The Biographical Approach in Educational Research. A Look at their Background, Trends, and Opportunities

Abstract

The consideration of the biographical approach in social research and, particularly, in educational research is perceived as a young epistemological commitment. Although one can speak of a traditional sense of biographies that dates back to antiquity or the middle ages, as can be seen, for example, in Plutarch's Parallel Lives or hagiographic accounts, it will be the epistemological turn of the new modernity that favors the extension of the genre –until then, historical and literary– to the territory of social sciences and education. This article looks without prescriptive intentions, at this process of emergence marked by major milestones of contemporary theories of science and their inevitable impacts on the redefinition of the scientific status of the social and cultural realities, from where pedagogy has picked up an unusual diversification of the biography through methods, applications, and knowledge.