The research Professional Knowledge in Primary Education Teachers and its Implications in Initial Teacher Training: Case Studies (EDU2011-29732-C02-01. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain. 2011-2014), seeks to locate the professional knowledge of teachers in a thinking relationship regarding what happens in their classrooms with their students and themselves.

This study is focused on the analysis of the research carried out with three teachers from different educational contexts in Catalonia: Esther, pre-school teacher in a state school; Jaume, History teacher in a secondary grant-aided school; and Marta, social educator and director in an Open Centre in Sant Adrià del Besòs (Spain). As this fact-finding process is very wide, in this presentation we put the focus on two key processes they unfold in their educational areas: reception and authority.

The research objectives that we are setting out in this study are: a) to investigate their day-to-day work as trainers, with the aim of understanding what it is that sustains their teacher practice, looking at where they act from, or find out what guides them, asking ourselves as to its meaning; b) to analyse how they deployed their professional, experience-led knowledge, focusing on reception and authority; c) to transfer this knowledge to initial university education, in which we are lecturers. 

One of the key factors that guides these teachers throughout the education process is the sense and importance they give to the concept of reception in the classroom. Certainly not reception in an exceptional, momentary or circumstantial manner (Orozco, 2009), but as a vital process, built from what is regarded as most significant by the group of children, the teachers, the educational team or the students' families. It encompasses knowledge reception as well; experiences and stories that their students bring to the classroom, how these teachers incorporate all that to the teaching-learning process and how a way to be in relationship arises, which opens up possibilities to a particular authority (Zamboni, 2009; Noddings, 2002). From this perspective, we consider that this kind of stand offers a recognition of authority towards each one of the class group members, thus facilitating a number of mediations, knowledge and ways of doing that enrich the learning and self-improvement processes (Contreras, 2010; Van Manen, 2003). Thus, we can observe that reception and authority are an educational key that constitutes a professional knowledge that brings together aspects of educational knowledge, doing and being that is complex in its makeup in relation to the terms of academic disciplinary knowledge (Clandinin, 1985). Therefore, experience-led knowledge is not a simple accumulation of practical knowledge, a know-how or just a collection of experiences lived through, but it rather refers to a way, always in movement, of questioning oneself about the meaning of what is experienced, and what the educational relationship means or implies as en encounter that takes place from a position of alterity. It is this knowledge that needs to take into account the personal dimensions, with their own histories that constitute us as subjects, and from where we live, think and act (Contreras and Pérez de Lara, 2010). A knowledge that is nourished from what is lived, and from the work on oneself, as a way of clarifying meanings and opening up aptitudes and directions in and for teacher training.

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