For the last 40 years, the university as a changing context has been the focus of many studies. Bourricaud's (1971) book was probably one of the first to rethink the social role of this institution, pointing out the relevance of connecting social change and institutional transformation. Following this path, many studies (Garrison & Anderson, 2003; McIntosh, 2005; Metcalfe, 2006) have been exploring the challenges faced by higher education institutions.

Considering the consequences of change processes in higher education and its professionals, the main goal of our research was to deepen our comprehension about the impact of the economic, social, cultural, technological and labor changes experienced by the Spanish universities in the life and the professional identity of teachers and researchers.

As we were a group of university teachers and doctorate students who was planning to do narrative research (life histories) in our very own professional context, we decided to start by writing professional autobiographies about our own careers at the university. These narratives should then face some sort of internal reading, but what kind of reading? Conle’s (1996) resonance concept seemed to us an interesting and productive concept for guiding our reading and exchanging of impressions about our narratives. This paper is about our experience of exchanging resonance responses in the beginning of our research about the changes in the lives of the Spanish universities’ teachers (“The impact of social change in higher education: staff professional life and work”, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation SEJ2006-01876).

The problem that originated the notion of resonance was the connection established between narrativized experiences. Conle noticed that people spontaneously connected their experiential narratives, which led her to think about the nature of the links established in such process. Conle’s concept of resonance reunites many characteristics that we find particularly attractive. First of all, it is about a common everyday fact that happens unpredictably when we are exposed to a narrative or works of art (Conle & Sakamoto, 2002). Connecting a set of images from a narrative to another set of images from our experience happens in different contexts and Conle found a way of using such a daily life process in teachers’ formation. Secondly, the implicit and practical knowledge changes that may come from the vicarious experience of autobiographical descriptions of someone else’s experience (Conle, Li and Tan, 2002) make resonance responses very desirable in any formation context. In our case, we were about to face the construction of 24 life histories and needed to prepare ourselves for that. Thirdly, we like the way Conle understands the changes in our practical knowledge, which is not through adding information or making logically constructed connections; instead it is about losing ourselves in someone else’s narrative and bringing our own stories to it.  Finally, the emphasis Conle (2007) puts on how resonance may help building bridges between very different life experiences seemed very interesting to us because it was clear from the beginning that we would face many realities and professional life contexts different from ours.

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