Let us make our lives a work of art?

Abstract

This article presents an educational research as an investigative way developed together with many people. We have counted on the narrative of some female popular educators in order to share a professional development experience carried out in the city of Campinas-SP, in the period between 2003-2004. We tried to show how the teachers' education and the work developed by them in a literacy program for youngsters and adults had an impact in the life of all the people involved in the process. The importance of the experience can be seen through the narratives, which are full of the understanding of those educators about themselves and the work developed along with professors and students, all of them producers of a new and different comprehension of the lived experience. The educators' attitude manifested in their narratives, as writers, and in their life choices indicates that the emancipatory conception of knowledge production, as experienced in Popular Education allows the development of people's intelligence and creative energy. The new meaning of life as a work of art, unfinished and open, can be seen by the writings of the subjects involved in this program: educators and researchers.

knowledge production; educators development; popular education