Articulations between epistolary genre and teacher training:

experiences and knowledge

Abstract

This article realises an approach to epistolary writing in the teacher education processes as an invitation to self-recognition within the teaching profession and, from that perspective, to appropriate the accomplished experience. On the basis of the theoretical assumptions which locate the writing of a letter within teacher education as a proposition that invites both students and practising teachers to focus on the self in order to write, to a recipient of choice, about the subject under study. Two examples are analysed: the first one is centered on initial teacher education, and the second one comes from a training experience with practising teachers. In both of them, epistolary writing, the deferred work of putting words to past actions with the purpose of project them in search of future senses, allows for recuperating lived experience and, in that exercise, transforming it into knowledge.