Narrative Documentation of Pedagogical Experiences: Educational Research and Teacher Participation

This article presents and unpacks the methodological potentials of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences (Suárez, 2007) as an emerging modality of qualitative educational research that promotes teacher participation in the process of knowledge production, professional development, and action in the field of education and seeks to make the relationships between power and knowledge it intersects with and constructs more horizontal and democratic. This educator research-training-action strategy (Anderson & Kerr, 2007) arranges a series of narrative and autobiographical practices to allow participants the opportunity to tell stories about their professional practice. These interpretations of the school environment and the teaching profession are put into writing so that they are opened to inquiry, public deliberation, and change. In this way, narrative documentation is tied to a research tradition and a pedagogical movement oriented toward the democratic transformation of education and generates and sustains collaborative and networked spaces in the field of educational research and teacher training (Bueno, Catani, & Sousa, 1998; Suárez, 2015b; Suárez & Argnani, 2011). Narrative documentation is particularly interested in activating the pedagogical memory of school and “narratively deepening” the public discourse surrounding education through the production, publication, and circulation of pedagogical experiences written by educators (Contreras, 2015).

The objective of this article is to demonstrate part of what we have learned during 20 years of “methodological and political experimentation” (Martínez Boom & Peña Rodríguez, 2009) through a succession of projects and experiences working with narrative documentation together with diverse figures within the pedagogical field. As a research group and a university extension of the Department of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, we have worked with educational boards, school administrators, and ministries of education, labor, and social development at the national, provincial, and municipal levels. Additionally, we have worked with teacher unions and organizations, teacher training colleges, and other national and Latin American universities; regional and national educational networks and international teacher collectives; educational movements; and social organizations from different countries in Latin America. And we have done this at different territorial scales, with different numbers of participants, in diverse places, and at many different levels throughout the educational system as well as with a variety of organizations in the educational field. We have involved different stakeholders as participants, including teachers from all grades and modalities within the educational system, school principals and supervisors, technical and professional teams, educational directors, and in some instances ministers and secretaries of educations, educational union leaders and social activists, community educators, and literacy teachers within social and community organizations (Suárez, 2016).

Through this intense, productive, and collective experience, narrative documentation has garnered legitimacy as a research-training-action strategy for educators that is inscribed, developed, and validated within the field of education and that works to illuminate, problematize, and deepen forms of saying and doing in the world of education. Narrative documentation forms part of the expansion of “biographical space” within the territory of education and pedagogy (Arfuch, 2002; Suárez, 2014a). Its intention is, through participation, to re-elaborate public pedagogical knowledge through the knowledge of experience that educators construct when they teach and when they inhabit, work within, and name their worlds (Contreras & Pérez de Lara, 2010). Its training objectives work toward the organization of “communities of mutual attention” (Connely & Clandinin, 1995) that foster horizontal relations between participants and encourage the reciprocal transmission of “secrets of the trade” through writing, lectures, commentary, and conversation about the stories of educational experiences.

To achieve these goals, the work plan for this particular form of pedagogical documentation arranges and mobilizes a number of methodological precautions so that the participants reflect on significant moments from their experience as educators and within their professional lives. The methodology ideally facilitates reflection, tension, and debate within the pedagogical understandings that have been formed by educators’ professional and working lives and allows them to reconstruct, problematize, and transform this methodology through narrative documentation of lived experiences in schools and within communities of practice (Suárez, 2014b). In this way, as these narratives are incorporated into research-training collectives that adopt the modality of workshops, the participants become “educator narrators” of their own pedagogical experiences and engage in cooperative writing and rewriting processes, reading with their peers, and informed conversation regarding their different narratives. Through these key moments of the methodological mechanism of narrative documentation and with the coordination of other more experienced narrator teachers or university researchers, the participants carry out the narrative research and the pedagogical documentation of their own educational worlds and share in processes of self and co-training processes among their peers (Suárez, 2012).

In the course of this collective and cooperative work, teachers train themselves at the same time that they are narrating, researching, and categorizing the ways in which they give meaning and ascribe significance to their professional and work environments. When the narrator educators recount and reinscribe past events from the schools in which they work, they make explicit their experiential knowledge and rework it by searching for works and narrative plots that account for its vitality and dynamism. In this way, they transform their practical consciousness into discourse (i.e., it becomes the subject of enunciation, reception, dialogue, and interpretation), and this discourse and knowledge is thus made available for critique, evaluation, commentary, and new readings and interpretations both from the narrator educators and from other educators, researchers, and stakeholders within the field of education. In this sense, the formative practice of writing and then reading one’s narrative alone is compounded by the reflective power of the alternative readings and commentaries of the other educator narrators and researchers.

Finally, when this collective of teachers presents the stories of their pedagogical experiences, elaborated within their framework and circulated within diverse, specialized circuits of reception, they become the authors of pedagogical texts and documents, therein intervening in educational debates within the field of pedagogy. For this reason, through the theoretical-methodological combination of an research-training-action strategy, we argue that documenting one’s own experience is neither simply writing stories nor is it writing them alone.

Research-Training-Action for Educators and the Methodological Criteria for Qualitative Social Research

The theoretical and methodological criteria that inform narrative documentation of experiences are themselves specific to the field of pedagogy and to “research on educational experiences” (Contreras & Pérez de Lara, 2010): they work to organize and standardize the development of the research-training-action model for teachers in accordance with the rules of the engagement that regulate the field of situated practice and pedagogical inquiry. But, despite this specificity, the methodological precautions for pedagogical work between peers is inspired by and in dialogue with some traditions of qualitative social research that favor its deployment. Through these criteria, this strategy also involves debates within the field of educational science and educational research. These research traditions, in conversation with narrative documentation, produce ethnographies of education, autobiographical and narrative research, action-participation research, participatory teacher research, educator workshops, and, fundamentally, research workshops for teaching practices.

However, our work as narrative teachers and university researchers focusing on the narrative reconstruction of teaching practice is difficult to categorize in any strict sense as one of these forms of educational research. It takes ideas from them, but it arranges and reworks them according to their work strategies, which are, as previously emphasized, fundamentally pedagogical. From educational ethnography (Rockwell, 2009), it appropriates the imperative to document the undocumented aspects of daily life within schools and the need to give “thickness” to their textual productions. However, the stories of educators’ pedagogical experiences are not constructed as ethnographic reports; they are not “thick descriptions.” Educator narrators have other compositional rules and different end goals than anthropologists, and while their narratives can be of interest to educational anthropologists as “primary sources,” their primary destinations and imagined readers are other teachers and stakeholders in the field of pedagogy.

Autobiographical narrative (Bolívar, 2002) considers its methodological contributions in relation to the autobiographical reconstruction of the professional trajectories of educators (Bullough, 2000) and has the potential to account for lived experience—to document it and problematize it. However, the stories of experiences that educator narrators recount and rework in the documentation workshop are configured around educational (or pedagogical) experiences and are not about the professional biographies of the educators. They contain autobiographical elements, but they are not, in a strict sense, autobiographies or life histories. The stories encompass the pedagogical experiences in which the educator narrators have participated, including the educational and historical works that they live in and talk about. For this reason, they do incorporate autobiographical elements, but they do so in a way that contributes to the “pedagogical narrative” of the story.

Together the participation-action-research model and the teacher-action-research model (Anderson & Kerr, 2007) emphasize the epistemological, methodological, political, and ethical importance granted to the participatory processes of knowledge production and to the nonhierarchical conversations between academic researchers and the participants/subjects in agreeing upon the terms of the production process.

Participatory-research-action, and teachers’ research action (Anderson & Kerr, 2007), likewise pays attention to validating criteria as a strategy of knowledge production. This approach draws significantly from teaching workshops on qualitative and participant research, especially the “workshop methodology,” that is, a particular way of organizing, orienting, and managing, time, space, theoretical, and methodological resources for social research in order to facilitate participation within the framework of dialogical research approaches (Batallán, 2007). It has also developed faith in the potential of productive empathy within collaborative and participatory work between researcher-coordinators of workshops and teachers while working as researcher narrators in practice.

However, the approach differs from these workshops in several ways. Perhaps the most is that narrative documentation is not intended to involve or incorporate practicing teachers in qualitative social research on teaching practices. Rather, it invites teachers who narrate their pedagogical histories to recount their educational experiences, or to do what they usually do—tell pedagogical stories—but within certain rules of the engagement and under predetermined organizational and methodological conditions, the definition of which they are also invited to participate in. In fact, these narrator teachers are increasingly involved in the management and maintenance of the political, organizational, institutional, and pedagogical conditions that make the processes of narrative documentation possible. This is yet another difference.

The Trajectory of Narrative Documentation: Moments of Research-Training-Action for Educators

As mentioned earlier, throughout the past 20 years we have carried out many experiences of narrative documentation in the field, and each instance has been specific, unique, and conducted with different actors from the pedagogical field, within different scopes, and with the participation of different teacher-narrators. One of the methodological potentials of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences is the ability and plasticity of the mechanism to adapt to diverse contexts and locations, as well as to different political, institutional, and pedagogical circumstances that characterize and situate those contexts.

Beyond the specific way in which this modality of teacher research-training-action has been adopted in each case, it is possible to identify a successive and recursive series of “methodological moments” that facilitate a more detailed description of the trajectory of pedagogical work that narrative documentation sketches, as well as a deeper understanding of how the teacher narrators actively participate in each one of these instances. These successive and recursive moments include (a) the management of appropriate political, institutional, and pedagogical conditions for the participatory teacher research-training-action; (b) the identification and selection of experiences to document; (c) the writing and revising of different versions of narrated experience; (d) reading, commentary, and conversation about successive versions of the narratives; (e) the publication of the narratives; and (f) the circulation of the narrative documents in specialized circuits of reception. This article describes these synthetically and offers some examples that highlight the participation of the teacher narrators and other actors in the pedagogical field at each point in the process. This shows how they are involved in the processes of reworking the knowledges constructed through pedagogical experience.

The Management of Political, Institutional, and Pedagogical Conditions

This strategy of pedagogical work between peers imagines a rupture with the conventional and established modalities of teaching work, as well as a rupture in the routine flow of educational activities. It involves inventing times and spaces and establishing norms and micro-politics that guarantee opportunities for research training and collaborative work among teachers and between teachers and academic researchers that are difficult to procure. For this reason, managing and maintaining political conditions and institutional qualifications so that educators can be actively involved in the processes of narrative documentation is necessary for narrative documentation to act as an effective mechanism. The narrative documentation of experience is inscribed and developed within the pedagogical field, a field in which it is not always easy to find normative and administrative resources for pedagogical research regarding educational stakeholders and professional development between peers.

In fact, the projects that have been effectively undertaken in the field have managed to carry out their goals because each one was supported by a series of work agreements that sustained the initiative until its successful completion. When these political and institutional arrangements are not achieved, it makes it difficult to develop a process of narrative documentation. This serves to illustrate the importance of these arrangements in light of the difficulties many projects face in establishing themselves and obtaining any continuity. For example, the project of narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences in early levels developed together with the management of the level in three educational regions of Buenos Aires province could only be deepened and expanded in one of the educational regions (La Matanza), as long as agreements with the Regional Head of Education and a group of educational supervisors dedicated to teacher research-training-action could be secured. The results of this negotiation were that the regional scholastic administration included narrative documentation as a possible line of work for supervisors, managers, and teachers at all educational levels within the local educational policy plan. In the other educational regions (Pilar and San Martín), in contrast, once the province-wide project was concluded, the work was discontinued, because, among other reasons, the regional educational heads did not give the project their support, there were no institutional authorizations for the participation of teachers, and no educational stakeholders demanded it.

To sustain the conditions necessary for the production of narrative documentation, the methodological mechanism must anticipate the work from the beginning and throughout the working process in cooperation with researchers, teachers, and institutional references and educational administrators (authorities and technical teams of the ministries of education, school supervisors, school directors). This requires the definition of the specific moments of exchange in order to reach these agreements and establish the rules of engagement that enable the journey of participatory research-training-action. This includes an “invitation” to teachers to join the work and requires a clear explanation of the responsibilities the process entails, as well as the cautions, guarantees, and certifications that are institutionally available that make participation possible. The incorporation of teacher narrators into the collective and into the process of narrative documentation is necessarily voluntary, in contrast to the usual, obligatory official “calls,” and their participation must be negotiated throughout the process.

Identification and Selection of the Experiences to Document

The identification and selection of experiences to document could be considered the initial moment of the documentation process in a strict sense, although the intellectual operations that are involved with its development are also found at other moments throughout the process. The tasks that define what experiences will be documented are strategic in at least two senses. First, they involve the negotiation of expectations and research approaches, training, and pedagogical intervention from different sectors and actors. Second, these agreements on what to document impact the preliminary development of the working pedagogical relationships between peers that regulate the narrative practices and qualitative research of teachers during the whole process.

For these reasons, the selecting criteria to identify and select appropriate moments of narrative documentation can be thought of as a point of intersection between the more general objectives of pedagogical policy that champions narrative documentation and the more specific objectives that the processes pursue in the field. This effort to reconcile and make diverse interests and their languages legible is a determining factor when recruiting teachers to participate in the initiative. In the previously mentioned project aimed at documenting, through narratives of experience, the world of early education in three educational regions in the province of Buenos Aires, for example, the Provincial Office of Early Education indicated its interest in compiling accounts of pedagogical experiences with “early literacy” and “socialization within the norms of coexistence.” However, during the fieldwork, the local processes of narrative documentation carried out by the coordinators and the narrative teachers tended toward other themes in which they were interested. Although only half of the accounts collected told pedagogical stories addressing the questions preselected by the province, the other narrative documents helped to enrich the range of issues incorporated into the educational policy agenda for this educational level.

While essential first steps in the process, the tasks of narrative research associated with identification and selection are also (usually) present throughout the entire process. One reason is that the same individual and collective process of interpretation and commentary on successive versions of the stories can redirect the focus and interest of the narrator teacher to other lived experiences. In addition, once the experience being documented has been selected, it then becomes necessary to work persistently to identify different aspects of that experience (scenarios, contexts, personalities, voices) in order to configure the narrative interest of the story. Finally, the practices of narrative and autobiographical inquiry of the participant teachers reconfigure their ways of understanding, their pedagogical judgement, and the ways in which they narrate the events within the educational sphere.

Identification and selection involves a congruence of relatively complex intellectual operations. First, through workshops, a set of exercises are made available to evoke lived pedagogical experiences from teachers, as well as to reveal fingerprints and material traces of the pedagogical practices they employed. Teachers are able to search their personal memory, as well as the memories of other teachers and “key informants,” in the institutional memory of schools or organizations and thus achieve a primary reconstruction of the experience in question. Next, they are asked to recount this reconstructed experience orally to their colleagues within the group. The act of “telling their story to others” allows each participant teacher to construct a first draft of the narrative plot of the account and, at the same time, to make a first attempt at putting the reconstructed experience into objective terms. Likewise, their colleagues and the coordinator contribute to the process by questioning this first draft and inquiring into the sparse, blurry, or controversial aspects of the story.

After these first drafts, the teachers engage in a series of writing exercises, working toward a better objective account of the experience, although this is still an intermediate step. This process, where peers and the coordinator read the first drafts, facilitates a new round of reflections and exchanges that lays the foundation for the next. Likewise, these interpretations inform the subsequent comments, questions, and observations that are returned to the teacher who wrote the initial draft, initiating conversations about the outlines. Clearly, the operations of narrative and autobiographical research that the mechanism of narrative documentation deploys involve the self-reflective collaboration of the collective through a series of “data collection techniques”: field notes, open interviews, conversations with key informants, professional journals, photographs, and videos.

Writing and Rewriting Accounts of Pedagogical Experiences

The process of narrative documentation anticipates a second moment of work specifically oriented toward the writing and rewriting of different and successive versions of the teachers’ experiential accounts until arriving at a “publishable version” of the text, that is to say, until the experiential account in question aligns with the combination of criteria laid out by the peer collective for the publication of the texts produced within the workshop. In this decisive moment, the teachers carry out a series of very specific textual productions, taking the trial histories and the first texts produced during the moment of identification and selection as the primary source but also incorporating the stories, commentaries, and descriptions offered by the interviewees, other documentary records of the experience (projects and plans, records of observations, evaluation reports, professional journals, videos, photos), and, of course, the memories activated, reflected on, and recreated throughout the process of writing and rewriting.

Each revision is an occasion for teachers to deepen their inquiry into the experience through extensive conversations and interviews, archival work and the systematization of documentary materials, new analysis and interpretations of the materials that have been revealed, and reworkings of the lived situations and the actions taken. Each new account or version of the account is an opportunity to create a “clean copy” of the experience, to think about it again, interrogate it again, and name it again but with other words, meanings, and questions. This is the moment in the process in which the account is textually “fixed,” although always in a provisional manner, to the experience and in which it acquires a degree of objectivity that allows it to be reworked and questioned again and again with more distance. At the same time, this is the moment in which the teacher narrators provide the narrative plot with a pedagogical density that connects and gives meaning to the different events, actions, and contents of the experience, which until that point have been dispersed and fragmented.

Through the progressive reconfiguration of the plot, the narrator teachers incorporate their own descriptions and interpretations of the events recounted into the text, and they put them in tension with the point of view of the other participants within the experience. The account of the experience gains verisimilitude and complexity as its narrative is rewritten and revised throughout the process of documentation. Simultaneously the teachers, as they write and revise, develop a discursive awareness that they did not have before. Teacher training, pedagogical research into the educational sphere, and narrative practices are connected until they are collapsed within the same process of documentation.

The process of producing different versions of a story requires, additionally, other complementary writing practices, not necessarily narrative, that work together to increase the self-reflexive aspect of the process and generate a significant body of documentation and sources for reach revision. In addition to stories of pedagogical experiences, the moment of writing and revision includes the production of field notes, accounts of experiences of writing, cards, essays and autobiographical notes, indices, schemas, outlines, reports, and chronologies that accompany and inform the narrative production of teachers.

Almost all of the strategies that are used at this point in the process tend to convert speech and conversation into writing and, more specifically, into written accounts of experiences. They usually begin with a prompt for the teachers, to spark their writing and help them begin their first-person narration. Due to the current conditions of production of texts in the educational sphere, teachers are often encouraged to write in an uncompromised and depersonalized style. In contrast, narrative documentation depends on teachers embracing their role as both the protagonists and the narrators of their histories. For this reason, one of the first exercises that teachers are asked to engage in is writing an autobiographical account of something that they would usually communicate by speaking or conversing.

The workshop exercises are organized so that each teacher defines a “writing plan.” The exercises are intended to guide a series of decisions related to the title and the content of the account, while other, more advanced exercises work to manage the narrative details in relationship to time within the story and the position of each teacher as the narrator of his or her pedagogical experiences. At the same time, other suggested methodologies of the narrative documentation mechanism promote writing a chronology and later a report of the experience; others, more systematic and complex, propose building out an index and an outline or sketch of the experience in question.

Reading, Commentaries, and Conversation Regarding the Experiential Account

The practices of reading, commenting, and conversing about narrations of experiences that teachers carry out throughout the research-training-action process are intimately interwoven with the rhythms, dynamics, and logics of the writing practices of the subsequent versions of the texts. However, they manifest a clear methodological specificity and observe a series of specific operational guidelines. The steps involved in “pedagogical editing” include the following:

Through this series of practices, the teacher narrators inscribe their accounts within a network of readings among peers, receive comments on their texts, and offer commentary on the texts of others, with the end goal of collaborating throughout the process of pedagogical documentation and enriching their initial accounts. For this reason, the activities carried out during pedagogical editing are decisive within the processes of training and participatory research that regulates the mechanism of narrative documentation. But these tasks are strategic, not just because they contribute to an increase in the volume in publication of teachers, narratives, but also because they are intended to collaborate with and reflect on the process of narrative and autobiographical research with teacher protagonists in order to document their experiences and to help them form more subtle, informed interpretations and descriptions of the educational sphere.

This moment in the process is highly recursive and is extended over time and at the same time is committed to the collective dimensions initiated by the mechanism of narrative documentation. The activities of interested reading, the exchange of comments, and conversation between peers that is activated during the narrative’s development transform the objects of thinking, provisionally grounded through the writing and revision of the stories, into objects of group reflection, inquiry, and collective questioning and joint problematization of the narrated experiences. The solitary act of writing and revision of the stories is thus disrupted by the reading and commentary of others (peers and the coordinator of the process), and the pedagogical narrative configured by the teacher narrator in the account begins to be reconfigured in conversation with the lectures, shared deliberations, and successive revisions, therein generating mutual attention in a community of specialized pedagogical practices and discourses.

The following is a fragment of a reconstructed pedagogical narration created in a narrative documentation workshop in Rosario de la Frontera, Salta province. The passage alludes to the process of writing and revision completed by the teacher Mariela S. This version of the account was created through a teacher collective within a network of northeastern Argentine schools and was coordinated in the field by Susana C. with the advice of a university research team and university support.

Mariela accepted Susana C.’s invitation to write about a pedagogical experience, and, after a personal exchange with her, methodological orientation, several conversations with colleagues, attentive reading of the pedagogical materials on the subject, and the completion of various preliminary writing exercises, she wrote a first version of her story It was worth it!

The hall of Jesus College in Salta was full. Students, professors, teachers, and parents from all over the province settled in as best they could in the aisles and the doors . . . there were no empty seats left. At my side, Cecilia Nazán looked at me nervously, with a frozen smile, she wanted to hide, poor thing! Both of us trembling! Zulma Céliz, the other author of the project presented at the Eighth Science and Technology Fair was absent, having left for our city of Rosario, with great regret, for another job. “How did we end up here?,” I asked myself . . . The images passed rapidly through my head. My 2° year student Physics student Zulma was the one whose initial unease led us to investigate the contamination of the Rosario river, and Cecilia joined the team. We wanted to demonstrate that our river was contaminated with very dangerous bacteria. . . . Then, we got a laboratory in Salta to analyze the water, we sold raffles in order [to] pay for every cent, we were buried up to the ankle in water and mud in order to collect the samples, and we walked with our noses wrinkled in the middle of the dump, we wrote and discussed and we wrote again . . . And then came the display in the Edgar Leal school, with the stand put together with so much effort and help from relatives and friends; after the joy of “passing” to the province stage. The three exhausting trips in Salta, where the jury questioned, reviewed, evaluated, again and again. . . .

There we were: the faces of students and teachers were a mix of nerves, anxiety, and even anguish Some cried with emotion, or laughed euphorically, others cried with frustration. If I had asked them as I asked myself, if such effort was worth it? Because in those moments I thought, how much work! How many complications! Was it worth it? My answer arrived from the microphone of the presenter, who announced . . . “And the First prize in the Natural Science Category, Level H, goes to . . .” (To whoooooooooo?! Say it already!!): When the river sounds, microorganisms rise!! . . . from the Institute of Superior Education Number 6024 of Rosario de la frontera.” What? We looked at Cecelia, only half understanding, we couldn’t breathe . . . We walked down the aisle as if we were dreaming, the Minister Altubre put something in our hands, the people congratulated us as we passed, “they’re the ones from the river” said some, “they’re the ones from Rosario de la Frontera” said others . . . Yes, yes it was worth it, I thought with tears in my eyes.

In this version of the story, Mariela joined the narrative documentation workshop that Susana coordinated and in which other teacher narrators had already participated. Before reading her text, Mariela listened to readings and read preliminary versions of the written narratives of experiences written by colleagues; she listened to commentaries on those texts; and she herself thought of some suggestions, observed how the teacher narrators took notes, responded to interpretations, corroborated points of view, entered into conversations with colleagues about their texts, and recommended pedagogical reading to inform the expansion of the narratives. After this, she was encouraged by Susana to read her first draft of her narrative. She read it out loud and received several spoken comments from the coordinator and some of the teacher narrators. The observations of these teachers were primarily suggestions to provide additional information so that they could better understand the experience and to restructure it. The coordinator suggested that she expand “a little more information about the content of the experience” and suggested she better describe the “disappointment” that some colleagues felt. In response to this observation, Mariela confessed that she did not want to mention this in her text in order to “not complicate the institutional setting by raising these issues.” However, during the conversation she took field notes and exchanged points of view, made clarifications to questions, and marked her text with her own comments.

After this, some of the participating teachers took copies of Mariela’s first draft, read it, and sent her comments, questions, and suggestions for revision in writing and by marking up the original. Susana also made commentaries of this kind, as well as facilitated the textual material and described the work done by the team of researcher-coordinators who did not participate directly in the workshop. After analyzing them, this team indirectly engaged with the editing process by sending the following commentary to the local coordinator of the process:

Mariela’s story is very well told, the expressions are endearing, the descriptions are interesting. It raised several questions for us, because we desired to know much more about the experience of winning the prize than about the prize itself.

And here is the question: it would be great if she could expand on why she decided to pursue this experience, who were these teachers and students and what were their respective educational levels, the what and the why of this history. If not, the experience seems a bit obscured and trapped in the mere fact of having won the prize, without being understood. From an initial reading it seems that all of the work “was worth it” because they won a prize. But why was this experience valuable pedagogically? This is the richness of this story that is missing. Another very interesting issue appears in this story that could be workshopped: how the profession is valued. [External validation] is so necessary that at times it obscures the pedagogical results, or the one is obscured by the other. In this respect, some questions that could help revise the text: Why was is so important to win the award? Why did winning a prize make a pedagogical experience worth the work?

As we can see, the observations of the coordinating team were also oriented toward asking for more information in order to clarify the story, but it also took the next step of suggesting some individual and collective reflection regarding the role of external validation within the text, above all regarding what it has to do with the pedagogical meaning of the experience for its protagonists and the narrator and the problematization of the assumed positions. Through these commentaries, Susana continued to encourage the revision process, offering Mariela suggestions and observations about her story. Mariela was already prepared to revise her story using the feedback from her colleagues and process coordinator. She then wrote a second version of her experience:

Memories of a Professor from a Science Fair. It was worth it!

The hall of Jesus College in Salta was full. Students, professors, teachers, and parents from all over the province settled in as best they could in the aisles and the doors . . . there were no empty seats left. At my side, my student Cecilia Bazán, looked at me nervously, with a frozen smile, she wanted to hide, poor thing! Both of us trembling! Zulma Céliz, the other author of the project presented at the Eighth Science and Technology Fair was absent, having left for our city of Rosario, with great regret, for another job. “How did we end up here?” I asked myself . . . The images passed rapidly through my head. My 2° year Physics student Zulma was the one whose initial unease led us to investigate about the contamination of the Rosario river, and Cecilia joined the team.

We wanted to demonstrate that our river was contaminated with very dangerous bacteria . . . Our work would serve a social function, a service to the community; they would know why and to what extent the Rosario River was contaminated, they would know the danger connected with recreational activities in its water or using them to irrigate the orchards. For me, as a teacher, I had set a goal for myself: to bring the investigation to the school and to demonstrate that it was possible for the Instituto Tercario to be of service to the community. So, we got a laboratory in Salta to analyze the water, knocked on many doors asking for help and despite the fact that few responded to our request, we learned that in life, when you want something very much . . . you can achieve it. Not everyone turned their back on us and thanks to them we moved forward; we sold bonos contribución in order pay for every cent and were able to pay for the costs of the project, we were buried up to our ankles in water and mud in order to collect the samples, and we walked with our noses wrinkled in the middle of the dump, we wrote and discussed and we wrote again . . . And then came the display in the Edgar Leal school, with the stand put together with so much effort and help from relatives and friends; and then the joy of “passing” to the provincial stage. The three exhausting trips in Salta, where the jury questioned, reviewed, evaluated, again and again. . . .

There we were: the faces of students and teachers were a mix of nerves, anxiety, and even anguish. Some cried with emotion, or laughed euphorically, others cried with frustration. If I had asked them as I asked myself, if such effort was worth it? Because in those moments I thought, how much work! How many complications! Was it worth it? My answer arrived from the microphone of the presenter, who announced . . . “And the First prize in the Natural Science Category, Level H, goes to . . .” (To whoooooooooo?! Say it already!!): When the river sounds, microorganisms rise!! . . . from the Institute of Superior Education Number 6024 of Rosario de la frontera.” What? We looked at Cecelia, half not understanding, we couldn’t breathe . . . We walked down the aisle as if we were dreaming, the Minister Altubre put something in our hands, the people congratulated us as we passed, “they’re the ones from the river” said some, “they’re the ones from Rosario de la Frontera” said others . . . Yes, yes it was worth it, I thought with tears in my eyes. Gone were the voices of those who diminished our labor, of those who told us not to get our hopes up about receiving any recognition because in the capital there would be hundreds of more innovative projects . . . As we returned to our home, I thought on what this experience meant to my students (my little ones); on the inspiration it would bring to my colleagues who were disenchanted with this profession that at times can be so unrewarding (only at times).

All things considered, the positive elements of this experience transcended any prize. What we shared and learned as scientists and as humans enriched us as people, and enriched me as a professional; Now I know that as a pedagogical experience, research within the classroom helps our students to experience what a scientist feels when she or he is frustrated or thrilled with her/his work. I remembered why I chose to be a biology professor, and how much I love what I do: I guide the hand of “my little ones” to learn and value nature together. Yes, I know that all this about a vocation is out of style, but I understood that if I undertook so much trouble to see this project through, it was precisely because of this antiquated notion: my vocation as a teacher; and the good part, the best part of all of this is that it’s only the beginning!

In this new version, the bold text indicates changes and expansions introduced by the teacher narrator. Reviewing them synthetically, we see that first there is a new “conceptual title” that emphasizes the teacher narrator’s own participation in the experience. Next, by including entirely new paragraphs, the author expands the story and the narrator contributes more specific information about the pedagogical experience in question, which allows us to understand the point of view of the protagonists in connection with the pedagogical value of the story. This also illuminates the unequal local power dynamics that motivated their self-censure. Additionally, these added textual fragments impact the narrative structure of the account, therein modifying the value judgements articulated by the teacher narrator and transforming the account into a denser and more detailed narrative of an experience.

Based on what Susana pointed out about Mariela’s writing decisions, Mariela expanded information about the experience and multiplied her content; she censored by omission the expansion of her story; she maintained the structure of the story and the narrative events and the tone and the style of the narrative; and she modified the storyline, some of the content (themes, questions, and interpretations) of the story, and the pedagogical value of the experiences to the extent that one could say that the story is a “different” experience from the story narrated in the first version.

The collective, organized by the coordinator of the local documentation process, considered and deliberated on all of these elements, changes, and interpretations within Mariela’s writing and revision processes. Regarding the editing process, Susana developed a case study, gathered materials and diverse documents for its analysis, and presented them to the collective of teacher narrators in the workshop. One of the themes that dominated the conversation regarded the analysis of the process of inquiry and training developed through the teacher narrator, as well as the different interpretations put into play. Another topic of discussion was how the successive transformations of the text were supported by revisions that at the same time entailed individual and collective reflection between peers. As a complement to these reflexive exercises, Susana also suggested new writing practices for teacher narrators, this time in reference to the experience of researching and documenting the educational sphere itself through stories about pedagogical experiences. The results of this reflective writing was a new account of Mariela’s experience that was integrated into a new cycle of reading, commenting, and conversing within the collective. Through all of these materials and exchanges, the collective of teacher and coordinator made decisions with respect to the accessibility and relevance of the story and referred it to the coordination of the pedagogical network for publication.

Publication and Circulation of Narratives of Pedagogical Experiences

Although they correspond to a specific moment toward the end of the teacher research-training-action process, the political, methodological, and technical problems of publishing the narratives of experiences are present thought the entire process. Once the experiences that will be documented have been selected, throughout the process of writing and revision, and above all during pedagogical editing, debates and exchanges about the “criteria for publication” arise. These collective instances of decision-making almost always focus on which narratives of experience to publish and in what format. In this way, issues related to the publication and circulation of the stories of experience are updated at every step in the process and engage increasingly active participation from teachers as “editors” of their own narrative production. However, throughout the mechanism of narrative documentation, a specific moment is clearly distinguished in order to debate and collectively decide the strategies, supports, and modalities of publication. Be it through the reflective exercises, debates, and conversations fostered by pedagogical editing of narratives or through the creation of ad hoc “editorial committees,” a series of operations can be identified as a different kind of work. Toward the end of the process, the debates and the decisions about publication return to a conversation about how to use these narratives of experience to intervene in public debate, especially with regard to education.

The publication and circulation of the narrative documents represent the culmination of the process regulated by the mechanism of narrative documentation and, at the same time, result in an important political-pedagogical event. All of the mobilization and organization of time, space, and resources comes together in the act of making concrete results public. The publication of these educational histories as told by teachers constitutes a strategic instance of the process, precisely because it is the moment in which the teacher narrators become the authors of pedagogical documents, and, through them, their knowledges and experiences reach the highest possible level of objectivity.

The circulation of the narrative documents is connected to the activities of publication and the attempt to intervene in public debate, particularly with regard to the specialized debate over education, through the narratives of experience produced within collaborative pedagogical networks. In fact, the diffusion of the narratives of experience through different mediums, supports, and strategies, and in different circuits of reception, increases the political impact of the publication, making it more specific in determined environments to pedagogical deliberation and complmenting it with its struggle to legitimize itself as a valid form of knowledge. However, the strategies of intervention at different levels and with different educational actors that the circulation of narrative documents establish are of a different nature from the previous ones because they involve the mobilization of efforts, resources, and innovation within the collectives of teacher authors into other circuits of production of pedagogical discourses and practices.

For this reason, it can be described as an example of pedagogical work between different peers that, in generic terms, tend to respond reflectively, operationally, and politically to the question of what to do with the stories once they are published. Their meaning is based precisely on fostering effective and lasting revisions of the dynamics and relations of pedagogical work in schools, of the modalities of curricular and research organization in teacher training institutions, and in other environments within the field of education on which pedagogical knowledge is created, legitimized, and circulated. Ultimately, it is the ability of the collectives of teacher narrators to circulate their intellectual production that ends up validating the pedagogical work of teachers in the field of education. After all, this strategy of research-training-action is not just about better understanding the educational sphere but also about working to transform it through new discourses and modes of pedagogical thinking.

Conclusion

So what have been the contributions of politically and methodologically experimental works on narrative documentation within the educational field, especially pedagogy in teacher training and pedagogical research? What contributions have been made to the debates about qualitative research and research-training-action in education? Consider the following important issues that may generate future conversations.

The first is to collaborate in order to deepen debate within the field and tradition of critical pedagogy, primarily by working to construct an affirmative pedagogical discourse through the use of imagination and construction and proposing a model of research-training-action among teachers focused on the elaboration of narratives and experience. In this sense, we inform the epistemological, methodological, and political viability of constructing alternative pedagogical proposals in teacher training materials, pedagogical research, and curricula that complement the “horizontalization of criticism” by expanding the “horizon of possibility.” Second is the proposal of a horizontal training strategy between teachers that anticipates and projects the incorporation of teachers and teacher narrators into communities of practice and critical pedagogical discourses that work together to reconstruct the language of pedagogy. The narrative documentation of pedagogical experiences can collaborate in the confirmation and the unfolding of pedagogical networks and collectives of politically and pedagogically mobilized teacher narrators that imagine, think, say, and make in ways that envision public education differently. Finally, together with other pedagogical experiences of research-training-action, a collective construction of a pedagogical political movement has occurred in which networks and collectives of teachers are engaging in different conversations in order to research their pedagogical practices and work toward the democratization of education.