Training for cooperation in life stories and work careers

Abstract

The article contains a reflection about knowledge from cooperation, developed in the course of life and work by members of a footwear cooperative in the Sinos River Valley, RS. The reflection is a partial result of a research project titled “Knowledge from cooperative work and cooperative work of knowledge.” The reflections on life and training experiences developed by Josso (1999, 2004), Fischer’s reflections (2003, 2004) about experience and systematization of experience and those developed by Santos (2003) on production and legitimization of knowledge are the article’s theoretical references. In the life stories of the interviewed persons, the experiences of work in agriculture, in trade union activities and in the cooperative itself have been and continue to be essential for the constitution of their knowledge from cooperation. Such knowledge has been produced in daily life, in which the observation of their own practice and of others constitutes the main learning mode. They also recognize the importance of the training activities offered by unions and a school of workers for their participation in activities of cooperative work. The methodological procedures adopted in the research project allowed workers to become aware of that training on the basis of the experiences, in the and for cooperation. They were able to do what Josso (1999, 2004) calls the transaction from experiences to training experiences.

Key words: knowledge from cooperation, work, research-training, experience, systematization.