The Use of Biographical Narratives to Explore Good Teaching Practices, por Zelmira Alvarez, Mª Cristina Sarasa y Luis Porta

Zelmira Álvarez, Mª Cristina Sarasa, and Luis Porta, from the faculty at the School of Humanities in Mar del Plata State University are members of the Education and Cultural Studies Research Group (GIEEC), created in 2005. The presenters have been involved in the following research projects. “Good Teaching Practices and Teacher Education: Contributions towards a New Pedagogical Agenda” (2003-2005); “Teacher Education II: Narrative in Teaching” (2005-2007); and “Teacher Education III: memorable teachers’ professional (auto) biographies” (2008-2009).

This presentation summarizes the findings of three research projects on teacher education. The first explored “Good Teaching Practices and Teacher Education” (2003-2005). It studied good teaching in the EFL Teacher Education Program at the School of Humanities, UNMDP. It identified good practices through a semi-open questionnaire administered to a selected sample of good senior students. This presentation analyzes students’ conceptions on good teaching that obtained. The second project was called “Teacher Education II: Narrative in Teaching” (2005-2007). It continued focusing on the role of narrative in teaching and educational research. Most frequently recorded instructors were interviewed by means of a semi-flexible script emphasizing their narrative perspectives. Conceptions on good teaching, ideal curriculum and good teaching models emerged in the course of these interviews and were used to theoretically resignify private teaching experiences, generating categories involving conversation in teaching, the site of narratives, and the relevance of teachers’ intuition and beliefs. The third ongoing project “Teacher Education III: memorable teachers’ professional (auto) biographies” (2008-2009) follows biographical narrative lines. The biographies of university teachers from the five teacher Education Programs at the School of Humanities, UNMDP, are studied, selecting those instructors who have been identified as memorable teachers through a questionnaire administered to senior students. Categories analyzed centre on the meaning teachers give to their personal and professional development, the value they assign to their life itineraries, and the views they construct about their teacher education process through their “storied” accounts. The interpretation of data aims at generating categories that illuminate teachers’ professional development, which in turn contributes to the exploration of university didactics. The results will be linked to the conceptualization of new problematics and alternatives in reference to teaching in higher education.