Pedagogical narratives and teachers’ knowledge: movements of research-training

Abstract

This paper discusses pedagogical narratives written by teachers, as possibilities of construction, sharing, and socialization of teaching knowledge, in movements that involve research and teacher education. It takes as its theoretical and methodological contribution the (auto) biographical narrative approach, in dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Paul Ricoeur and Mikhail Bakhtin. The research was developed in the context of an extension course, as continuing education, in a partnership between university and school, in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The movements experienced in sharing with the participating teachers favored reflection by means of what was narrated, in the search for understanding of the practice itself and the conceptions that underlie it, bringing important contributions to the field of teacher training, socialized by means of lessons. One of them concerns the way we work with narrative sources when we opt for the (shared) understanding of the formative meanings which we call cointerpretation. In this process, from the teacher’s first narrative, which according to Ricoeur (2007) is already self-interpreted by the teacher, we produce, through negotiation of meanings, a second text, a metanarrative about the formative learning. Another lesson learned is that this decision presupposes an ethical and responsive posture (Bakhtin, 2012) of epistemic horizontality as we assume the radicality of making interpretative movements in a collaborative way with the co-participants.