Strategic Autobiographical Narrative in Penitentiary Pedagogy

Strategic Autobiographical Narrative is a pedagogical concept designating the deliberate and structured use of self-narration as a tool for learning, identity reconstruction and community engagement in contexts of social exclusion. Its strategic dimension lies in the conscious articulation of memory, language and transformative action: converting lived experience into pedagogical material capable of resignifying biographical trajectories, sustaining the openness of identity to new readings, and projecting possible futures from a critical and communal perspective. The concept operates through three synchronic registers: as temporal mediation, reopening biographical time where institutions tend to freeze it; as identity mediation, sustaining the mobility of the self against classificatory fixation; and as relational mediation, creating the conditions for the intersubjective event of recognition within a space of non-judgmental listening. Against the disciplinary institution’s tendency to fix identity under a single classificatory reading, the concept recovers the subject’s capacity to reinscribe their past within an open narrative and project a future not prefigured by their carceral present. Its operational methodology is structured around the ELCEN method—listen, read, converse, write and narrate—and deploys diverse autobiographical pathways oriented toward both the reconstruction of the subject’s identity and the community’s sensibilisation in the process of social reintegration. At its core lies a conviction safeguarded by oral tradition for millennia before anyone theorised it: to narrate is to coexist.