As part of our master program education we were invited to participate in the research programme “Schooling and subjectivities’ which started, at the University of Barcelona, in 2003. In that moment the research group had got a grant from the Spanish Research Committee to explore how young people, both those who have left their secondary education unfinished and those who have had success at school, cope with different experiences of savoir (inside and outside schools). In this study, where we are participating as novice researchers, the key notion is the students’ relationship with savoir as distinct from school failure, that normally is associated with no savoir or absence of relation with any kind of savoir. Charlot (1992:80) has defined this relation as meaningful; as a valuable relation between an individual or a group and the process and products of savoir. A relationship with savoir is a relation between a subject and the world, the self and others. It is a relation with a series of activities, and also, it is localised in time, as a space for activities (Charlot, 1992:78). Being new members of the research group we were interested in how our colleagues, in their aim to build a narrative research, started exploring their experiences of savoir through autobiographical narratives. At this point we also got the invitation to write our experiences and to be part of the team who prepare the first thematic analysis of these narratives. We paid particular attention to the relevance of mapping our trajectories and experiences with different forms of savoir as a strategy to make explicit our role as constructors of the research theoretical frame (Ibañez, 2001; Claindinin & Connelly, 2000). From that starting point, we explore in this paper our learning process in the participation of a narrative research that follows a constructionist epistemological approach. Therefor, in our presentation we specifically point out our trajectory in a research project where the researchers have defined what savoir could be from their experiences; we also face the difficulty of a fair translation of this French concept into the research practice; and try to build others, maybe wider, meanings of savoir that are not prefixed in our aim to cope with youths’ savoir experiences in the next phases of the research.

We deal with savoir bracketing preconceptions based upon our own experiences as learners and teachers. What is handed is a reflexive approach that takes into account the relationship between researchers and their informants and the constructed nature of the research (Richardson, 1990:70). The aims of writing our narratives are: to approach the notion through our experiences; interpret these narratives by a thematic analysis; understand the complexity of the savoir; and hold an accurate understanding. We have analysed the writing pieces bringing up the themes that emerge following what Van Manen (1990:87) describes as: the form of capturing the phenomenon that one is trying to understand; a theme describes an aspect of the structure of lived experienced. In this way, we have identified fundamental categories that reveal expectations, relationships and fundamental aspects about the phenomenon of savoir that we could use in the for coming collaborative work with the youths.

In order to localise the lenses we use to represent youths' relationships with savoir, it became necessary to make our process explicit. The researchers’ savoir representations has been analysed through our narratives, emerging themes and shared them with the rest of the research group. We would like to underline how this perspective encloses an important experience not only for the researchers but for all the participants. The collaborative work would turn into a shared chance for learning and research into a negotiation. Coming from this analysis we are able to present some answers to the following questions: How a thematic analysis could generate new forms of understanding our selves and the research focus? How these conceptions of a researcher could influence their understanding of students’ relationships with savoir experiences? How all these process is influencing our own narratives, as novice researchers, about what a researcher and a research should be?