The creation of an ethical gaze from literary images: art and education as possibilities of other ways of looking

Abstract

This paper delineates the beginning of a doctorate research within the scope of the Graduate Program in Education at UFRGS and is aligned to the field of education and arts. The work results from the questioning on the possibilities of literature as a tool in teachers’ education and practice. Through this path, the work develops in ways of thinking how aesthetic experience with literary texts can foster the teaching process, especially promoting an education that takes into consideration our relation with the otherness, considering the relevance of the issue in our contemporary sociopolitical context. I introduce the beginning of my research with the analogy of the gaze, understanding it not only as an operation linked to a pair of organs, but as ways in which we put ourselves in connection with everything that surrounds us. Once literature is populated with extremely powerful images (seen here as scenes, descriptions, metaphors, etc.), I invite some images from Manoel de Barros' poetry and Mia Couto’s short story O embondeiro que sonhava pássaros to put in motion both writing and thinking as a way of emphasizing the creation of an ethical gaze that is opened to the radical otherness of existence.