Understanding and Self-understanding: the Brazilian educational field within an itinerary of readings from Pierre Bourdieu

Abstract

The text renders explicit and analyses an appropriation modality of Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking, as it indicates some fundamental points for studies on the educational area. It refers to the possibilities of understanding inscribed in his sociology regarding the elaboration of scientific knowledge and the field’s determinants, habitus and capitals linked to subjects and their positions. It thus underlines the intimate connection between scientific knowledge and self-knowledge. Among its aims, the text seeks to be useful to young researchers as it shows the modalities of thinking “with Bourdieu” as I remake a case and bring attention to the problems of knowledge production in education, historically and socially. A personal itinerary of readings from the Bourdieu’s oeuvre is built in the form of an essay and using it as a method, highlighting two perspectives that guided choices in different moments. One of them refers to the development of investigations in the history of Brazilian education and the other refers to the research, teaching and intervention work involved in teachers’ training. Given the nature of writing and the conviction that several modes of production around educational studies are possible and desirable, no conclusions are made explicit, but, instead, I propose a multiplicity of questions that unfold from the construction of ideas and from the thinking trajectories undertaken.