Words of Witnesses: Toward a pluralization of the historical narrative

The return of the individual and the singular in the writing of history is one of the major changes in socio-cultural history from the 1980s onward. The biographical approach has been rehabilitated after a long period in which the macro-historical narratives and the serial history dominated. The biographical approach emerged, enlarged and transformed, as an inseparable part of the understanding of social contexts. Going back to this change of paradigm, this article focuses on two currents that opened new perspectives that could be further developed in history of education: the research of “egodocuments,” and the microhistory. As an example, I analyze a local, non-spectacular “educational case” – the institutionalization of a formative course for teacher educators in the mid eighteenth century – by examining the traces that have been left in archives. DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.15572/ENCO2014.08