Professional narratives as a form of institutionalised learning
This exploratory research was conducted in partnership with SVUVET's Basic Training Division. The focus is on professional narratives produced by vocational school teachers during their pedagogical training. The aim is to determine how teachers take into account their personal experiences during their pedagogical training by using narratives.
Evaluation of formal, non-formal and informal learning on the basis of personal and professional experiences (professional narratives, logbooks, portfolios, validation of prior learning dossiers) is an increasingly widespread practice in the basic and continuing training of French-speaking teachers (De Simone, Baslev & Mauroux, 2021). These practices of formalising personal and professional experiences are intended to help students to become both protagonists and critical observers of their own learning trajectories by developing first-person narratives (Vanhulle, 2009; Pineau, 2020; Breton, 2021).
Responding to this renewed interest in purposeful writing, a number of researchers have investigated the use of professional narratives for aspiring professionals (Tschopp, 2019; Bernard, Tschopp & Slowick, 2019). However, not much work has been done with vocational school teachers. This specific target group has professional expertise and their knowledge of working world is a major factor in helping learners to acquire the cultural codes of a profession.
This exploratory research was conducted in partnership with SVUVET's Basic Training Division. The focus is on professional narratives produced by vocational school teachers during their pedagogical training. The aim is to determine how teachers take in to account their personal experiences during their pedagogical training by using narratives. We focus on how teachers recall and establish correlations between the theoretical knowledge taught at SFUVET and their former professional experiences, their early exposure to teaching as well as their formal and informal practical knowledge. We are therefore mainly interested in the various resources that teachers draw on in their professional narratives, which may be skills, knowledge, know-how or attitudes, theoretical and/or practical knowledge, acquired formally and/or informally, in the recent context of their pedagogical training and/or during past experiences.
This research is based on four main steps:
- Review of literature on professional narratives
- Analysis of a dataset of around fifteen professional narratives produced by experienced teachers
- Evaluation and adjustment of the procedure: analysis of the instructions given and the conditions in which professional narratives are produced, focus groups with the various individuals involved in the process of producing professional narratives (experienced teachers, coaches, evaluators, etc.)
- Development of partnerships and networks of users of professional narrative platforms to identify new data to be collected (reflective narratives by teachers who attended other teacher education programmes besides the ones offered by SFUVET) and to explore the possibility of comparative research.