Roots and connections. The genogram as a narrative instrument

As educators, we need narrations, personal histories, but seldom we do not manage to reconnect this necessity to our family history and consequently we seek to find histories from the outside, missing the opportunity to come in contact with ourselves. This paper focuses on the need of exploring the use of autobiographical metaphors in educational work and on the chance to restore the meaning, the direction, the rhythm of the plot that often proves to be misplaced through a family history. Therefore, the opportunity for psycho-pedagogic educators still in training to meditate on their personal experience related to the connection between their own family history and their educational choices will be analysed. In this regard we present a study conducted availing ourselves of the collaboration of the students attending the course of “Pedagogy of Family Relation” offered by the University of Naples “Federico II” in which the most prominent methodology used to mould the familiar plot has been the so called “tri-generational genogram” (Bowen, 1979) used both in psychotherapy and in the field of education (Mazzoni, Veronesi, 2007) . The genogram consists in a form of representation of a family tree able to report pieces of information concerning the members of one family and the relations among them over at least three generations highlighting them through a graphic representation aimed to give an easy global outlook over the usually complex family patterns. This “pencil-paper” instrument is conducive to the development of an individual perception of family relations, of the transformations that have been characterising it over the different phases of the life cycle as well as the ways thorough which a family has guarded its own myths and has handled different critical situations. From this perspective the contact with the situations relating to the so called tri-generational histories proves to be less difficult that it allowing, in addition, to understand the symbolic meanings that are organised over throughout a series of transgenerational conventions. Starting from a purely descriptive structure, like a map, the genogram stands as a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic instrument. Furthermore. In this piece of research we have made use of different narrative supports including texts, photographs and various evidences. The modernity of the genograms is rooted in the fact that the happenings that concern different generations are considered according to a perspective related to the present, scilicet to the meaning they can assume here and now. The work on one’s own family history is something that anyone is able to undertake and it proves to be a pivotal element for anyone who works in the educational field. The “Saying or not saying” phrases in a family should be situated within a plot: from personal life stories emerge one’s childhood and one’s personal struggles and exactly in the passage from the “saying” to the “telling”, educational facts are developed (Demetrio, 1996).