Telling about subjective experience: autobiographical writing in the logbooks narrative

All human writing is influenced by our life histories. Each word we write represents an encounter, possibly a struggle, between our multiple past experience and the demands of a new context. Autobiographical writing is never some neutral activity which we just learn like a physical skill, but it implicates every fibre of the writer’s multifaceted being. This article would like to describe the autobiographical technique of the journal, the logbook, as a way of learning wherein students, more generally people, relate an experience lived to their thoughts and feeling. The logbooks, as narrative self-reports, combine an autobiographical style with a subjective investigation of feelings and a theoretical understanding. We would like to explain the first part of a research where the logbooks, as autobiographical narratives, have been adopted and adapted in the research investigation, in order to understand how was produced knowledge and transformation of meaning perspectives thanks to the experience carried out. Within the framework of the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 2005; Romano, 2014), that is a theatrical technique developed in the 60s by Augusto Boal, quickly spread throughout the world, as one of the most effective weapons for social participation, were conducted at University of Naples four workshops with the methodologies of the Theatre of the Oppressed, with graduate and undergraduate students. The data were gathered through the adoption of qualitative tools. The research methodology, in fact, involves the collection of logbooks, narrative self-reports, in which the participants in the workshops of Theatre of the Oppressed describe their subjective perception of the experience, focusing on what happened and what were the individual and group resonances. Embedding some excerpts from participants’ logbooks, we would like to show the usefulness and the trustworthiness of the logbooks as narrative autobiographical tools for exploring potential and eventual transformation in the field of adult education.