Strategic Autobiographical Narrative is a pedagogical concept designating the deliberate and structured use of self-narration as a tool for learning, identity reconstruction and community engagement in contexts of social exclusion. Its strategic dimension lies in the conscious articulation of memory, language and transformative action: converting lived experience into pedagogical material capable of resignifying biographical trajectories, sustaining the openness of identity to new readings, and projecting possible futures from a critical and communal perspective. The concept operates through three synchronic registers: as temporal mediation, reopening biographical time where institutions tend to freeze it; as identity mediation, sustaining the mobility of the self against classificatory fixation; and as relational mediation, creating the conditions for the intersubjective event of recognition within a space of non-judgmental listening. Against the disciplinary institution’s tendency to fix identity under a single classificatory reading, the concept recovers the subject’s capacity to reinscribe their past within an open narrative and project a future not prefigured by their carceral present. Its operational methodology is structured around the ELCEN method—listen, read, converse, write and narrate—and deploys diverse autobiographical pathways oriented toward both the reconstruction of the subject’s identity and the community’s sensibilisation in the process of social reintegration. At its core lies a conviction safeguarded by oral tradition for millennia before anyone theorised it: to narrate is to coexist.
Strategic Autobiographical Narrative does not designate a specific programme, but a pedagogical architecture oriented toward transforming lived experience into educational mediation, community recognition and identity reconstruction in contexts of social exclusion. This architecture, verified over more than a decade, has given rise to multiple pedagogical dispositifs: the
Palabras Prisioneras programme (2015–present), the Erasmus+ project The Chrysalis and the Butterfly (2020–2023) with partners from seven European countries, the audiovisual pathway
Sonrisas Prisioneras, the dramaturgical creation
Ficciones Sonoras, the collective literary project
Narrativas Prisioneras, and, most recently,
¡Yo No!, which extends the autobiographical strategy into preventive education for adolescents. This empirical base, documented in peer-reviewed publications and in a good practice handbook [
1], warrants encyclopaedic treatment: this is established, verified and transferable knowledge.
Education in penitentiary contexts has been studied predominantly through perspectives oriented toward vocational competencies, recidivism reduction or the management of incarceration time. A recent scoping review of over three hundred articles confirms that the field is dominated by approaches privileging quantifiable outcomes, with limited attention to formative processes, identity or the relational dimension of learning under confinement [
2]—this despite growing evidence that the prison classroom produces relational and normative effects extending well beyond post-release conduct [
3], and that educational participation reduces recidivism rates significantly [
4]. When social reintegration is conceived in terms of efficiency, the prison sentence is experienced as purgatorial time: the context generating crime rarely changes, and pedagogy is reduced to one more mechanism of the corrective apparatus.
Imprisonment produces what may be termed a narrative closure effect. Under the institution’s classificatory regime—the file, the penal category, the administered time—identity becomes fixed in a single reading. Sameness eclipses selfhood: the capacity to reinscribe one’s past within an open narrative and project a future beyond the carceral present becomes suspended, when not foreclosed. Experience ceases to be transmissible and becomes mute, fragmented, incapable of integrating into a shared horizon [
5]. It is within this context that autobiographical narration acquires its strategic dimension: not as therapy or expressive device, but as a pedagogical practice sustaining the openness of identity to reinterpretation, creating a space for self-recognition and communal recognition alike. This distinction—between spontaneous narration and narration deliberately structured within a methodological and communal framework—defines the concept this entry documents.
The entry is organised as follows:
Section 2 presents the theoretical foundations;
Section 3 describes the ELCEN method and its functions;
Section 4 maps the autobiographical pathways and the pedagogical ecosystem to which they belong;
Section 5 articulates the key conceptual dimensions; and
Section 6 and
Section 7 present scope and conclusions.
+1 credit
