Reflections upon the concept of subjectivity in a research project regarding headmasters from the clinical approach

Abstract

Reflections in the field of psychology and contemporary philosophy around the question of the subject and subjectivity have mobilized exchanges, during 2013 – 2014, within the research team of the “Program School Class”, from Research Institute of Educational Sciences [IICE], where the project we will account for here belongs. This article discusses the changes in the formulation of the research object of a project that explores the work of school principals in contexts of social vulnerability in the City of Buenos Aires, due to a series of reflections on subjectivity. It is described the process that  accounts for the transformation of the research object: from the study of the school principals´ practices to the study of the principals´ experience, following the conceptual change from the construct of subject to that one of subjectivity.
The first section summarizes the interests that led to the formulation of the research project on principals and explain the reason for the adoption of the clinical approach. In second place we refer to the first formulation of the  research object with the construct of practices. In the third section we present the reformulation of the object from the notion of experience and we analyze some features of the construct of subjectivity that the notion of experience highlights. Finally we analyze the limits and possibilities in the research on principals that the adoption of the notion of experience poses.