tics and computer scientists. The narratives’ transcriptions were annotated with the results of the syntactic patterns search, and visualized and edited in a dedicated content analysis editor, that allowed a deep analysis and the detection (and elimination) of false positives. Completive clauses are usually introduced by que or se, and are a compulsory complement of declarative (dizer que/se. . . ), unaccusative (acontecer que. . . ), epistemic (considerar que. . . ), interrogative (perguntar se. . . ), and perceptive (sentir que. . . ) verbs. Given the nature of corpus, completive clauses selected by declarative verbs were expected. E ela disse que era aquilo, que não podia dar mais e ela tinha pessoas na família advogados. . . However, speaker’s narration strategies often use other forms of reported speech than indirect speech, and don’t use a com- pletive clause: E a minha mãe disse: "Pois é senhora professora, mas nós não temos possibilidade. . . " A non expected high frequency of completive clauses selected by epistemic verbs was veriﬁed. Towards to understand that, two hypotheses have been advanced. i) Speakers identify themselves with a particular worldview, the workers one: Eles achavam que lhes fazia bem [. . . ] Eu achava que era uma maneira de eles, de eles se diminuírem. . . ii) Memories are reconstruction of the past, and thus it seems reasonable some lack of memory: Era sempre, todos os dias se cantava o hino, e, e acho que até se rezava também! Acho que até nós, até nós, até se rezava um Padre- nosso. The research on occurrence of completive clauses became richer than it was expected, and further analysis is needed. Concessive clauses express concession or contrast with an idea implicit or explicit in the main clause. They are usually introduced by subordinating conjunctions like embora, mesmo que, ainda que, apesar de, etc.. Eu gosto de reaver assim o passado embora ela na altura me ten- tasse tramar e aí o meu pai então dizia: “ Eu quero que vocês descontem para o sindicato” This preliminary study seem to show that concessive clauses are not frequent in oral speech. Temporal clauses are introduced by subordinating con- junctions like quando, antes de/que, depois de/que, até que, desde, logo, etc.. Since they are time localizers which are essential to the narrative progression, a great amount of temporal clauses was expected in biographic narratives. Quando acabou a escola primária foi para o colégio. [...]estou a ver que me vou embora antes que seja o patrão a fechar isto Era desde que eu saía até à hora que entrasse, era assim Logo que chegássemos a fazer os deveres, ia corrigir. However, the occurrence of temporal phrases without temporal value was veriﬁed: Olhe, a sua ﬁlha anda assim, a sua pequena anda assado. Olhe, ela até nem tem comido. Preocupavam-se até com o nosso lanche. Adversative clauses express contrast, and are intro- duced by coordinating conjunctions like mas, porém, todavia, con- tudo. E a minha mãe doméstica, estudava, mas teve que deixar os estu- dos porque faleceu-lhe a mãe. The analysis shows an unexpected low frequency of adversative clauses, at least introduced by coordinating conjunctions. Fur- thermore, the occurrence of mas as a discursive marker without adversative meaning was veriﬁed. Para mim foi uma novidade e foi. . . mas muito agradável. From biographical memories to the experi- ential learning:an educational analysis With the interpretation of the narrated experiences in the bio- graphical interviews, we aim to make clear the relation between biographic pathways with processes of education and formation that transcends the spaces, the epochs and the actors institutionally deﬁned as educational. These processes are indissociated of the construction of a worker’s identity where the dimensions of civic, political and profes- sional education are articulated. The result is a work of critical analysis that stresses the im- portance of experience knowledge in the construction of edu- cational pathways, not only as a tool in the production of knowl- edge, but also as a tool in the production of social relationships that can enhance the educational aspects of life/experience (José Alberto Correia). Methodology We used theorethical contributions of ed- ucation sciences, particularly from the ﬁeld of adults’ educa- tion and formation, mobilizing authors like António Nóvoa, Rui Canário, José Alberto Correia, among others. We used the interpretative method for content analysis, not only because of the corpus speciﬁcities, but also by the nature of emerging categories during the analysis: senses and mean- ings implicit (and explicit) in the biographical narratives that translate experiential learning and the importance of knowledge from experience. Articulating the history of the education and adults’ for- mation emergence with the narratives analyzed, we note that the informal formation pathways have emerging conditions (like the needs) that contribute to the process of meaning from experi- ence, namely regulatory conditions which reﬂect the need that the adult has to adapt to, learn something new, usually associated with in- stitutional knowledge. emancipation conditions which reﬂect the individual needs for the collective/social, political, cultural and educational changes. Articulating experiential knowledge, institutional educa- tion and formation pathways with the stories of labour, trade unions, associative participation, etc., we understand the impor- tance of communicative rationality to the conceptual interpreta- tion and epistemological rupture with the perspectives which categorize the experience as knowledge obstacle. Articulating the theoretical contributions of Antonio Nóvoa about the (auto)biographical narratives as a method for research and a tool for formation/training with the meanings that the interviewees give to some of their experiences, we be- lieve that a biographical narrative stands for a life alias, because it does not follow the chronological order, but a subjective order - a reconstruction of experience beyond the experiment itself, and therefore, it is important to enhance the educational aspects of life/experience. Sociology of shame and respect The factory is a structuring, although not exclusive, chronotope of the work- ing class condition. In the factory, the time acquires a sensually concrete character. The order of things is engraved in the ﬂesh and bones of agents in the form of preferences and rejections, likings and aversions. This sense, ac- quired socially and interpersonally, incorporates a cultural history made up of relationships of inequality. It is this propensity to be, to see and to do that guides social agents, giving the body an objectivity, a perceptibility and a sig- niﬁcance for others that constitutes the basis of social experience. The effects of the differential form of being of manual workers, due to their differen- tial relationship concerning the resources, affect the most intimate processes through which the individual is formed. It is the inter-subjective structure of behaviour that, in turn, concretises and actualises this speciﬁc social experi- ence. The vocabularies of shame and respect are ﬁrstly related with the contrasting representations, conceptions and interests placed upon the body-in-work of workers and bosses. The legitimate vision of the body is disputed over the asymmetrical social space of the factory. From the point of view of work- ers, there’s a scission between the maintenance of naturalness and maleness as sources of autonomy and humanity before the invasive managerial inten- tions of bodily objectiﬁcation by means of over-exploitation, strict vigilance and disciplinary prescriptions. The work is, simultaneously, a way of vir- tuous aggrandisement and a constant usury of their corporeal capital. So, these vocabularies are related with that complicated conciliation between the fragility and detritions of the body-in-work and a symbolical economy of virtues and a masculine culture based on carnality. The ambiguity and du- ality that lay at the heart of the vocabularies of pride and shame employed to confer coherence to the shopﬂoor experience are rooted in the very contra- dictory nature of the workers presence in the social relations of production.