Naos Works 2009

Les cultures pedagògiques de la comunicació, VIII Las culturas pedagógicas de la comunicación, VIIIThe cultures of teaching communication, VIII

Els treballs del NaosLos trabajos del NaosWorks of Naos

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PrologueFrancesc Llobet DalmasesPresident, OETI

As is the tradition OETI is proud to present in this eleventh edition of the Works of Naos, the research of various international scholars on the theme of the Observatory Sessions: The pedagogical cultures of commu-nication VIII.

Once again, thanks to the collaboration of the Representation in Barcelona of the European Commission, the days were held in their headquarters last November 2008.

The generous participation of various specialists from all around the world, enables us, year after year, to be able to see and discover the importance of the world of communication in our culture and the need for it to inte-ract with the world of education and vice versa. Together, communicators, semiologists, pedagogues and educators, can draw up and establish new ways of collaborating and as a consequence we are very happy and grateful for this body of research.

On behalf of the European Observatory on Children’s Television I want to thank once again, the institutions, companies, organisations, persona-lities and investigators, for their generosity and this year, in particular, the generosity and all the hard work of the outgoing team that has meant that this year we can celebrate the XIIIth edition of our activities.

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128

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166

176

70

82

110

120

Guillermo OrozcoProfessor, University of GuadalajaraCommunication Studies DepartmentMexico

Víctor FuenmayorDoctor Honoris Causa University of ZuliaVenezuela

Xavier LabordaProfessor, University of BarcelonaLinguistic DepartmentSpain

Regina de Assis Professor, Catholic University of Rio Brazil

Guillermo OrozcoProfesor de la Universidad de GuadalajaraDepartamento de Estudios de la ComunicaciónMéxico

Víctor FuenmayorDoctor Honoris Causa de la Universidad de ZulíaVenezuela

Xavier LabordaProfesor de la Universidad de Barcelona Departamento de LingüísticaEspaña

Regina de Assis Profesora de la Universidad Católica de Rio Brasil

IndexÍndice

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Works of Naos

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Communicative citizenship as the horizon for the pedagogy of screens

Guillermo Orozco

Guillermo Orozco’s text, for presentation at the OETI Sessions, November 2008

To promote the formation of citizenship in contemporary societies, necessarily supposes promoting the integral training of citizens as interlocutors of multiple screens and circuits of information. For what distinguishes and characterises social subjects nowadays is precisely that they are, and participate as, audience/user in an expansive communicational ecosystem. A status, that, despites its recent generalisation, is a status that

being in society at present, and in particular—as is argued in these pages—the new way of being a citizen. If in other eras the “social contract” or political accord established between the State and its citizens was realised and manifested directly

such as work and school or in certain places like the square or the street, in the current era, the central interactions of daily life, relations that are

information within which it participates. The physical presence is no longer essential even in classical institutions and formulas for online working and distance learning are becoming ever more widespread in our societies.

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Guillermo Orozco 129

The virtual exchange encompasses all spheres of daily life and tends to monopolise how important transactions are carried out. In order to illustrate with just a few examples, it is possible to mention the economic case, with the payment of all sorts of different services, advertising and the receipt of money through the internet, the computer screen as well as through the mobile phone. Or in the case of politics with voting on line for candidates or the “participation” in organisations and virtual social movements or in networks, also through the mobile phone. Or in entertainment, where listening to music and the watching of videos and other audiovisual and musical material takes place by way of different technological devices. Or in the case of education, with the simple viewing of images to the more intentioned exploration of scenarios on line, through

different types of site; or the promotion and production of different kinds of learning, the acquiring of skills with and through screens. Or in the case of culture, this sphere of life and agency of everyone in the everyday,

as their exchange, reproduction and circulation, emerge and proceed in the majority from and through some kind of screen. All this and more constitutes what some call the “virtualisation” of social practices and others denominate as the “spectatorship” of contemporary societies, emphasising the subject of the action more than the action itself, to indicate that the current phenomenon or dominant tendency is the innovative diversification of sectors and segments of citizens, in relation to their interaction with different screens. Audiences, now reconverted into interlocutors on screen, with the possibility of interaction that is propitiated by the digital, are developing their potential for participation. This at the same converts them into users, as they transform the information they receive on screen into new products, in not just reinterpreting them, they establish themselves simultaneously as producers and broadcasters, no longer just receivers, of diverse information, and through them become socio-culturally active subjects. Thus through the

well as in politics or, end up excluded from them.

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130 Works of Naos

New citizens’ rights and obligationsIf traditionally the theme of citizenship with its different emphasis and perspectives – as we will see later – has been focussed on the laying out and description of the rights and obligations of citizens as individuals and as members of collectives, the “communicative condition” of our time requires new formulations or narratives for what communicative citizenship could be. For the communicative condition one understands here precisely the inescapable fact of the multiple interactions between audience-users and screens. In a world of globalisation many forms of decentralising and reordering occur all at once. One of the most important is precisely that of citizenship (Ramírez, 2007). Referred to before as local or as national, citizenship more and more is established in reference to the world. And in this permanent reconstitution, media and digital communication are simultaneously the channels or vehicles as well as the key mediators of its very construction. The world is in the screens. It is perceived in them and from there other worlds are imagined. It is not just that certain models of what “being a citizen” is are propagated through some of the screens. It is above all and in addition to this propagation, that through the reception of these images, through the interaction with the screens themselves, the citizens agglomerated into audiences construct the meaning of the models, as much as their interaction with them and thereby their own identity as subjects. The models don’t just invite imitation, they are the detonators of

which citizens establish themselves and interrelate. There, in front of the television screen they take a political stance about a local, regional or world

cinema they construct meanings and they interpret the images and the political and economic discourses in a permanent and incessant symbolic construction that abridges thought and perception. (Orozco, 2001). There,

affection, tolerance, adoptions and “addictions” are renewed or recycled. Opinions are formed from the written press they have read, as well as from a newsworthy radio or television programme or from the visit to an

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Internet site. And all this leads to options but also to prescribed routes. Social control also passes through the screens. It is not just from the pulpit that social happenings are sanctioned, that conducts are dictated or that actions and events are condemned. It is now through the screens that all this happens and more. The social, political and cultural inclusion and exclusion of individuals and groups, as well as of ideas, values and various ideological positions is also realized through screens. It almost seems that what is not seen on them, particularly on television, stops existing. In fact it loses media presence. And the contrary is also the case, as what one does see, can gain an unreal, unusual or spectacular presence on the screen. The assault on fundamental human rights and the violation of citizens’ guarantees are increasingly exercised through screens. Through them, things are named or hidden, exaggerated or minimised, neutralised or manipulated; social subjects, groups or facts are reduced or taken out of context, that later all acquire real weight and consistence in the daily interactions of the citizens in the diverse scenarios where they circulate. It is because of all of this that communicative citizenship is relevant, and it is essential that it be dealt with through education as one of the most precious objects in human and democratic formation nowadays. And to a certain extent one is looking to open a breach within this subject, as the concept of the citizen has been focussed on the political and somewhat on the economical, but much less on culture and even less on communication. It is specifically within this cultural dimension that communication acquires meaning.

An assembly of coexisting citizenshipsThe origin of citizenship as an agglutinative and differentiating category, as a set of criteria and responsibilities for living together in society, more than just as an abstract concept, has evolved in several aspects. If originally citizenship served to recognize rights and obligations and constituted an accord between the powers that be and the citizens, with time citizenship has stopped being an almost univocal monolithic piece of reference, to diffract into several sub categories: political, social, economic, cultural and


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The growing conglomeration of settlements in urban formations, that is to say cities, and the multiple interaction that occurs within them, between the inhabitants and then between them and the institutions, authorities and powers that be, is the origin of the outlining of the rights and responsibilities of all of them, within the framework of different perspectives of citizenship. Also establishing the framework of what delimits the permanent difference between government and citizens. POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP

A first reference or category is political citizenship, which is the one that is perhaps most familiar, as it is fundamental in any democracy. Within this perspective there are two tendencies of comprehension. On the one side there is the liberal. This perspective, inspired by the rights

an individual at the centre of the socio-political interaction. On the other side of the same coin would be the republican political citizenship, which highlights individuals’ membership of communities and societies, from where their rights and obligations arise (Padilla, 2009). Both perspectives

private sphere, while differing in the emphasis they place on the citizens themselves. While from a liberal perspective the individual is the point of departure and arrival, the epicentre of citizenship, from a republican view establishes the community as the central element.

ECONOMICAL CITIZENSHIP Economical citizenship emphasises what concerns this subject area and in particular seeks to clarify the rights and obligations that affect individuals and communities, as well as the decisions taken by the State that directly affect work and trade. That is to say the workplace and whatever relates to it, such as safety at work, the policy of minimum salaries, the right to strike and to form unions, amongst others. In the present day this would also

for nations (Reguillo, 2008). Current statistics, the object of deliberation and participation of citizens in their respective decisions, are being debated

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from diverse perspectives, which is also becoming a central point in what concerns the cultural.

SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP

Social citizenship is focussed on weighing up the conditions of the context in which all social interactions take place, from that linked to the enjoyment of a minimum level of wellbeing; of space, of health and its corresponding services, as well as in education and access to schools, in public safety and its derivatives, in transport and opportunities for leisure, sport and socialising, as well as housing and other public and cultural spaces for the formation and healthy relaxation of citizens. It defines according to age, what it means to be a child, a young adult or a member of the third generation within this category of social citizenship, as well as

recognition of everyone within a society. (Knight & Harnish, 2006).

CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP

The term cultural citizenship was elaborated by Rosaldo(1999) although UNESCO had previously coined the term. A central argument in this perspective is that citizenship in general has been debated more in the

this author, cultural citizenship can be expressed in two directions. On the one hand this citizenship as well as specifying the interaction between citizen and State, emphasises the interaction between citizens themselves. And on the other hand, faced with the variety of situations in which

and inequities of the subordinated groups and their legitimate aspirations as full citizens (Padilla, 2009). Based on the above, the notion of cultural citizenship challenges the neutrality of the concept of citizenship as such, at least in relation to its universality. Who belongs? What does belonging mean in practice? These are the key questions from a position of critical citizenship. So an outstanding feature of this cultural perspective concerns migrants and different cultures and their contact and interchange. This is what is inter-cultural. The nationality of origin, the race and gender, with their


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importance for a cultural citizenship that grants full rights to everybody; whatever their nation of origin, colour, gender, sexual preference or age and whatever their beliefs, values or expectations, something that can be evidenced not just abstractly but in each socio historical and geopolitical context. The constituents that are at play in the different perspectives of citizenship are essentially the following: The recognition that subjects have rights and obligations, be they individuals or members of a community, but also

citizenship in favour of global citizenships, only made possible through the impact of the media and computerization in contemporary societies (Ramírez, 2007).

TOWARDS A COMMUNICATIVE CITIZENSHIP

A citizenship of this type should start with two questions. On one hand, the question of what a citizen has to learn in front of screens, and on the other, about how to facilitate this learning with an intentionally contemporary education. These two questions are not new as they have been present over the last decades in many educational proposals relating to the media or their reception and have generated a certain amount of debate (Hoechsmann & Brownen, 2008). Here for reasons of time and space only a few key ideas will be sketched out, following on from and reformulating the original proposal of Martín-Barbero about mediation(1997). These are based on the main features of the multiple interaction with screens: the role of institutions, media and interactivity. A first line of work starts to recognise that any screen is also an

characteristics and ends. This institutionalfocus of attention in the educating a communicative citizenship. Citizens in fact “struggle” daily with the institutional aspect of our interactions with screens and one has to recognise what type of global-visions are within them, what sort of directionality, what motives. The rights of the consumer elaborated with regard to tangible and material merchandise, would be applied to a consumerism that is

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not necessarily tangible, but symbolic, manipulated by the media and

key points, as has already begun in many countries, such as Spain and

be dedicated per hour to advertising in the various broadcasting schedules, to the establishing of criteria for veracity and objectivity in newsworthy

agenda for what it is important to know in order to be able “to take the pulse” of a country or the world? How are citizens in the different scenarios represented? Who is present in the everyday audiovisual stories and who is excluded? Would be just a few questions to orient a discussion about this dimension of the communicative citizenship. A second line of thought and development is one that is here proposed as “ ”, a term that encompasses everything that has to do with the medium itself or with the technological support and its possibilities of expression. The aesthetic and of course, the technological dimension

communicated, that is the language or the format and the programme

Depending on certain possibil it ies and condit ions this media-

guidelines that govern its encoding. They vary according to the medium or technological support in question. The newsworthy is defined to a

piece of news, as with screens anything that doesn’t have any images loses newsworthiness, even if the fact or the event that it is dealing with may be important. In the same way as the special effects of the camera, the stage set, the wardrobe, the colours and spotlights, or the designs of the platform or internet sites, some more attractive and clear than others, or the resolution of the image if captured by the mobile phone, the storage


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screens. Which is what makes multiple literacy programmes so vital.

as an abstract linguistic code but as an expression situated and connoted by citizens who are also in turn situated. Ultimately they have to do with the diverse options for interaction and interactivity between citizens and screens and amongst citizens through the screens. If what distinguishes the contemporary interactivity from other types of interaction is the possibility of interacting with screens and with others, beyond the simple interpretative dimension, “educating for a critical eye”

the capacity for production. Because the typical receiver literally also becomes a “transmitter” of new audiovisual products, in a creative spiral where the experiences of previous exchanges are the principal reference for learning. Despite all the above this interactivity doesn’t come, or isn’t attained automatically. One has to prepare the citizen-audience and one has to overcome the obvious hurdle, which is the accessibility of technology and screens. An access that is not just to the instrument, but also to a culture of exchange and production, that has screens as its aim and that possesses many codes and forms of knowledge that are in the process of developing, but also of being discovered through their use, that all implies time and strategies. A cit izen doesn’t become interact ive overnight. One has to pass through a process of trial and error and an important cultural transformation. One has to emphasise that what is in play, is not just the practical mastering of a new instrument, but also the placing of oneself actively and critically in a distinct epistemology and in a cognitive strategy for exchange, for creative action rather than memorising or repetition, where experimentation and risk taking leads to knowing,

How to be the transmitter of one’s own messages? ¿What conditions have to be followed and respected to be able to create? And what transmitting or broadcasting conditions have to be taken into consideration in order not to falsify reality? Are just a few initial questions that point

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to the problematic areas that are gestating in the face of a culture of rights and responsibilities for the new communicating, media citizens. The current convergence that permits an unusual exchange between the screens brings at the same time new challenges to communication and to citizenship, in that it superimposes new combinations in the production and transmission of information. The authorship of certain audiovisual products that are exchanged and transformed by users is diluted on the one hand, while on the other, the new productions don’t know, because its not that evident, the origin of many computer-media productions. Who

products- merchandise, that nobody seems to be responsible for, but that somebody exploits or commercialises? A communicative citizenship therefore must imply considerations that are vital in order to bring about, ethically and democratically, a growing

“interactive convergence” of screen citizens, and of citizens amongst themselves, a propos screens.

BibliographyHoechsmann, Michael y Bronwen, Low (2008). Reading youth writing. Nueva York: Peter Lang

Knight y Harnish, J. (2006). “Contemporary discourses of citizenship”. Communication Research (32) 3 . 653-690.

Martín-Barbero, Jesús (1997). “Prefacio a la quinta edición” (p. 3-7) en Jesús, Martín-Barbero, De los medios a las mediaciones. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.

Orozco, Guillermo (2001). Televisión, audiencias y educación. Buenos Aires: Norma

Ramírez , Juan Manuel (2007). “Introducción” (p.9) en Juan Manuel Ramírez (Coord.). Descentramiento de la ciudadanía nacional. Guadalajara: ITESO.

Reguillo, Rossana (2009). Presentación del Seminario Interdisciplinario IV, primavera 2009. Manuscrito.

Rosaldo, Renato (1999). Ciudadanía cultural, desigualdad, multiculturalidad. Conferencia magistral, Seminario “El derecho a la identidad cultural”, UIA Noroeste, Tijuana, 19 de febrero 1999.


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Víctor FuenmayorFROM THE NARRATIVE NEST TO TECHNOLOGIES

Every form is the resolution of a fundamental dissonance of existence; every form restores the absurd to its proper place as the vehicle, the necessary condition of meaning.

George Lukacs, La théorie du roman

From the narrative nest to technologiesStorytelling is a human comportment the sources for which are immersed in the primitive and emotional memory of the individual in pre-expressive stages, in the diversity of cultural narrative forms (myths, ceremonies,

beyond the different forms of narrating in the trans-cultural narrative

knowledge that can be brought by narratology, the discipline or science of narrative; where numerous writers situate within the story the problematic search for values that would imply narrative’s place as an essential part of education. If this is the case, the search for meaning in all narrative, be it literary, or on television or cinematographic, it is necessary to question the implied values it transmits. Regardless of the literary techniques or technologies that they can be poured into. Its value goes beyond the restricted concept of education and communication to indicate models of teaching and learning.

a) Art as a pedagogical model: education through art, the currents of creative and self-expressive pedagogies and the theory of multiple intelligences. (Herbert Read, Howard Gardner and others). b) Narrative as a class of communication that is emotional or inclusive, even if it is expressed in technological media.

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c) The existence of a theory, both implicit and explicit about the human model in education. And in communication.

Narration in any event precedes, phylogenetically and anthologically, the command of language, writing and the technologies of communication and the institutionalisation of education. This original and unconscious precedence encompasses all cultures and would explain the creation of narrative (by individuals, cultures and all humanity) and the privileged use that the audiovisual media make of it. The technological screens of seduction harness in our audiovisual contemporary culture the unconscious attraction that narratives exercise over spectators. The technological media transport myths, epics, biblical texts, stories, novels, tales, chronicles and legends, using quotations, versions, adaptations or reminiscences of these stories. We can consider that the narratives of communication are not separated by these traditions and possess the same structures, and use the same creative processes that some authors have called inter-textuality1, its creation referring to another quoted text or reminiscence that has originated it. How to obviate the novels of chivalry of Quixote? How to avoid the

The inter-textual can constitute, at school, one of the resources with which to connect the narratives of communication and the ancient texts (oral, literary, photographic and cinematographic).

NARR-ACTIONS AND NARRATIONS

The narratives of communication imply formal and symbolic traditions in which the organisation of actions remits to the structures of narrative

without any kind of symbolic elaboration, differentiate themselves from other captured images whose aesthetic organisation make it possible to

events with a camera or a mobile phone, or the projection of violent events in television news, the gutter press or the Internet, don’t constitute narratives. They can be confused with the mimesis that the majority of

1 Ver BATJIN, Mijail, Teoría y estética de la novela, Taurus, Madrid, 1989 y KRISTEVA, Julia, Semiótica 1 y 2, Fundamentos, Madrid, 1969.

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2 See BARTHES, Roland, Mitologías, Siglo XXI editores, México, 1980.

of the shaman is considered to be the collective projection of the whole community.

stories bring, but the literal capturing of these images– that we name with the neologism of narr-actives- should not be confused with narratives. We will reserve this name solely for the aesthetic and symbolic elaborations of actions in the form of stories that evidence a formal organisation in accord with the traditional techniques of narration and that propose questions about values. NARRATIVE FORMS AND THE TECHNOLOGIES OF COMMUNICATION

Audiovisual narratives, even the most technologically advanced, in their form and content, follow unconscious codes and cultural traditions that can be recognised even beneath the new highly technological embellishments. It doesn’t seem strange to us that a wonderful ancient tale accepts wonderfully the special effects of movie making; or even that

Space Odyssey 2001 by Stanley Kubrick is articulated according to one of the most ancient forms of narrative: the myth of origins. The narratives of communication, when analysed, reveal encoded structures (myth, epic, story, tale, novel) adaptable to whatever can be narrated in the present day and with the existing technologies. There exists, even within the narratives of communication, a mythology that manages to be narrated albeit disguised by the current forms of communication2 just as in turn, there exists in settlements that are far from technologies, an understanding of the audiovisual technologies in accordance with unconscious and millenary beliefs3

narrative structures makes it possible to translate them into the forms of audiovisual techniques, some more than others, or any other kind of materiality (comics, drawing, animation, video-art) while maintaining its form and meaning. This makes it possible to think that there exist contents, both in the everyday and beyond, that can be narrated and that the narrative capabilities of the human being express them according to a narrative identity, individual or cultural, developed prior to the version of the stories that have been technologically adapted.

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THE NARRATIVE IDENTITY AND EDUCATION OF ANTHROPO-ETHICS

The narratives of communication should not be separated from the other narratives that historically preceded them and that are implicitly evoked, adapted or transformed by the technologies of communication. The

development by way of the triple identity (individual, cultural and human) makes it possible to displace them towards what I have called narrative identities. Education needs to lead towards an “anthropo-ethics” considering the ternary character of the human condition that consists of being individual-society-species all at once. (…) In the same way, all authentically human development has something to do with the individual, part of a society and part of the species. Each one of us brings along this triple reality.4

This anthropo-ethical education allows me to follow an approach that is also a subject of narratives: to place the narrative nest in the individual, to understand the narrative traditions of different cultures and to explore the trans-cultural structure that reveals narrative principles within the human condition. Investigators in the 20th century already proposed under a variety of concepts the existence of a framework or structure for narratives. The concept of the morphology of the story in Propp (despite the fact that it refers to the Russian fairytale) refers to an organisation of actions and

structures in the story, the myth and the novel in the work of other authors (Claude Levi-Strauss, George Lukacs, Lucien Goldman, Roland Barthes, etc.…) that situate in the narratives the search for meaning or truth that

not through a variety of separate sciences or a fractured knowledge but in the inter-disciplinary or cross-disciplinary manner demanded by the

Morin proposes in the different forms of knowledge of the future.

4 MORIN, Edgar, Los siete necesarios para la educación del futuro, Paidos, Barcelona, 2001, p. 22.


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To make the triangular nature of the narrat ive ident ity more comprehensible I will outline three instances that provide a connection between the narratives of education and those of communication:

1. The narrative nest refers to the unconscious and singular decisions of the individual.2. consciousness for which I will employ the term the maximum possible consciousness of the narrator of a culture and a society. 3. From the maximum possible consciousness to the truth of the narrative supposes the cross-disciplinary complexity concerning the method of investigation of the truth that the narrative can reveal.

The nest of narrativesWhat can be called the nest of narratives comes before the reading of children’s books or the stories read at school. These stories are not invented especially

in different versions in the coexistence of the narrator with sons/daughters or with children of the community. Every infant is born immersed in a nest of narratives: personal, family and cultural. For this I call it the nest, a sort of archaic substratum of the art of narrating in relation to life, that creates the stimulus, the procedures and the materials to create an interest, in the early stages of infancy, that will determine future forms of conduct and behaviour. Narrative is a vital necessity for infants, as much as food and love. Psychoanalysts talk of the period of Latency, of

and of the structural imprint of the relational and emotional history of the human being. Everything goes to suppose that stories form part of

with corporeal memories (olfactory, visual, taste, tactile, cenesthetic) but not anatomical ones, from which are derived the phantom intuitive organisational processes.

is visual, which leads on to oneiric elaboration and the use of the visual in the investigation of narrative during infancy:

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Drawings, an effusion of colours, forms, are spontaneous means of expression for the vast majority of children. It pleases them to then “recount” what their hands have translated from their phantoms, verbalising in this way for whoever is listening to them what they have drawn and modelled. Sometimes what they recount lacks a logical connection ( for an adult) with what the adult believes to be seeing. (…) These child productions are the representation of authentic phantoms, from which one can decipher the structures of the unconscious. They are only decipherable due to the verbalisations of the child, who anthropomorphises, giving life to different parts of his drawings, when he starts talking about them with the analyst.5

The nest of narration is cenesthetic, multi-sensory, spontaneous, where the

in its verbalisation a narrative that translates the visual organisation. The narrative procedures in the plastic productions are projections of represented phantoms that generate oral stories. It is not a direct form of education, with the aim of teaching children how to make stories or poems,

in the infant unconscious and the images are a way of representing it. The narrative nest is revealed in the space of intuitive corpus-multi-sensory organisation, ordered by the visual thought that can then take form in the spontaneous plastic expression the meaning for which is found in the narration. Body-image-word form the synthetic or syncretic thought of the child, according to some authors. We are not far from what can be called personal guides in metaphoric correspondence with the techniques of synthesis that are employed by cinematography, although the difference is enormous. If the drawing and the story are spontaneous expressions, a technological medium will never be during infancy, as it requires a secondary and conscious apprenticeship. Infant narration suffers a latent wait until is able to express itself plastically and verbally. The nest protects the latency as the bridge with which to construct the narrative attitudes of the child through

5 DOLTO, Francoise, La imagen inconsciente del cuerpo, Paidós, Barcelona, 1994, p. 9.


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In this way Latin American writers evoke some kind of parental image: to narrate like his grandmother for the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, to hear the Spanish and Guarani in the reading and commentaries of the Bible stories by the mother for the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos and the reception by the Quechuan community, during the travels in the company of his father, for the Peruvian José María Arguedas.

a sensitive impregnation that can begin while listening in the early stages, that will mark the child’s and later the adult’s desire to narrate from a primitive perceptive sensitivity. In the words of the French psychoanalyst Boris Cyrulnik:

The pre-verbal experiences impregnate the brain with a preferential sensitivity that can’t be conscious because we aren’t aware that we perceive a certain type of world in a preferential manner: we believe in it because we see it.6

This visual nesting stage leaves a determining imprint on permanent perceptual processes that can derive later towards the command of narrative procedures. What determines that someone has developed their hearing, sight or the sense of narrative more and can express it better in a physical, auditory, visual or narrative form of art? How is possible to perceive the original source of the cenesthesias that determine an interest for the synthetic techniques of the audiovisual arts? The answer would be linked to the infant’s disposition or aptitude to express the nest of images (in any art form) that later will develop into the desire to communicate in narrative formats.

(impressions related to perceptive memories) that with a preferential sensitivity must come intuitively to the symbolisation of a passing expression. The continuous immersion of the child in all the stories of the everyday

of seeing the world shift towards subsequent narrations, be they oral, written or technological. As in the case of the linguistic nest, the narrative

6 CYRULNIK, Boris, El amor que nos cura, Gedisa, Barcelona, 2007, p. 85.

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identity will nestle in the continuous listening to stories from the mouths

viewing of photographs, family albums, genealogical trees, comments. That is to say that the narrative identity needs a relational or contextual situation that is linked to affection, just as the intuitive acquisition of language is

stories, myths and histories, leaving in his persona marks of affection

intuitively and unconsciously understands the narrative structure and will begin to create his very own narratives, but always needs to be motivated and listened to by another, in the need for company, affection and listening. Is there a bridge between the listening and affection of this infant narrative nest and school communication? It depends greatly on the sensitivity of the teacher and their theoretical preparation according to an ideology or an educational model.

NARRATIVE AND MEANING

What happens in the body of the child is not just a product of the entry into verbalisation but also carries the traumas of his personal history. He needs to organise or construct his world and his persona in the union of the imaginary and the real, of fantasy and reality, projecting his own history in whatever expression he employs. The entry into the symbolic world can be considered a trauma, just like on occasions starting school. Are we conscious of the seriousness of the narrative game at school? The text of a French psychoanalyst will allow me to relate the nest of narratives to the child’s search for meaning in the trauma. In stages of infancy, children organise information in stories that project traumatic events of their own history but at a stage subsequent to when the event was lived. The child needs to elaborate from Latency to forms of representation. To gain meaning the trauma has to pass from phantom latency to narrative representation:

a whirlwind of contradictory information that makes us incapable of deciding. Although given that we are obliged to give meaning to the facts and the objects that “talk” to us, we


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have a medium through which to throw some light on the fog provoked by the traumatic event: the story. In which case, narration becomes a labour of attributing meaning. (…) Although the capacity to construct a discourse that makes it possible to access the intimate ambit only starts to happen between seven and ten years old.

We can situate the nest in two narrative stages that concern schooling according to age.

1. What happens between 0 and six years old? Can we still place it in the nest of narratives while the construction of the unconscious and multi-sensory image of the body is being incubated, in the latency of a pre-expressive or pre-verbal stage. Latency must then pass to constructive representation through verbal, non-verbal or corporal languages that implicitly transport the narrative. 2. ¿What happens in the subsequent stages between seven and ten years old? The psychoanalyst talks about the capacity to construct a discourse in which we can include oral narration; but we also must the add the introjection of a personal model that will be in the process of

delete themselves in the stages following verbalisation or the command of symbols.

Trauma lives in the latency of the child imaginary waiting to organise itself into a story the syncretic expression of which by the child integrates all the languages, revealing itself better indirectly in artistic forms. Education must provide in these ages of seven to ten years old, all the explorations of all the expressive languages possible, to construct the bridge between the latent nest of narratives and the intuitive narrative forms taught at school. In particular I highlight the function that the psychoanalyst gives to the story: to throw light on the traumatic event, that is to say, to give it meaning, to free the child from the whirlwind of contradictory information so that he/she can decide for him/herself. One would have to ask if educational institutions take care of this function of casting light on trauma and if teachers are currently prepared to confront the stories that the child or pre-adolescent expresses. If it is not about the verbal expression of a story, we can be sure that the stories

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will be in one of the expressive languages that the child uses to express him/herself...

NARRATIVE MEMORIES

For a better understanding of the narrative nest we must recognise the existence of two memories from the neurobiological point of view. Projecting them in the narrative identity we can differentiate and investigate

memory without representation that is the imprint of narrative aptitudes that determine the facility for learning by intuitive aptitude, in our case, referring to the procedures of narrating or telling a story.

This type of learning constitutes a memory without representation and consists in the

a procedural memory in which the neurological zone of the cortex that processes a certain type of visual, sonorous, cenesthetic information is moulded by this sensory information. In this way the brain becomes predominantly sensitive to this type of information, which will have been perceived in a premature state, causing this brain to acquire the capacity to perceive them better than others.7

One of the qualities of procedural memory is the absence of representation, but that it makes us sensitive to a certain type of information. By being inscribed in the neurones and in the cortex it can be reinforced or erased through evolution, like any biological process, except that one’s guides of representation are more permanent and can reorganise themselves with the work of the word into a framework for body-mind that we can associate with the command of a technique8. Here I’m interested to add a comment referring to the work that must reinforce the idea of integrating art in school as a transforming application:

7 CYRULNIK, Boris, Ibid., p. 848 “ The non-habitual use of body-mind is what is called ‘technique’“ (BARBA

drama techniques in this way, in La Canoa de papel. p 259 Ibid, p. 95.


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into works of art.9

It could be said that this memory without representation confers procedural aptitudes for narration, which must then be integrated in turn to another later, semantic or representative memory of images and words. This second

are: intimate, familiar and social. It is an affective, episodic and semantic memory during the stages of controlling the body, language and time-space. Art here takes on a dynamic meaning, non deterministic, making it possible to situate the functions of artistic and at the same time pedagogical communication, in the transformation of the trauma narrated, to transform it with teaching. The inclusion of the audiovisual arts in the transformation of stereotypes is questionable, except if the child takes on an active role, not just as simple receivers or consumers of stereotypes but by becoming personal transformers through creation10. If the media also result traumatic we should use them as tools for inter-textual, narrative creation, in order to know with the new text the true effects of media on the infant-youth imaginary.

PERSONAL AND TAUGHT NARRATIVES What a child or youth brings to school are the experiences he has lived (traumatic, pleasurable or otherwise) as well as his own personal narrative traditions. The intuitive and spontaneous expressions serve as initial material. The procedural memory without representation provides a singular perception and vision of the world that should serve, in education, for the exploration of narrative by integrating it with the more conscious, semantic representative memory that supplies it with images and words.

10 See Víctor Fuenmayor, “Towards the Creative Training of Art Teachers. De la catástrofe a la estrofa”, in Issues in Arts Education in Latin América, Edited by Rachel Mason and Larry O’Farrel, Queens University, Canada, 2004. UNESCO Conference in the Gathering of Regional Experts in artistic formation in Latin America and the Caribbean, University of Uberaba, Brazil, 2001

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Each individual or culture seems to priorit ise some forms of narrative that are interconnected with other manifestations of cultural

through the culture of the child or youth. Thus for example the Catalan Christmas tradition of the caganet or caganerto a familiar children’s festive narrative scene, surprising because of its anal and oral content, verbalised in a song and acted out on stage with symbolic aggression, with the banging of sticks and the subsequent demand for chocolate and marzipan. A tradition is never isolated from the rest of expression but is interconnected with all the other manifestations of cultural communication that narrative can help to know. I can relate

caganer to many colloquial linguistic expressions and to scatological aspects of the Catalan and Spanish cultures and other cultures. It can be seen as a Christmas narrative ritual, the actors of which are the children of the family, involving the totality of a culture. We could think the same of other cultures that can be as peculiar as the Catalan caganer thanks to the phenomenon of migration from other continents that are integrated within the school. Take for example the narrative tradition of the Venezuelan Christmas in the zone of the Andes: the taking of the infant Jesus from the crib, the search through the streets of the town

narratives exist in a class, which a teacher can explore within the school environment? Would this not be the precise moment to begin personal and group communication? First would be the recuperation in person, in the oral communication of the respective narrative traditions before then moving on to the teaching of taught traditions, in order to make literary, plastic, drawn, animated or technologically audiovisual versions, according to the desire of the children, youth and educators.

Losing the inhibitions of narrative identity and education It is not an easy matter, but nor is it impossible, to obtain this body-mind

personal guides of self-representation that are lost, hidden or disguised, in a blind intent to integrate in the new receiving society or due to the inhibitions of


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11 MORIN, Edgar, Los siete saberes necesarios para la educación del futuro, Paidós, Barcelona, 2001, p. 37.

certain ages, temperaments and cultures. That there can be an inhibition of the individual identities and of the narrative traditions establishes the need of the educator to know the resources, in order to be able to unblock their expression. We can consider this inhibition as part of the traumas that impede school communication, above all when they mark with a blot their own narrative identity. Various strategies for liberating this identity could

the same time other symptoms of expressive blockages that would facilitate creative communication at school. The mechanisms to free up inhibitions demand that the teacher has a corporal knowledge and uses inductive strategies with intuitive and spontaneous expressions of children based on a corporal and psychic experience, to make it possible to induce the losing of inhibitions before passing on to explore the various forms of representation. In some of these artistic expressions

or literary narration or into other forms, where I would include the visual, the photographic and the video-graphic. From there the infant-youth population could train themselves, to acquire new narrative and communicative capacities as well as to elaborate creative codes specific to the transition from their own tradition and that taught, that deals with the expression of values and meanings according to their singularity and their culture. NARRATIVE AND KNOWLEDGE.This development of the narrative ability has something to do with a capacity to acquire and organise the bits of knowledge that influence personal development. What the culturologist and French educator Edgar Morin encompasses in the noosphere, are considered by the educator Howard Garners to be cognitive processes stemming from art. This concept of the

We need to be more conscious that the noosphere – the sphere of spiritual things – was

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formidable sublimation of these spiritual beings drove and dragged homo sapiens towards deliriums, massacres, cruelty, adoration, ecstasy and to sublime events unknown in the animal kingdom. Since then we live in the jungle of myths that enriches all cultures.11

The noosphere can be considered within narrative, given that there are

passing of time. This supposes the recognition of the sphere of spiritual things as knowledge –as stated by Morin – within which he includes narrative characters and myths.

NARRATION AND INCLUSIVE COMMUNICATION AT SCHOOL To consider the story as a type of implied communication, where values and emotions enter into the inter-subjective relations of language is a risk that educational practice has to take. When we objectify from the narrative, we share imaginatively with other human beings the relational image that we have of ourselves and with others, of our culture with other cultures, of the more ancient traditions with the new technologies. Myths, rituals and ceremonies look for a more immediate link than the words themselves, where the implication of the narrative language can be a tool to search for any verbal or non-verbal language to express it and to allow the creation of new forms. The technological tradition where technology is not blind to the narrative identity of each human being can enter into the school. How to make this personal adventure into cinematography or video-art, while stressing the human values more than technology? How to elaborate codes

capture them without betraying them? One needs to have a knowledge that goes well beyond a simple command of the technologies. The capturing by audiovisual synthetic techniques approximates the

expressions, these can be integrated into the synthetic technologies or

Technology can be a way of bringing together in education the art of narrative and communication, but one always has to understand, beyond


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the power of the vainglorious image, the seduction of the narrative.

(affection, fear, anxiety) to pacify the body and shed meaning or light on events. Be it as an education or therapeutic instrument narration can provide the synthesis between art and the technological tool in school communication.

From the nest to the maximum possible consciousness of the narratorBeyond the nest of narratives that cast light on trauma, there exists a similar approach in the sociology of literature, philosophy and the arts that corresponds to this light cast on experiences lived during the period of infancy, but in this case concerning stages of adulthood. We can make considerations about what the cognizance of society implies in the narrative that emerges. The communicator and educator must bear in mind the expanded consciousness that narrators offer. Firstly I will use the interpretations of theories closest to the Western written narrative, where I will take as my example, the novel of mediation that begins with Don Quixote. For oral narrative, I will try to sketch out a situational theory that reunites physicality and the oral in certain ancient cultures that differ from the traditions of cultures of the book. THE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE NARRATOR For certain contemporary thinkers (Lucien Goldmann, George Lukacs, René Girard, Marthe Robert and others), the narrator expresses a maximum possible consciousness:

Occasionally exceptional individuals arrive at, or more or less come close to integral coherence. In that they come to express, the conceptual or imaginative plane, they are philosophers or writers and their work will be so much more important when it comes close to the schematic coherence of a vision of the world, that is to say a maximum possible consciousness of the social group that they are expressing. (…) The collective conscience doesn’t exist other than in individual consciences but yet it is not the sum of them, (…) The result of this is that exceptional individuals express better and in a more precise way the collective conscience than other members of the group and as a consequence it is

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12 GOLDMANN, Lucien, Le Dieu caché, Gallimard, Paris, 1955, p. 27. . It is not a direct relationship between the context and the work but deals with the construction of a vision of the world. (ver ibid,p. 26)

necessary to invert the traditional way that historians propose relationships between the individual and society.12

Exceptional individual narrators exist, in the literary field as much as in the cinematographic and come to express the schematic coherence of a vision of the world in a narrative genre. The cited text is clear: it is not about the correspondence of the illusory image of the real captured by the technologies (that would be too easy and simply technical control), but is about coming close to this symbolic and schematic construction of a vision of the world, creating or discovering the integral coherence that demands a maximum possible consciousness of the social in an era. Film captures narrative in a different way than literature. Firstly in that the gaze is lost in the screens, watching rapid actions told in fugitive images

it is necessary to read and re-read in order to capture the meaning of a narrator’s vision; although it can be said that cinematographic work should also be watched and then watched again until the conscious vision offered

Space Odyssey 2001 by Stanley Kubrick

interest in the young and amongst critics that it became a classic that has passed to the category of legible and is still projected today on television screens as a classic of cinematography. What one would have to ask is with what creative or theoretical consciousness, do educators and communicators perceive, what the narrative comes to mean in the consciousness of the creator and the viewer?

THEORETICAL STANCE OF THE EDUCATOR AND THE COMMUNICATOR IN THE FACE OF NARRATIVE

We must investigate among educators for implicit or explicit theories that are similar to these narrative approaches, which concern the consciousness with which the world and man are interpreted in the educational model.


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In this case education would be a real adventure between teacher-learner with the same ends as the narrative coinciding in the construction of consciousness and the values of a culture or society. An educator such as Freire approached the problem from the theoretical position involving educational practices:

All educational practice implies a theoretical stance, on the part of the educator. And this theoretical stance implies – sometimes more or sometimes less implicitly – an interpretation of the world and of man. It couldn’t be any other way. The process of orientation doesn’t include just the association of images as it does with animals. It includes above all, thought-language; that is to say the possibility of the act of knowing through praxis, through which man is capable of transforming reality.13

Without any other remarks about what is obvious in this quotation, I note that for the author the educational process does not include solely the association of images but that it touches above all on thought-language. We can compare this consciousness implicit in the theoretical stance of the educator with what the theorists refer to in narration as listening to the maximum possible consciousness within the story. The educator and the narrator can share this mission, to infer an interpretation of the world and of man from the problematic of values, in an educational adventure for one and in an artistic one for the other, in the search for theoretical approaches. NARRATIVES AND THE PROBLEMATIC OF VALUES The conscience of the hero amidst a problematic search for values has been the grand theme of Western literature, in that it refers to a tale of mediation within the book. It proposes value in a more ambiguous and indirect form than that desired by parents or educators: educational institutions don’t always exactly understand the type of consciousness that the narrative implies. We have to start from the recognit ion of a problemat ic of values, that involves education, art and the media of technological communicat ion. How does one approach this awareness of the

13 FREIRE, Paulo, Acción cultural para la libertad, Tierra Nueva, Buenos Aires, 1975, p. 17.

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problematic of values? Can one understand Don Quixote by Cervantes, Citizen Kane by Orson Wells or Space Odyssey 2001 by Stanley Kubrick by overriding this problematic adventure of value? Neither the knight from the Mancha nor the astronaut of the Odyssey use direct and obvious actions in their search for values and reasons for existence, but the literary or cinematographic narrative does so through an indirect, obtuse and problematic adventure. In the aseptic and ascetic world of

the narratives nor of the contemporary theories of value. Thus it is the problematic itself that opens the door to understanding the value that aliments the imaginary narrative, that doesn’t coincide in many cases with the ideologies of politicians, educators or parents. Bringing in a sensitive and indirect way this fight of a character in defence of values and meanings that have been abolished in social and

in order to save itself from educational censure. This censure traps the text within only one meaning, without interpreting the vital and polysemic

towards grammatical corrections, partial commentaries of the text, the prohibition of certain interpretations, obvious meanings, doesn’t allow the imaginative interpretations of child or youth to escape the pedagogical prison, depriving them of the pleasure of broader interpretations to which, albeit negatively, the majority of narrative texts of our modern or contemporary times refer. Spain has had the luck to inaugurate the modern dialogist narrative, inter-textual, of mediation, with Don Quixote, who can be made contemporary with another adventure that brings it into the present-day, be it under the problematic of other values and other heroic battles, or in the disguise of other subsequent literary or cinematographic

To sidestep the school readers pleasure of discovering the other meanings that make up the narratives, in the way contemporary authors interpret them: the distancing of the hero and the irony or novel humour in George Lukacs; the truth in the disillusion of the mediated desire of René Girard, the truth in the comparison between the antique and the new, the truth and the book, in Marthe Robert, deprives them of this maximum


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possible consciousness that the narratives offer. All these interpreters take Don Quixote as their pioneering model. To deny the infant-youth reader the pleasure of new discoveries in old texts through contemporary

uncertainties in respect of the currently negated social values, also deprives them of being able to understand the present problematic of value or truth that is suggested in every narrative. The interpretations of the heavily studied case of Don Quixote, for example by George Lukacs, René Girard and Marthe Robert, among others, could reveal a burning and current theme that surpasses its value

this space between sanity and/or madness, clarity and/or obscurity, past and/or future values, that situates the problematic of narrative creation and of values within permanence and relativity, the antique and/or the new, the past and the future, has not yet lost validity in the new textual and cinematographic creations. The responsibility falls on education, as in the case of the narrators or philosophers, to construct this bridge in search for a coherent integral consciousness, above all in these difficult or critical times that we l ive in. The theoretical formation of the educator and of the communicator should enable this encounter between theories and the narratives of epic or problematic heroes in search of values. By placing emphasis on the passing transformations that the literary can experience when expressed through technological media, and the history of cinematography can also bring invaluable material. We are at a crucial point in the shift from the culture of writing to the culture of image technologies, which haven’t been able to change even the heroes, nor the vision of the world, nor the theories of narrativity. Now the new quixotic knights don’t have a horse or armour but suits and space masks when they travel, they don’t go on horseback but by

character of David in Space Odyssey 2001, with the computer of the space station. In the majority of the cases the story is expressed through other material or in technique other than writing but maintains the narrative structure: the giant that David has to bring down is not Goliath but

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technology. If Quixote fought for past values, David’s battle, in the very contemporary space Odyssey, refers to the Hellenic character of Ulysses in

technological Goliath. There are so many clues in the narratives of communication that they

responsibility is to elaborate these inter-textual bridges. In order to able to gain liberty to navigate the world of narratives of a certain time and of all times (as would be the case in true globalization) there is a need for a vast culture that is not just educational or communicational but universal, as it used to be called. As regards the problematic of value in narratives it can also be a point of anchorage, given that values can change in each culture, but the narrative structure, like rhetoric, remains or changes more slowly than the content. By always maintaining the defence of values in their form, the narratives of communication imply a wide-ranging knowledge, that is not just technological but also cultural, of texts and inter-texts that are contained in the narratives of communication and that make it possible to heed the meaning better, to recognise this maximum possible consciousness that is actualised every time a narrator, not just a technical operator, technologically or cinematographically assumes this maximum consciousness that narratives demand.

FROM AGRAPHA CULTURES TO SCRIPT There are other narratives that still don’t have technological media nor scripts, but which educators and communicators must not ignore, above all in the education of those millenary communities that expressing themselves, in European languages or not, protect in their stories the survival of oral narratives (ancestral or recent). Many educators and communicators are not familiar with oral narrative literature and how it relates to what I have called the nest of narratives, to the cultural memory of the narrative; but they also lack the theories that are essential in order to comprehend the written narrative of their own culture and that of others. I consider this knowledge to be essential. I’d like to


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our Latin American narrators (and other continents) in the valuation of the oral tradition leaving its mark even on the writing of literary stories, with the integration of the narrative traditions that were unable to be written.

the mediation of the hero and of writing, as in the knightly inter-texts in Quixote or the romantic ones in Madame Bovary, but also another tradition: the oral. Listening to an oral literature at an early age, tinged with affectionate body contact, is something that it is invaluable and that education should take up again from the angle of new experiences of narratives, above all if necessary in poly-cultural or intercultural educational communities, be it here or there. The value of oral creation, of the word that is spoken and not read, is tending to disappear as an everyday form of communication and it needs to be recuperated. This performance or recitation of oral texts, on the edge of theatricality in certain cultures (as in the case of the African oral narrators), would allow the integration of these narratives into other scenic arts that can be captured technologically. There, in the performance that each makes

through the value of the spoken word, in its poetic and aesthetic uses and in its possible translations, without any possible form of escape. It would bring to the school body the added value of an all involving face-to-face form of communication, with the cultural affections and appendages,

educators make. One would have to listen, behind the literary forms, to the personal traditions that feed the written stories, to these confessions that allude or

Márquez), the indigenous mother talking Guarani (by the Paraguayan Augusto Roa Bastos) or of the mother reading (by the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges), of the welcoming Quechuan community (by the Peruvian José María Arguedas). This type of inclusive communication of bodies and emotions, between agrapha literature and writing, the vernacular tradition and Western narrative genres, could bring a breath of fresh air to the creation of all those who live between two worlds, between two cultures: one agrapha and one written, between the traditional and the

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contemporary. It could be the sowing in the classroom of a desire to create new narrative forms in this intermediary space of communication and contact. From intercultural writing (between his/her culture and the other), interlectal (between two languages), inter-subjective (in being about groups in communication at school or the relationship between the narrator with

at school with the search for originality. A search that should begin, at the

in contact with the act of narrating, the pleasure of being together, with the emotional charge that could then be displaced towards the creation of new languages that education doesn’t always know how to take in nor the technological communicators understand. This united path between language and affection in the origin of the narrative traditions, that certain educators and communicators are unfamiliar with having not experienced it in their lives, could move towards an educational opening for a different or inclusive form of

also help to understand new children’s stories of our contemporary times that don’t necessarily have fairies, little red riding hoods nor Prince Charming, but could populate the narratives with characters that are unusual in infant or youth storytelling. There, in those zones of the right here at school or the somewhere out there of their cultures, should be

family or community affection, where the oral tradition is maintained for the pleasure of storytelling, before any educated version of narration. Whoever becomes a narrator in other latitudes grasps not just at the book

his skin and resorts to other non written traditions to express what he has lived in another language or another culture.

Maximum conciousness and the human condition Narrative is embedded within a historical-cultural context, but at the same time the forms negate this contextualisation. We could talk of structures, patterns, codes or forms of narrative, to name the skeleton or armature with which all narratives of communication are constructed. To accept the


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triad of identity (individual, cultural, human) projecting it on the narrative identities supposes the acceptance of the complexity of narration. From the study of the morphology of the Russian folk tale by Vladimir Propp, the functions applicable in the narrative storytelling of a certain

under the guise of the structural analysis of the story. Many television channels use Propp’s theories to elaborate scripts for soap operas, recognising in doing so their applicability to other contexts and media. Although other genres have also had theories, such as the structuralist analysis of myth by the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, we can’t ignore the cross-cultural structure of the myth. We could say the same of the novelistic narrative constructions that, despite their number and diversity, contain narrative patterns that are extracted from other novels. Each culture can prioritise a type of narrative that the educator or the communicator can’t ignore nor make themselves blind and deaf to, in order not to hear nor read nor understand the knowledge that one can obtain from these general principles for the investigation of the narratives of communication.

THE MULTIPLE MATERIALITY OF THE NARRATIVE

of communication: one arises out of the different materialisations into which narration can be placed; the other is the responsibility to surmount the sciences and other disciplines in order to create a cross-disciplinary space. One has to take into consideration, in the face of this difficult task, a rapprochement from two points of view that concern the multiple materialisations of the narrative and the diversity of the sciences that need to come together in the study of it. Just as, Roland Barthes, established in respect of its materiality:

variety of genres, that are themselves distributed amongst different substances, as though

substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy,

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drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula), stained glass

diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society.14

This amplitude of narrative forms means that we have to overcome the division between the narratives of communication as something separate because they are related to technologies. The articulation of narrative in material forms in education would bring together a transversal knowledge in the curriculum that could be elaborated through pedagogical sequences within all subjects of an education that is scaled according to age.

THE CROSS-DISCIPLINARY NATURE OF NARRATIVE

In as much as many sciences have investigated narratives, the Russian thinker Vladimir Propp, of the Morphology of the Folk tale, already commented in a less well-known work:

of reciprocally isolated disciplines, folk tales are studied by archaeologists, orientalists of various tendencies, ethnographers, religious historians, sociologists, literary historians etc… and each one of these disciplines contemplates only one aspect of the material being incapable of seeing the others.15

This dispersion of the disciplines drives the desire of many investigators

Propp with Morpholog y of the folk tale, George Lukacs in the Theory of the Novel, Marthe Robert with The Old and the New, René Girard with Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Deceit, Desire and the Novel, 1966), Roland Barthes with S/Z. Many of these authors suggest the narrative as a

14 BARTHES, Roland, Introducción al análisis estructural de los relatos, in Análisis estructural del relato, Ediciones Coyoacàn, México, 1999. 15 PROPP, Vladimir, Edipo a la luz del folclore, Editorial Fundamentos, Madrid, 1980, p. 1116 See LUKACS, George, Théorie du roman.


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structure that permits variations in the structure according to the contexts; but what could be interesting educationally in reference to the structure, is the inter-textuality of the narrative forms and the problematic search for values. This search has varied over t ime (myth, epic, novel, serial ised pamphlets, chapters for television series) according to the types of epic or problematic heroes, according to the type of societies, closed or open16. The search for values always results problematical for the hero, hence his struggles and defeats, that is to say modern narration moves to abandon the epic and constructs new narrative forms where the problematic hero

of society. NARRATIVE VALUE AND EDUCATIONAL VALUE

Living the contradictions between the ideal and reality, between the model and culture itself, Dionysian and Apollonian tensions, madness and sanity, illusion and disillusion, narrators have elaborated a dialogical narrative logic where the fictional characters go from being heroic to problematical in a social, philosophical or life situation. With actions that touch the opposite extremes, in a third position, narrative involves itself in the problems of value where there is no longer a clear distinction between good and bad. Although many messages of mass communication maintain this epic opposition, the best works of our modern literature and

hero in search of values that are missing from the heart of society. The problematic of values is in itself a bridge between narrative, education and communication. I wil l take three examples of cinematography, among the many that are concerned with the subject of literature and the media. The Dead Poets Societyeducational questioning of the traditional versus new values of liberty and creativity within poetry. The Truman Show by the same author approaches the problems with the vision of a reality-show, similar to Big Brother, that deals

and reality play the same role in the literary mediation and the disillusion. The Purple Rose of Cairo by Woody Allen narrates the exit of a character from

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the screen at the time (1930) of the Great Depression. These products of communication possess a narrative structure that is similar to the novel, brought with humour, distance and irony to the screens. They are not unique cases in the narratives of communication. Modernity and the contemporary can’t avoid this problematic of narratives and the search for the truth. I will cite only one example to understand what authors call truth, that relates to Quixote, but that occurs in other later works, as with the surveyor in The Castle by Kafka or in Madame Bovary by Flaubert, but that can also be found in other

that until then has constituted his life to go and follow pathways, apparently by chance

everything he has read in books. The majority of his adventures take a bad turn but neither the suffering that he experiences, nor the taunts nor the disappointments, nor

17

The education or communicational value of these texts is undeniable through this vision of the contemporary hero being brought to the dynamic

meaning to antique forms where the value not the meaning was left suspended in the adventure for the reader to construe it. Step by step, just like the surveyor approaching the castle that becomes something else, following the thread of the narration, the narrative truth can slowly reveal itself to the eyes of a good reader or a good spectator. It is the same process of destruction and construction in a dynamic history of the life-death of forms, of the illusion-disillusion of truths and is like the life process of all the creative processes of cultural objects of humanity. Taking the greatest possible consciousness of the processes of construction of the narrative and of the immanent values,

17 ROBERT, Marthe, Lo viejo y lo nuevo, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, Caracas, 1993, p. 9


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which education is responsible for teaching children and youth, it would be possible to clarify child trauma through to the uncertainties of adults and the social dissonances of meaning and values. It would require using, in the educational ambit a scaling of the intuitive procedural narrative memories to the representative or semantically taught ones, to then later bring comprehension or the understanding of the techniques so that the stories could be poured into audiovisual technologies without losing the narrative identity of the individual nor the cultural traditions. It is about seeking always in the creation (be it oral, written or cinematographic) self-creation and the understanding of the individual, cultural and human identity, as proposed by Edgar Morin with the anthropo-ethical model for forms of knowledge for future education.

BibliographyBARBA, Eugenio, La canoa de papel, Tratado de antropología teatral. Grupo Editorial Gaceta, México, 2002.

BARTHES, Roland, “Análisis estructural de los relatos”, “La concatenación de las acciones”, in La aventura semiológica, Paidós Ibérica S.A., Barcelona, 1985.

BATJIN, Mijail, Teoría y estética de la novela, Taurus, Madrid, 1989.

CYRULNIK, Boris, El amor que nos cura, Gedisa, Barcelona, 2004.

DOLTO, Francoise, La imagen inconsciente del cuerpo, Paidós, Barcelona, 1994.

FREIRE, Paulo, Acción cultural para la libertad, Tierra Nueva, Buenos Aires, 1975,

FUENMAYOR, Víctor, “Towards the Creative Training of Art Teachers. De la catástrofe a la estrofa”, in Issues in Arts Education in Latin América, Edited by Rachel Mason and Larry O’Farrel, Queens University, Canada, 2004. Conferencia UNESCO en la Reunión Regional de Expertos en formación artística en Latinoamérica y el Caribe, Universidad de Uberaba, Brasil, 2001.

GOLDMANN, Lucien, Le Dieu caché, Gallimard, Paris, 1955.

GOLDMANN, Lucien, GIRAD, René, LUKACS, George, Problèmes d’une sociologie du roman, Revue de l`Institut de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1957.

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KLEIN, Jean Pierre, DARRAULT, Ivan, LAFFORGUE, Pierre y otros, Art et Thérapie,Nº 36-37, INECAT , Paris, 1990.

KRISTEVA, Julia, Semiótica 1 y 2, Fundamentos, Madrid, 1969.

LUKACS, George, La théorie du roman, Editions Gonthier, Suiza, 1963.

METZ, Christian, TODOROV, Tzvetan, BARTHES, Roland, BREMOND, Claude, Recherches sémiologiques, Communications, Seuil, Paris, 1964.

MORIN, Edgar, Los siete saberes necesarios para la educación del futuro, Paidós, Barcelona 2001.

PROPP, Vladimir, Edipo a la luz del folclore, Editorial Fundamentos, Madrid, 1982.

RESTREPO, Luis Carlos, La trampa de la razón, Arango Editores, Bogotá 2000.

ROBERT, Marthe, Lo Viejo y lo Nuevo, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, Caracas, 1992.

URBAN, Jean Didier y FRESNAULT-DERUELLE, Pierre, Lettres et icones, in Langages 75, Larouse, Paris, 1984.

VYGOTSKI, Lev S., El desarrollo de los procesos psicológicos superiores, Editorial Crítica, Barcelona, 2006.

VYGOTSKI, Lev S., La imaginación y el arte en la infancia, Akal Ediciones, Madrid, 2003.

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166

Memoirs and the History of Nazism

Xavier Laborda

Narrative and HistoryThe intention of this article is to consider memoir writing –autobiographies, memoirs and diaries- and audiovisual documentaries as forms of narrative

centres on the contributions of Albert Speer and Joachim Fest in writing the memoirs and history of Nazism. The works written by Speer and Fest interweave in an amalgam from which comes the “true story”, the expression used for them in historiography. First it is necessary to introduce the narrative genre. Narrative is a

From the linguistic point of view, narrative is a textual pattern, a prototypical

what beings do. It is characterised by three traits: a) action or events; b) the

moral or material limits of reality. With these traits narration differs from the standard pattern of description that explains opinions about things or why things are as they are. Our focus of attention here is historiography as well as the theory and

man. History is a “true story”, according to the historian P.Veyne (1971).

paradox is revealed an argument, of which Roger Chartier the cultural historian, explains the nuances “History is a discourse constructed like

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Xavier Laborda 167

1). This argument refers to the principles of contemporary historiography that are inspired by hermeneutics and textual linguistics (Laborda 2002). In our explanation we apply the principles of historiography to an episode in the Second World War. We consider the role of a Nazi heirarch, Albert Speer and Speer’s contributions to historical knowledge (1969) as well as those of the journalist and historian Joachim Fest (2001,2005,2006). Associated with these names are two audiovisual pieces, the documentary that J. Fest co-directed with Christian Herrendoerfer, Hitler, a biography (1977), Der Untergang (Downwfall)documentary series Speer und Er (Speer and Hitler; The Devil’s Architect) directed by Heinrich Breloer (2005) for Bavarian television. One great attraction of this documentary repertoire is the combination of narrative formats,

2006), the historical monograph, (Fest 2003), the diary (Fest 2006), the cinematographic drama (Hirschbiegel 2005) and the docudrama (Breloer 2005).

Speer, Hitler’s architectAlbert Speer (Mannheim, 1905-London, 1981) was the regime’s favourite architect and an intimate friend of Hitler. He came from a liberal, aristocratic family, but was drawn to the Nazi ideology. And in 1931 he joined the German National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP). Speer designed the Congress centre in Nuremberg and the new Chancellery in Berlin, as well as a complete reform of the historic centre. Speer’s Memoirs (1969) are a documentary source about him and his work. His Memoirs are interesting as historical material but also for their literary quality. For example, the chapters illustrate in a magisterial way the semiotics of architecture in a totalitarian State. The following fragment of the Memoirs relates an important event in his life, in the middle of the thirties. What is relevant in this story is how the architecture and theatricality are determined as fundamental instruments of the Third Reich (Laborda 2005).

They took me to Nuremberg in a plane and I presented my sketches. There weren’t many ideas in them that distinguished them from the

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a span of more than thirty metres, pinned to a wooden framework as

The chief organiser at Nuremberg didn’t dare to ask me about it and sent me to the centre of Munich with a letter of accreditation, as I was still totally unknown outside Berlin. Once in the Braunes Haus, an extraordinary importance was placed on my architecture, or to put it more precisely, on my party decoration. A few minutes later I found myself in one of Hess’s luxuriously furnished rooms. He didn’t even let me speak:- A thing like this can, only be decided by the Führer.He made a short call and said to me:-The Führer is at home; I’ll have them take you there immediately.I was beginning to get the idea of what the magic word «architecture» meant in Hitler’s regime. (Memorias, p. 55)

Shortly afterwards, in 1937, Speer prepared an amazing stage set for the party Congress of Nuremberg. The main effect was a cathedral of light, as the expression of unlimited power.

The impression went way beyond what I had imagined. The one hundred and thirty clearly delimited shafts of light, placed around the Zeppelinfeld at only twelve metres from each other, were visible up to a height of six and eight kilometres, and there they diffused into a huge luminous surface. The whole thing gave the impression of a huge space, in which the distinct shafts of light seemed to be tremendous pillars of

through the crown of light and added a surreal element to the grandiose

of luminous architecture. For me it is still not just my most beautiful piece but also the only one of my spatial creations that has in some way managed to survive the effects of time. «Solemn and beautiful at the same time, it is as if one has discovered a cathedral made of ice» wrote Henderson, the British ambassador. (Memorias, p. 110)

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The architect Albert Speer worked under the personal direction of Hitler. The friendship and recognition of the Führer led him to be Minister of Armaments during the Second World War. Speer published his Memoirs when he left the prison of Spandau, where he served the twenty years imprisonment to which the Nuremberg trials had condemned him. In the memoirs and in conversations with Joachim Fest he referred to the details of the circumstances of the fall of the Third Reich that happened on the 8 May in 1945. At the end of the struggle, with a demoralised population and a defeated army, Hitler confessed a terrible thought to Speer. He said that he would prefer the total downfall of Germany than to surrender. With these words he expressed his determination to drag the population to the abyss that he despotically linked to a plan for annihilation. The quotation of Hitler’s words is:

been too weak. In this case, they won’t have passed the trial of History and will only be destined to destruction. (Memorias, p. 707)

These were the words that Hitler said to Speer in the bunker of the Berlin Chancellery in the last days of the war. They are the days that are narrated by J. Fest in the monograph Downfallby Oliver Hirschbiegel (2005). With the word “downfall” Fest highlights a revealing sense of the cruelty and madness of the dictator.

Intelligence without critical capacity During the Second World War Speer was Minister of Armaments.

incrementing arms production and weapon administration. At the end of the war he fell prisoner and the Nuremberg Trials judged him, as a member of the Nazi government, responsible. He served his sentence in Spandau until 1966. And three years later he published his autobiography Inside the Third Reich, Memoirs. Reading it

aspects of architecture in the totalitarian Nazi regime. But the whole piece, as voluminous as it is neat, is worthy of appraisal as it makes it possible

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to know with precision the different phases of a historical process. It is the process of the rise, the supremacy and then the downfall of the Nazi regime. To which is added the capacity of the author to offer rich descriptions of situations, people, conversations and elements of non-verbal communication. And another incentive of the book is the protagonist of this impressive and terrible tale, Speer himself. It is impressive due to the dynamism of a time of change and singular plans in the history of urbanism. And it is terrible for the disaster of the consolidation of a despotic power that doesn’t parry in its enslavement of vanquished populations and annihilation of millions of people. Albert Speer lived in the centre of power and participated in many of its actions, not as an ideologist but as an architect. During the twelve years that the collaboration lasted he could know and see everything he wanted to, but he didn’t know or see anything that seemed to him reproachable, until in the Nuremberg trials he had to face up to the evidence of the extermination camps. He then admitted, without excuses, his culpability as a minister. And in order to explain this surprising unawareness he recorded the words of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, that referred critically to the Nazis:

They were intelligent and educated people, honourable and sincere men who by their own initiative disdained the greatest privilege of a human being, being one’s own master…They stopped being critical of what surrounded them and accepted it as something natural.

Speer was all of that, without a doubt an intelligent and educated person and if one believes his words, perhaps also truthful. This is the impression that the pages inspire, despite the fact that the position he held meant he would have been able to know of the holocaust. Cassirer was right; Speer looked the other way and didn’t feel inclined to be critical. He concentrated on his fascinating technical mission and aspired to be ever more powerful in Hitler’s Government. He had an intelligence that is subtly embedded in the Memoirs, but he disdained the honourable and dangerous honour of being one’s own master.

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The unveiling of the myth of SpeerThe historian and journalist Joachim Fest (Berlin, 1926–Kroenberg, 2006) lived his childhood and youth under the Nazi regime. In his memoirs Ich Nicht (Not I) (2005) he relates how his family and he, through penury and with a lot of danger, maintained their distance from the Nazi ideology. This book, that appeared almost simultaneously with the apparition of the memoirs of Günter Grass, Beim Hauten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion) (2006), served to highlight the confrontation between the writer and the historian. While the autobiography of Grass is to a great extent a confession in which he accounts for how he was convinced by the Nazi cause, that of Fest is a presentation of the reasons why he remained immune to it, that all relate to his father, a fervent catholic that preferred hunger to agreeing with the Nazis. Fest is author of one of the most reputable biographies of Hitler (1973) and as a journalist he directed the newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine. His relationship with Speer arose out of an editorial commission to make a critical edition of Speer’s Memoirs. Fest regularly interviewed Speer between 1967 and 1969 to discuss the manuscript. His role as adviser allowed him to interrogate Speer about dubious points and to impose changes in order

to improve the quality of the text and to avoid the work being a vulgar apology of Hitler’s ex-minister. At the request of Fest, Speer described out loud and also in the manuscript the encounter he had with Hitler in the bunker in the last days of the war. This was the episode when Hitler talked about “the downfall” and of his determination to sacrifice the German people. The drama of the moment, the meeting of the key figures and the imminence of the denoument give this chapter of the story a special role. This was the reason why Joachim Fest wrote a historical study Downfall: Hitler and the end of the Third Reich (2001), in the pages of which appear Albert

Downfall

Ganz does an amazing interpretation, in the role of Hitler. Fest also wrote a biography about Albert Speer (2001). Nevertheless how well does he know the person he is interrogating and analysing? Fest

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formed this question in his diary Conversations with Albert Speer (2005), where he re-elaborated the notes he had taken between 1967 and 1981, in the interviews with Speer. The subtitle, Questions without answers, is a declaration

Fest and a colleague of his, the editor Wolf Jobst Sidler, of the interviews and the readings of Speer’s manuscripts provided some questions without answers. Shortly afterwards some of Speer’s secrets came to light thanks to several investigations, such as that of the historian Mathias Schmidt. Fest noted his impressions regarding them:

I have read the book of doctor Schmidt. It is very tendentious but the proof that it provides is not exactly irrelevant. It contains exactly what I have sometimes feared. So despite all Speer’s promises there were “secrets”. Deceived and angered. Today I told Siedler, that Speer, with his trustworthy face, had pulled the wool over everybody’s eyes. I couldn’t forgive him. (Conversations…, p. 216)

The biographer’s final judgment is severe. Fest considered that Speer,

“favourite” of Hitler and many other people. “It appears, that not only was he everybody’s favourite – concludes Fest- but that destiny was also to consider him a sort of darling… undoubtedly more than he merited”. A similar judgment is that formulated in the mini series of the docudrama by Heinrich Breloer Speer and him. It was produced in 2005 by Thilo Kleine and Michael Hild for ARD, the German public television channel, based on the screenplay by Heinrich Breloer and Horst Konigstein.

“The series, that has contributed to the fall of the myth of the good Nazi, is based on the documents discovered by the German historian Susanne Willems” (APIA 2005). In December of 2006 the docudrama was broadcast on Canal 33, of the autonomous Catalan television with the more explicit title of Speer y Hitler (Speer and Hitler). In synthesis, the docudrama undoes the benign image that Speer had transmitted of himself. It provided evidence about his knowledge and implication in the crimes of Nazism. One of these grave pieces of evidence refers to the period preceding the Second World War. Speer

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was the architect, who, under the direction of Hitler himself, remodelled Berlin in the pre-war period. In 1937 he was named General Building Inspector of the Capital of the Reich and he assumed the task of designing imperial Berlin. The condemning of buildings, that he himself oversaw, was an opportunity to dispossess Jewish owners while personally enriching himself. This fact doesn’t just talk of corruption but also of the knowledge and participation of the architect and minister in the holocaust, a point that he had always denied.

RESOURCES OF HISTORIOGRAPHY To conclude, we return to the abstract angle of historiography. As R. Chartier

and advantageous, just like the ones from the period of Nazism that we have looked at here: the historical monograph, the biography, the memoirs,

viewing of the pieces mentioned, about Nazism and what the protagonists

the canon of historiography and the resources of narrative discourse. The people that lived in this dramatic and terrible time have become characters of stories that are as fascinating as they are instructive. Some of these narrative pieces are memoirs and autobiographies, those of. Speer, J. Fest and G. Grass. To their literary quality they add the formal luxury of the doubling up of the same person in the roles of author and protagonist. The writer Caballero Bonald establishes three requisites for good memorialist literature. The prime requisite is that the writer be the protagonist of the events being narrated, that it to say that he has a central role in the story. The second is to participate in the spirit of the time or what is the same thing to participate in the events that mark the historic shift and to live what happens perceptively. The third requisite is to possess a sense of narrative, an aesthetic gift that makes it possible to extrude the relevant events and impose a rhythm on the story. Memorialist literature is a magnificent source of communication narratives. For on the one hand it carries aesthetic or literary value and on

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the other it carries formative or documentary value. Some of the works can become the epitome of a complex reality. In effect the life of an author-protagonist can assume the narrative function of condensing a whole era and certain values into a personal history. The protagonist thus becomes the concrete, intimate and suffering representation of a global, abstract reality. This is the appeal of the televised docudrama Speer and he (Speer and Hitler, on Canal 33 in Catalonia), that refers to the mysteries of the Hitlerian empire, through the history of the Nazi ex-minister imprisoned in Spandau, who secretly aspired to succeed Hitler in the leadership of the Reich. Or Joachim Fest, the person who along with his family refused to adhere to Nazism, risking his life for a democratic ideal. In Conversations with Albert Speer, we discover two people, Speer and Fest, who discuss the Nazi leader’s past. They are dialogues and stories about two people who survived the war, who defended ethically opposed positions and who in their way have participated in the construction of historical knowledge. The drama of these stories leads us to the secret of narratives: the

In the stories of Speer and Fest the reader discovers deviations that settle for meanness and the abject or for integrity or a commitment to historical truth. They are tales that not only call into question the human condition but also that of historiography. In short the concept of History as a group of narratives or “true stories” invites one to recognise that a reality that has not been recounted in a novel is incomprehensible.

BibliografíaAPIA, Agencia Periodística de Información Alternativa (2005): “Cae el mito de Albert Speer…”, 19-05-2005; http://www.apiavirtual.com/2005/05/19/articulo-6672/

BARTHES, ROLAND (1967): “El discurso de la historia”, en Barthes, El susurro del lenguaje, Barcelona, Paidós, 1987; pág. 163-177.

BRELOER, HEINRICH (2005): Speer y él. Miniserie del docudrama de la cadena de televisión pública alemana ARD, guión de Heinrich Breloer y Horst Konigstein, productores Thilo Kleine i Michael Hild.

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BRUNER, JEROME (1990): Actos de significado. Más allá de la revolución cognitiva, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1990.

CHARTIER, ROGER (1993): “Narración y verdad”, El País, 29-7-1993, cuaderno sobre historia, pág. 1 y 4.

FEST, JOACHIM (1973, 2002): Hitler , una biografía, Barcelona, Planeta, 2005.

FEST, JOACHIM; HERRENDOERFER, CHRISTIAN, dir (1977): Hitler, una biografía, documental, Alemania, producciones GmbH (151 minutos); edición española, Valladolid, Dinsa, 2007.

FEST, JOACHIM (2001): , Barcelona, Galaxia Gutemberg, Círculo de Lectores, 2003.

FEST, JOACHIM (2001): , Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

FEST, JOACHIM (2005): Conversaciones con Albert Speer. Preguntas sin respuestas, Barcelona, Ediciones Destino, 2008.

FEST, JOACHIM (2006): Yo no: recuerdos de niñez y juventud, Madrid, Taurus, 2007; versión en catalán, Barcelona, Columna, 2007.

GRASS, GÜNTER (2006): Pelando la cebolla, Barcelona, Suma de Letras, 2008; versión en catalán, Tot pelant la ceba, Barcelona, Edicions 62, 2007.

HIRSCHBIEGEL, OLIVER, dir. (2005): El hundimiento, producción alemana con la actuación de Bruno Ganz.

LABOR DA, XAVIER (2002): “Historiografía Lingüíst ica: Veinte principios del programa hermenéutico”, Revista de Investigación lingüística, RIL., Nº 1, Vol. V, p. 179-207, Universidad de Murcia.

LABORDA, XAVIER (2005): “Notas de Semiótica sobre fascismo y arquitectura en las Memorias de Speer”, Tonos Digital, 10 (XI-2005) 1-15. www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum10/subs/peri/peri.htm

LOZANO, JORGE (1987): El discurso histórico, Madrid, Alianza Universidad.

SPEER, ALBERT (1969): Memorias, Barcelona, El Acantilado, 2001.

SPEER, ALBERT (1976): Diario de Spandau, Barcelona, Mundo de Actual de Ediciones.

VEYNE, PAUL (1971): Cómo se escribe la historia. Foucault revoluciona la historia, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 1984.

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176

The Narratives of Communication

Regina de Assis

Throughout history, human beings have survived and expanded as a species, by virtue of their intelligence, creativity, courage, resilience, curiosity and capacity to look for and register information and to communicate it to new generations. By generating memory, establishing identities and cultures, the human species communicates and transmits its dreams, desires, visions, knowledge

use to communicate and inform, from the use of smoke signals, to the sound of drums and chants, or in cave paintings have evolved to become increasingly sophisticated and today manifest themselves in the form of signs and printed symbols, of images in movement, of sounds and in virtual digital codes, that navigate cybernetic time/space. From small villages to the global village, many centuries have passed and today, our children, adolescents and youth form part of a networked civilization that uses a vast quantity of languages, with mobile phones that

Communities are organized on the internet that use Orkut, MSN, You Tube and My Space amongst others, as well as blogs and other supports, that enable them to communicate their printed, audio/visual and digital narratives. This radical change in the paradigm of how we accede knowledge and the indispensable values of civil life is a challenge not just for education in families, but also for what happens in the context of schools and universities.

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Regina de Assis 177

The indiscriminate access to the languages of the media, their use and their quality, provoke perplexity in parents, teachers and others responsible,

websites on children and adolescents. Nonetheless, the contrary can also be a problem, that is to say the lack of access and the impossibility of the inclusion of and exposure to quality narratives in the various audiovisual, digital and printed languages. For this reason it is considered a new human right that has recently been won by recent generations, and as a consequence they must have it at their disposal in schools and universities, as if it is an obligation of the State in the eyes of children, adolescents, novels teachers and professors. The integration of media languages in pedagogical practices in schools and universities can have the virtue of empowering and democratising, in exponential proportions, the constitution of knowledge and values in a way never previously experienced by mankind. An important aspect for the production of narrative contents – that can serve as much in educational practices as in entertainment – is what they say about the public to which they are directed, that is to say, what will be the main characteristics. Characteristics of the Narratives of Audio/Visual, Digital and Printed LanguagesOne has to consider the distinct variables that can make these products of TV

become more valuable. The quality of the narrative that can originate in local or international literature also depends on the creative process developed between adults, children, adolescents and youth resulting in contemporary and innovative material. Big production companies always look for narratives that can be understood by everyone, so that they can sell and distribute a lot of them. A long time ago Tolstoy, the great, Russian writer said….”We will only be universal, if we know and love our village”…In this sense to start to create and recreate local narratives can in many ways be a good beginning for the development of attractive and successful narratives for all involved.

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In Brazil, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the public production company MULTIRIO, between the years 2001 and 2008, had the merit of creating and developing high quality audio/visual, digital and printed products for children, adolescents, youth and their teachers, in over a thousand Public Municipal Schools, provoking the interaction of media professionals with educational professionals and students. The results of the television series or DVDs were notable, given that

arts and technology with curricular content, generating contemporary and attractive materials for the teaching of Portuguese, Mathematics, History, Geography, Science and other areas of knowledge. In this way products such as Aventuras Cariocas (Carioca Adventures), that consisted of two series of programmes each with seven episodes, the first dealing with the ecosystem of the city of Rio and the second its history narrated through the monuments and historic sites, served these ends but could also perfectly integrate curricula from other areas of knowledge, given

The narratives for these programmes, were developed by specialists in these areas of knowledge, but also by teachers, scriptwriters, TV directors and multimedia specialists, who all added their distinct types of knowledge

generated were well received in the Public Municipal Schools of Rio. Public recognition also came in the form of national and international prizes such as the Ibero-Americano Prix Jeunesse. In 2008 the 200th anniversary celebrations for the arrival of the Royal Family of Portugal in Brazil, motivated the creation of other digital products, such as digital or printed games for students and audio/visuals for both them and their teachers.Some of these products were made out of the interaction of professionals from MULTIRIO with the students and teachers of Public Municipal Schools,

by all. For younger children there are very few high quality Brazilian products, and because of this we are developing two very successful products such as the Cartas Animadas pela Paz/ Animated letters for peace, winner of the UNICEF prize in the OETI Festival and Juro que Vi /I swear saw

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it, winner of a great number of prizes including amongst others ones from Japan and Anima Mundi. The merit of these products is how the narratives are produced and how they are transformed into audio/visual and printed products. Juro que Vi works with universal archetypes that are present in the myths of Brazilian folklore, that have been revisited by students of six to 11 years old, with teachers and professionals from MULTIRIO. The results are very

Iara, Matinta Perera and the Saci are once again recognised and appreciated by new generations, and are given new meaning at the beginning of this Century and Millennium. The Jury of the 2007 Japan Prize, conceded the Japan’s Foundation President’s Prize to the episode Matinta Perera, highlighting its excellence in stimulating cultural change. What stands out is the capacity of its creators –children and adults – to work with themes from the past and make them current. The capacity to use music and animated images, in movement, as an audio/visual language, created at the same time an original and universal narrative. Cartas Animadas pela Paz, considered by UNESCO in 2005 to be one of the best media practices for education, created short narratives through animations developed from the drawings made by the children, who often, although they couldn’t read or write, can narrate orally and draw their stories, at times full of drama and violence, particularly given the social and economic conditions of their families. This strategy could in fact

concentrating and expressing themselves to read and write. For teachers we create the monthly magazine Nos da Escola/Us at School, that integrates material from specialists in various fields of education, from teachers themselves, to parents and other professionals of the school system as well as from MULTIRIO. Nos da Escola became an object of desire for teachers, for its simple, consistent and communicative narrative. We also created a weekly TV programme and the website for the platform of MULTIRIO, www.multirio.rj.gov.br, developing in this way a convergence of printed, audio/

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and in knowing how to use each in the right context all communicate very successfully. That is to say, we could treat the same theme in distinct languages, but that each one has to know what its expressive, communicative potential

to its preferred public, be they children, adolescents, youths or adults.There are nevertheless products that carry a special qual ity of communication, that by working with feeling, values and a profound sense of humanity, manage to generate knowledge as well as emotive and unforgettable messages, for all generations across the world. These are what those of us working in the field of Media and Education should continue to seek and create.

BibliografíaAssis, Regina de i Tavares, Marcus Tadeu Nos da Escola criando Midia e Educaçao, libro y dvd, MULTIRIO/RIOMIDIA, , Prefectura de Río de Janeiro, 2009, www.multirio.rj.gov.br

Assis, Regina de i altres, MULTIEDUCAÇAO, Núcleo Curricular Básico, Río de Janeiro, Secretaria Municipal de Educaçao, Prefectura de Río, 1996. Versión .pdf, www.multirio.rj.gov.br/multieducacao

Canclini, Néstor García, Lectores, Espectadores e Internautas, Barcelona, Editora Gedisa 2007, www.gedisa.com

Correa, Elizabeth Saad, , Observatorio (OBS) Journal, núm. 4, 2008, 307/320.

Smolka, Ana Luiza, Ele narra, eu narro, nos narramos... e as historias se desdobram em crónicas do cotidiano, Cadernos RIOMIDIA núm. 2, 21/30, Rio de Janeiro, MULTIRIO/RIOMIDIA, 2006 www.multirio.rj.gov.br/portal/riomidia

180 Works of Naos

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Regina de Assis 181

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Annex Anexo Annex

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Comitè d’Honor / Comité de Honor / Honour Committee

Aldees Infantils SOS CatalunyaFrancesc Xavier Martín Burillo, president

Associació de Mestres Rosa SensatIrene Balaguer Felip, presidenta

Caixa TarragonaGabriel Ferraté Pascual, president

Consejo General de la Abogacía EspañolaCarlos Carnicer Díez, president

Consell de l’Audiovisual de CatalunyaRamón Font Bové, president

Escoltes CatalansMarina Gay i Faura, presidenta

European Children’s TelevisionAthina Rikaki, presidenta

Fundació BlanquernaSalvador Pié Ninot, president

Fundación Cultura de PazFederico Mayor Zaragoza, president

Fundació Internacional Olof PalmeAnna Balletbò, presidenta

Fundació La CaixaJaume Lanaspa i Gatnau, director general

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Fundación Germán Sánchez-RuipérezAntonio Basanta Reyes, vice-president executiu, director general

Fundación ONCE

Miguel Carballeda Piñeiro, president

Il!lustre Col!legi d’Advocats de BarcelonaPedro L. Yúfera, degà

Institut d’Estudis Humanístics Miquel Coll AlentornCarme Dropez Ballarín, vice-presidenta consell assessor

Prix Jeunesse InternacionalMaya Götz, directora general

Síndic de GreugesXavier Bonal, adjunt per a la defensa dels drets de la infància

The Open UniversityBrenda Gourley, vice-presidenta

United Nations Children’s Foundation (C. Español)

UnescoKoïchiro Maatsura, director general

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Comitè Científic i Tecnològic / Comité Científico y Tecnológico Scientific and Technological Committee

Academia de las Ciencias y las Artes de Televisión de EspañaManuel Campo Vidal, president

Barcelona TelevisióÀngel Casas, director

Centro de Estudios InternacionalesAntoni Millet i Abbad, director

Children’s Film and Television Foundation Anna Home, cap executiva

Col!legi de Periodistes de CatalunyaJosep Carles Rius i Baró, degà

Compañía de Radio Televisión de Galicia Alfonso Sánchez Izquierdo, director general

Corporació Catalana de Mitjans AudiovisualsAlbert Saéz i Casas, president

Drac Màgic Anna Morero, presidenta

Jordi Sánchez, director

Generalitat de Catalunya, Dept. d’EducacióJoan Badia i Pujol, Direcció General d’Innovació

Institut Català de les DonesMarta Selva Masoliver, presidenta

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Mitjans. Xarxa d’Educadors i ComunicadorsMontserrat Moix, secretària de la comissió coordinadora

RAI Trade

Teleduca Sara Reñes Cabezas, fundadora

TelemadridSara Tertre Torán, responsable programa serv. Público

Universitat Autònoma de BarcelonaAna Ripoll Aracil, rectora

Universidad Carlos III José Antonio Moreiro González, degà Facultat d’Humanitats, Comunicació i Documentació

Universidad Complutense Carlos Berzosa, rector

Universitat de BarcelonaDídac Ramírez i Sarrió, rector

Universitat de GironaAnna M. Geli, rectora

Universidad de MálagaEmelina Fernández, professora

Universidad de Santiago de CompostelaMargarita Ledó Andión, catedràtica de comunicació audiovisual

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Universidad de SevillaJoaquín Luque Rodríguez, rector

Universitat de VicAssumpta Fargas i Riera, rectora

Universitat Oberta de CatalunyaImma Tubella Casadevall, rectora

Universitat Politècnica de CatalunyaAntoni Giró i Roca, rector

Universitat Ramon Llull Esther Giménez-Salinas, rectora

Xarxa Catalana Interdisciplinar d’Investigadors sobre els Drets dels Infants i la seva Qualitat de Vida Ferran Casas, coordinador

Xarxa de Televisions LocalsMarc Melillas, director general

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Consell Assessor / Consejo Asesor / Adviser’s Committee

Ricardo BadaEscriptor i periodista. Deutsche Welle (Colònia)

Sebastià SerranoCatedràtic de Lingüística i Semiòtica (Barcelona)

Alejandro Perales AlbertComunicòleg (Madrid)

Josep Maria Benítez i RieraCatedràtic d’Història, PUG (Roma)

Regina de AssisConsultora en Educació i Mitjans (Brasil)

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Amb la col.laboració / Con la colaboración / With the collaboration

Amb el patrocini /Con el patrocinio /With the collaboration

Amb el suport institucional / Con la ayuda institucional / With Institutional support

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Observatori Europeu de la Televisió InfantilObservatorio Europeo de la Televisión InfantilEuropean Observatory on Children’s Television

Francesc Llobet i DalmasesPresident

Cristina Tresserres MacayaDirectora

Maricarmen Ezquerra PastorCoordinadora

Gualbert Vargas i GómezAssessor Pedagògic

Els Treballs del Naos, n. 11/ Los Trabajos del Naos, n.11/ Works of Naos, n.11

Coordinació de la publicació Cristina Tresserres Macaya i Gualbert Vargas i Gómez

Coordinació disseny: Ediciones CPGImprès per Mozart Art s. l.

© 2009, de cada persona autora per la seva col!laboració© 2009, de les traduccions a l’anglès: Jo Milne© 2009, de traduccions al català i al castellà: T6 Estandard Lingüístic, s.l.

Una iniciativa /Una iniciativa/ An initiative©2009, Comissionat de les Arts Audiovisuals de BarcelonaC/Aragó, 290-292, 5è B. 08009 Barcelona SpainTel. 93 488 19 14 - Fax. 93 488 20 86e-mail: [email protected]

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Documents

Naos Works 2009