Raconter l’enfance, entre projection et rétrospective

Abstract

Through two research works on very different topics – the formative years of an education specialist, Jacques Ardoino, on the one hand, and alternative education practices as told by parents on the other –, we examine the various processes of discourse production, their writing and the way they vary according to their target audience and the projects at their origin. In the first research, the narrative, or fiction (reconstructed long after the facts) of a forgotten childhood, will appear as an intelligibility resource like Ricoeur's "laboratory of forms": by combining an imaginary narrative and an examined reality, the narrative will allow J. Ardoino's family historyto emerge in a “bio-fiction”. In the second research, the approach is not
retrospective but projective, for the parents' formative narrative constructs the child's. In this case, the analysis modes will look for other possible constructions of reality, both in the discourse's structure and in its social representations. For both, the role of reading and writing is essential. Writing becomes a fictional backing of one way of reading a reality.