UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE MINAS GERAIS

Bárbara Fernandes Sena

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

An attempt to name my experiences

Belo Horizonte - Minas Gerais

2021
Introduction:

1.1 Scope:
You will find in my autoethnography personal accounts that concern my
experience as an observer/intervener in the journey of the mandatory internships set
into the new conditions that the pandemic has imposed on us. Some issues that
surrounded me during the beginning and, mainly, the end of these internships will be
presented in the parts called “background information”, “the subject of experience”,
“expectations”, “different realities” and “the teacher I want to become”. Such parts will
go through general and specific accounts of the significant moments that I was able to
understand and write about.

1.2 Purpose:
The purpose of this autoethnography is an attempt to evince my individual
experiences during Estágio I and II and, since Hagan (2005) states that “centering the
self allows the writer to tell her story and then offer a critical analysis of her own lived
experiences”, I proposed myself to analyse what they have caused, created or fostered
(or not caused, not fostered, not created) in my Self. As an effort to dig deeper into my
experiences, I will rely on some academic literature that brings concepts - such as
experience, frustration, identity and integrity - that helped me to get meaningful
answers. To finish, I believe it is valuable to point out the reason in trying to name the
feelings that Estágio I/II arose and nothing seems more suitable than Larrosa’s (2002,
p.21) words “I believe in the power of words, in the strength of words, I believe that we
do things with words and also that words do things to us.” (Our translation). Thus,
naming them might be a fruitful way for me to understand how those experiences are
connected to my present Self, and even how it will impact my future Self as well.

Findings:

Background Information
In order to understand the concerns that surrounded me during Estágio II, it is
necessary to understand the bigger picture that constitutes my history with English
teaching from my entry into university. I entered the Letras course at UFMG in 2017
after a year of studying in a preparatory course for the entrance exam. I was really
looking forward to starting my university journey and even more anxious to start
teaching, however, semesters passed and I still had not any direct contact with the
educational environment. I was working at a travel agency during my fourth academic
semester and I felt I needed a meaningful experience that connected with my
undergraduate course and, let us be honest, my paid activity at the time had no
connection with Letras.
With this thought in mind, I left my job and joined a college extension project
called UNISALE, this project aimed to reduce the historical difference between the
university and the regular school, making the knowledge produced in the former
connect with the latter one. In addition, since the scholarship holders had the
opportunity to work together with the teachers in the schools, it was exactly what I
needed at that moment. In the second half of 2019, I had my first contact with a partner
school of the project, Escola Estadual Doutor Eduardo Góes Filho, located in
Jaboticatubas, a rural region of Minas Gerais, and I was able to meet the teacher
Rosângela Rocha, who would later be my teacher advisor in the mandatory internship.
At the beginning of 2020, I ended my journey in UNISALE because it came into
view a new opportunity for a non-mandatory internship; it was a bilingual assistant
position in a private school, so I took it. The student’s realities from these two schools
I worked with were gigantic and it will later be discussed as an important point that
might have guided me in the direction to label my Estágio II as a partly “frustrated”
experience.

The subject of experience

The visit to E.E. Doutor Eduardo Góes Filho allowed me to have contact with
students through the observation of Rosângela's teaching, so I was able to see the
way she tried to raise interest in students for the English language with the use of art,
music, posters in the classroom and other creative forms, which unfortunately I did not
have during my student days in elementary school. This question touches on an
interesting point about my memory of what constituted a public school English teacher
based on my experience as a student. During elementary school, my teacher was
limited to writing the subject on the blackboard and, at the end of each three months,
we were evaluated by a written test and nothing else.
When transcribing this memory, I remembered what the author Parker J. Palmer
(1997) says about teaching being a mirror for the soul and a good teacher being the
one able to create a community with students. In this way, even after years of
interaction with this teacher, I could not say who she was, after all, her teaching did not
reflect her soul and she did not make it possible for us to get to know her. This is the
first memory I have of what an English teacher was for me.
According to Larrosa (2002), experience is what “comes to us”1, what happens
and transforms us, and the subject of the experience is a sensitive space open to
transformation. I understand, therefore, that I can name my visit to the Doutor Eduardo
Góes Filho school as an experience, and me as the subject of the experience because,
throughout the visit, there was a shift in my conception of what constitutes an English
language teacher of a public school: before, the one who teaches without showing the
soul, now, the one who teaches with the soul.

Expectations
Cambridge's dictionary brings two entries for the noun "expectation"; the first is
"the feeling that good things are going to happen in the future" and the second, "the
feeling of expecting something to happen". When explaining the meaning of this word
for those who do not know it, there will certainly be an immediate identification
regarding that human beings are composed of expectations: we have expectations
about the present day - will it be good? Bad? Will it be hot or cold? - About the future -
graduation, work, family - about others and even about ourselves. In other words, we
constantly live waiting for something that will or will not happen. Nevertheless, what
happens when these expectations are shattered by reality? How do we handle it? Is
this what we call “frustration”?
Well, to delve a little deeper into this issue that has haunted me for a couple of
months, I need to tell you about my experience during Estágio I and Estágio II. But
first, I must reinforce that both of my mandatory internships took place during the
COVID-19 pandemic, therefore all of the possible actions that would have been
possible in a “normal” learning environment had to be readapted to fit in a completely
different reality in the education sector. To begin, during Estágio I, the students were
not having online meetings, only PET activities (Planos de Estudos Tutorados), so
there were not many alternatives available for me or the teacher to intervene. Then,
together we concluded that we would present the topic Saint Patrick’s Day with a video

1
From to experession “ce que nous arrive” in French.
recorded in a TikTok format, and after that, we would have a live Gincana with
makeup/drawing contest and the last activity would be a quiz to test their knowledge
about the topic. The students interacted a lot with us through the chat and they did not
save words to say how much they enjoyed the class.
During Estágio II, the teacher, through a personal initiative, gave thematic
classes through the Meet platform and that was the point that “frustrated” me - here, I
will call it “frustration”, but later we will go further on that. The opportunity for
observation was there, closer to the normal reality before the restrictions caused by
COVID-19, but the UFMG calendar did not match the regular school calendar. We
started Estágio II in mid-June and in the beginning of August, the school would take a
recess, not counting the weeks set aside for assessments, in which they could not take
classes online. Although the timing was the same during the two internships, this time
I was more “frustrated” at having missed the opportunity to participate more in the
teaching environment.
I believe it fits into this narrative to add another personal fact that also
contributed to my aforementioned “frustration”. Added to the fact that the academic
calendar has provided us with little intervention time, I went back to work in person in
my non-mandatory internship (and with a new schedule) at the beginning of May of
this year. Moreover, as my residence is located far from work, commuting consumes
a lot of time, to the point that I left home at 9 am and returned only at 7 pm, which left
me with limited time to attend the few classes taught by the teacher. Both events were
beyond my reach to change them, but they certainly affected my enjoyment of the
internship, especially because its goal is to prepare us for the job market.

Different Realities
Meanwhile, I was living another experience in my non-mandatory internship.
The school that I work at is listed as one of the most expensive monthly payments in
the city of Belo Horizonte and, as expected, the students have access to all equipment
necessary to stay at home and have the classes or to go to school safe enough to
protect themselves from the virus. Since the students are able to be physically in the
classroom, I get to do more for them as well, then that made me feel like I wanted to
do more for those from the public one. Furthermore, most of the kids from the private
school will not even have to worry about working until they reach their 20’s, in contrast
to those from the public school that work in the morning and cannot watch the online
classes. The realities were completely different and, as I write this autoethnography, I
can see more clearly that I was not able to separate them and rashly called the
mandatory internship frustrating.
Jeronimus and Laceulle’s definition of frustration as “a key negative emotion
that roots in disappointment (Latin frustrā or “in vain”) and can be defined as irritable
distress after a wish collided with an unyielding reality.” made me understand that this
“unyielding reality” were multiples for me. I was experiencing different realities during
the internships: one was the reality that the whole world was/is living for the reason
that COVID-19 pandemic changed how we interact socially, economically and
politically; and the other, the different contexts I was inserted to while doing two
internships in a private and a public school. Hence, it would be impossible to meet the
expectations (or “wishes”) I had about the internship at the beginning of my graduation
whereas this reality no longer exists. And the same would apply to the different
contexts in a private and public school, the divergence of resources makes them
different realities, therefore my expectations also should be different for each one of
them.

Identification\The teacher I want to become

One of the biggest problems faced by students, according to our meetings with
Rosângela, and to what we could observe in Estágio I, was the low connection with
the internet due to the area that they live, so not all of them could participate in the
online meetings that the teacher offered to do. However, since many students
appeared in our last Gincana, we decided to keep with this same strategy - live on
meets - for the Estágio II. Hence, it was decided that we were going to present a class
about July 4th with the higher goal to raise some reflections, such as the individual
concept of independence, the feeling that they have about Brazil, and finally the parallel
concerning Brazilian’s and the U.S’ patriotism.
In the course of presenting the July 4th’s class, one of the most marking events
happened when we asked what Brazil was for them. During the meetings with teacher
Rosângela, we even pointed out that we would probably hear many negative
connotations in response and, perhaps, even the “patriotism” speech given by the
current president of the republic, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, could lead them to a distorted
notion of the real meaning of love for the country, but the opposite happened. We heard
responses such as "culture", "intelligence", “typical foods” and "diversity", this event
made me question whether their answers had any direct connection with the way
teacher Rosângela structures her classes, bringing a lot of her integrity and identity
(PALMER, 1997) to the classroom.
At the end of the class, I had the pleasure to witness a special scene, teacher
Rosângela announced, in tears, to the students that after more than a decade teaching
at Escola Estadual Doutor Eduardo Góes Filho, she would have to stop teaching, for
personal matters, and would stick only to her position as vice-principal. Obviously, the
students were touched and, through the chat, they left warm messages for the teacher.
This scene touched me a lot because I like to rely on the idea that good teaching is
related to the capacity to create a community (PALMER, 1997), and such ability to
connect with students makes teaching an individual and unique experience.

Conclusion
Estágio I and II have been a necessary experience to understand several points
that I was bothered by and that I thought I understood, but in reality, it was just a
distorted image of what was actually happening. Thus, while writing this text, I realized
that I could not distinguish the different realities in which I worked and, therefore, I had
the same expectation (wishes) for different contexts, so I have been sticking on the
error of cataloguing one experience as "frustrating" and the other as sufficient,
successful.
In addition, autoethnography allowed me to understand events past the
internship and even the graduation. Through Larossa's concept, I was able to
understand myself as a subject of experience for having contact with an experience
that ended up going the opposite way of what I thought a public school teacher was,
but which also ended up displacing in me a new conception about public education.
To finish, another meaningful fostered realization for me was to be able to see
myself in the Other for all the moments that I related to Rosângela while she was
teaching. I saw myself in her as she showed traces of identity and integrity with her
students and during that identification, I could understand that I was seeing in her
teaching, the teacher I want to be.
Reference

BONDÍA, Jorge Larrosa. Notas sobre a experiência e o saber de experiência. Revista

brasileira de educação, p. 20-28, 2002.

CAMBRIDGE DICTIONARY ONLINE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Disponível em: http://dictionary.cambridge.org

HAGAN, F. (2005). Reflections on teaching mathematics in an exam-driven school: An

autoethnography. In Building connections: Theory, research and practice. Proceedings
of the 28th annual conference of the Mathematics Education Research Group of
Australasia (pp. 401-407). Sydney: MERGA.

Jeronimus, B.F., Laceulle, O.M. (2017). Frustration. Inbook: Encyclopedia of

Personality and Individual Differences, Edition: 1, Publisher: Springer, New York,
Editors: Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Todd K. Shackelford, pp.1-8. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-
28099-8_815-

PALMER, Parker J. The heart of a teacher identity and integrity in teaching. Change:
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