Accounts of teacher training experiences

Abstract

The present work (as part of the research project PROICO 4-1214) addresses training processes as narrated by normal-school teachers and their possible connections to their life paths.

Our starting point is the understanding that a teacher training proposal involves the subject as a whole, together with his own history, bringing together an institutional device and a subject’s education history, family history, and their conceptions and representations built in interaction with social contexts.

“Through narrative we construct and, to a certain extent, reconstruct our past and our future. Memory and imagination are blended in this process” (Bruner, 2003, 130). Thus, the narrations offered by teachers allowed us to reconstruct the formation processes from their own experiences, feelings, perceptions and opinions. That is to say, the narrations do not constitute the events per se, but a reconstruction of what is selectively recollected, conditioned by what is culturally acceptable, around what “must and must not be and do” (Fernández & Ramírez, 2008, 2).

To achieve this purpose, we worked with in-depth interviews, since they provide specific information narrated in the first person.