Reconfiguraciones narrativas de experiencias de ser cuerpos docentes

Abstract

A review of the literature on the Teacher’s Body shed light on the lack of academic output in the field of education dealing with this topic, which implies that the body has almost gone unnoticed by research on issues regarding teachers (Cabra Ayala y Escobar, 2014; Martínez Álvarez y González Calvo, 2016; Sparkes, 1996, among others). We conducted a narrative research-creation process to outline a proposal that allowed us to understand the teacher’s body from the creation of short stories to tell the experiences lived by teachers: body stories. Our assumption is that to understand part of the concept of “body we are” (Rico Bovio, 1998), we need to tell a story (Bruner, 2003; Bolívar, 2002). As we live our lives in a narrative way and understand them in terms of narration (MacIntyre, 2004), we believe that the narrative approach suits the purpose of understanding the body from the stories that tell its experience. Likewise, we also acknowledge that teachers, like other subjects, are immersed in a myriad of stories coming from their professional practice which have not yet been told. From a narrative approach, these stories want to be told and are looking for a storyteller (Ricoeur, 2006). Hence, we proposed a methodology of narrative creation to identify the body landmarks for the different experiences these bodies had lived during their teacher practices, so that we could recount and regain such living experiences by building up storytelling (body stories). This creativity approach allowed participant teachers to build a corpus of 30 body stories that account for the particular experiences of being a teacher’s body within the different events that take place in their professional practices. Findings from the analytical and creative process of the narrative corpus provided both some analytical reconfigurations (8 analytical understandings on the teacher’s body) and a poetic reconfiguration (an illustrated book). These outputs not only expand, foster and strengthen what it means to be a teacher’s body, but they also increase the emerging literature on studies regarding the teacher’s body in the field of educational research. They also suggest a narrative approach for research on this.