Educational action research should engage the voices and the perspectives of all the individuals involved in the practice. However, within the educational research, the results of research initiatives are still often reported through the voices of professional practitioners such as researchers or teachers, while those of the other participants are not heard. In particular the voices of children and young people have been muted within the traditional paradigm of the conventional research project. Students are typically tested, surveyed, observed and interviewed; rather than treated as active agents in the research process. In this paper I will present a reflexive way of producing a narrative analysis on teaching and learning which involves all the participants of the pedagogical process. The data is based on a pedagogical initiative of developing the pedagogy of health education. The aim was to develop teaching methods and learning tools that increase students’ participation in education and that support students’ ability to find their voices. Another goal was to support the sense of community between the school and students’ homes.The data included narratives of lived pedagogy by teachers, pupils, and parents. It was gathered between April 2006 and May 2007 and analysed by using narrative methods. A total of 25 pupils and 19 parents participated in the research. The theoretical contribution rests on the concept “lived pedagogy”, adapted from Max van Manen’s term “lived experience”. Like van Manen, I start by asking the key question of phenomenological-hermeneutical research: what is the nature of the phenomenon as meaningfully experienced? For me the phenomenon is the pedagogical understanding of the people in a pedagogical relationship: it begins from listening to and reflecting on the stories told by children about their experiences of education Lived pedagogy exists in the social construction and interpretation process. It is continually changing in response to the stories told by people in a certain cultural and social context. If we want to understand the pedagogy practised in education, we should pay attention to the stories told by people in pedagogical relationships. In that sense the pedagogical research should be polyphonic; it requires simultaneously different ways of telling stories about the experiences of pedagogy and pedagogical actions. Thus, I will present how lived pedagogy is researched through the narratives told by the teacher-researcher, the students, and their parents, and how the analysis and interpretation is made with reference to three voices; my voice (teacher), your voice (pupils) and their voice (parents).

The evaluation is based on a central premise of narrative research, according to which interpretation is based on the interaction between researcher and participant storytellers. My voice refers to my narrative as a teacher. It focuses on individual experiences of the narrator, the goal and intentions, but also represents the pedagogical reflection about the problems in teaching but also tells about the possibility of doing things differently. Your voice refers to the students’ voice. Your voice is about students’ experiences and reflection. These experiences are presented chronologically, and the narrative presents a temporal sequence of events. In this study, the students’ voice is manifested through the students’ dialect. Her / His voice includes the parents’ experiences of how they felt the pedagogy and teaching methods used.

The paper gives a brief methodological presentation how these narratives were analyzed and discusses about the possibilities this method gives to the pedagogical research. The paper also points out that involving students and parents more closely in educational decision-making, and listening seriously to their stories of experiences are essential first steps in developing pedagogy and teaching methods. In this particular case it turned out that involving the students and their parents in the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating education increased the sense of community between school and homes. Also project learning and participative teaching methods used were also seen to support participation and sense of community in the classroom.