Life histories retold: reconceptualization of school biographies of trainee teachers

Abstract

There are teachers who leave in their students deep marks that reveal themselves in different ways and last over time. These are traces drawn by experiences that move and last, that make the student leave the class thinking and feeling; we are referring to those traces left by updated, complex and reflective teaching practice, which goes beyond the simple fact of offering data and content as they have an underlying framework that gives them meaning (Maggio, 2012). This article follows a qualitative research that adopts an interpretative approach, perceived as a process of understanding the close meanings of the actors themselves, also involving the construction of a constant reading and integrating the immediate details with the relieved theory. To explore the teachers traces in all their variety and complexity, a narrative inquiry perspective is adopted, which gives us a way to co-construct reality by addressing it from different levels. In this way, and through the analysis of field texts, narrative inquiry offers a particular reconstruction of the experience, from a reflective process that resignifies what happened or was lived seeking answers to the main questions that motivated the research: which are those teachings experiences? who have left their trace in the construction of the professional profile of the students of the English Teaching Education Program of the National University of Mar del Plata (UNMdP)?