Deaf education: visual narratives; reinvention of the self

Abstract

In this paper, we present an experiment involving photography reading carried out by a group of deaf and hearing teachers that work with Deaf Education. We approach the narratives of their life histories, explored from the teachers’ personal pictures. In order to sensitize the participants’ perception in the activity through which the experiment was developed, we worked with the notion of “punctum” as proposed by the French semiology researcher Roland Barthes in the book Camera Lucida (1984). According to Barthes, the punctum of a picture would be a kind of chance that touches and hurts the act of looking. Each participant was encouraged to look at their co-workers’ pictures and think about them considering that perspective, far from the need of neither a historical realism nor an end, being more subject to chances than the pictures themselves could trigger. The aim of that methodology was to provoque new ways of looking at each participant’s personal history and recognize in the other, singular elements capable of displacing the ordinary autobiographic look. Picture reading from punctuns produced a diferent way of looking at each participant’s personal history, thus displacing the look to other aspects of their lives, beyond those related to teaching or deafness. Such displacement is a change in the way of looking which, as Nietzsche pointed out, produces a new perspective of life. It is on this range of possible lives that this text focuses on and aims to think about.