Abstract:

This text is based in a study developed for a PhD these. The research was developed centrality in order to know and understand learning experiences of experienced teachers in workplace.

When we started, many studies just revealed a huge gap between theory and practice in professional development for teachers, leading to serious doubts concerning the effectiveness of their design and practice for real change of their practice and for school improvement. Simultaneously knowledge was short about the characteristics of the contexts where teacher change and how development is happening there. The idea that the work contexts are closely related with real life configurations and with lifelong learning, rather than has been traditionally called as teachers’ training or professional development, has revealed to be a very current field of study. The interest over connections between training and professional development emerged, and the same was happen with teacher’s learning and development, considering the changing times and complexity in the teachers’ daily lives, contexts and careers.

Following these goals, the narrative inquiry with teacher’s life stories allowed us to get to know and understand their formatives experiences in workplace. We build knowledge with four teachers in this work. In the echo of their voices we identified singularities and invariants in everyday workplace contexts, concluding that teachers need to open a new era in the history of their own education. It also follows that the person's stories and professional are permanent professionalization processes.

We believe that professional knowledge was never built by a lonely road, but in permanent tension and pressure dilemmatic associated with the process. At the same time, it has proved his discomfort. Teachers do not learn in isolation, separated from their peers or separated from their school as environment and historically and culturally situated condition. We brought the long series of complexity and uncertainty in their lives of teachers and schools and we dare to point out that the involvement of teachers in cooperation projects encouraged them permanently. Teachers' learning processes, and the construction of changes that make in your workplace, are part of a person's learning and development throughout life. They are active participants in the production of knowledge and agents in their own transformation and in the school organizational development.

Keywords:

Narrative Inquiry, Teacher’s Voices and Storytelling, Workplace Learning, Professional and Organizational Development.