This thesis analyzes the life stories and formation of retired female teachers residing in
Tocantins. It’s an interdisciplinary study guided by Oral History, Discursive Semiotics, and
studies on women's history. The objective was to investigate the life histories of retired teachers
who worked in the northern part of Tocantins in order to record their academic and teaching
experiences, as well as retirement, as their stories contribute to the educational history of the
region. We interviewed ten retired female teachers, six of whom worked in the municipality of
Araguatins and four in Araguaína. The fact that we developed an interdisciplinary study allowed
us to understand memory in its various meanings, the transformations experienced by female
teacher subjects in relation to other subjects and objects. We adopted the semi-structured
interview as a data production instrument, using two resources: audio and video-audio.
Considering that the generative path of meaning allows us to identify the relationship between
subjects and between subjects and objects (BERTRAND, 2003, p. 286), and their
transformations implied by lived events, we related the structuring categories of the interviews
to the semiotic categories of competence, performance, and sanction, to compose the analysis
sections. For the analysis, we intertwined the life stories of the narrators, considering the
regularities and singularities present in the narratives that reveal the retired female teachers as
either the creators of their own destinies or as manipulated subjects who were led to a being-
doing aiming at a doing-being (GREIMAS; COURTÈS, 2008, p. 300). We also present the
process of competency and performance in the light of the narrative syntax that inscribes each
of the retired female teachers as subjects of "knowing-doing" and "being-doing" (GREIMAS;
COURTÉS, 2008, p. 74-77; 362-363), and the "absolute of competence", and sanction
(GREIMAS; COURTÉS, 2008, p. 426), from the perspective of the syntax of the canonical
narrative path. The analyses are permeated with meanings constructed from what we also
constitute as female teacher-researchers and which, often, we identify and/or see reflected in
what the narrators stated. To do so, we rely on studies on memory in Agostinho (2015),
Benjamin (2012), Bosi (2003), Gagnebin (2009), Portelli (2016), Ramos Jr. (2011, 2016, 2019,
2020), Ricoeur (2007), Silva (2016, 2019, 2021) and Thompson (1992); on women's history in
Anzaldúa (2000), Federici (2019, 2017), Hooks (2017) and Perrot (2019, 2020); and discursive
semiotics in Bertrand (2003), Fiorin (1996, 2015), Fontanille (2016, 2011), Greimas and
Courtés (2007), Landowski (2014, 2022), Silva (2021, 2016) and Zilberberg (2011); and Freire
(2019; 2011; 2021), which deals with the teacher as a subject of knowledge who is constituted
in relation to the world and our ethical responsibility in the exercise of our teaching task. The
narratives revealed the subjects of wanting, duty, knowledge, and action that are the retired
female teachers and how, from an engaged and humane educational practice (FREIRE, 2021),
they contributed to the formation of social subjects for 25 or more years in public schools.
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