This research is part of a larger projecton the academic staff thinking. In this study, the authors examine the teaching conceptions, visions and inner culture of a cohort of teaching assistants, members of diverse faculties of Alicante’s University.

The cohort studied is inclusive of sixty participants, thirty female teachers and thirty male teachers from different faculties. The theoretical framework is focus on the perspectives, tendencies and methodological problematic of the teachers’ thinking theories considering, also, the new hypothesis about the social mind and brain (Dunbar & Schultz, 2007; Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2006). This hypothesis can open a light in our knowledge of the emotional dimension in teaching and learning.  

In this moment, with a new teaching model, the new role of the universities in the deep and complex social transformations context, mainly given the current blur of equity and solidarity values (Sennett, 2006; Silverstone, 2007; Zizek, 2006). Promote the teacher thinking is indispensable for the professional identity constitution if we want overcome the fall of the intellectual compromise and the emotional disaffection between the teachers’ community (Altbach, 2003; Burge, 2007) This paper is situated in the framework of a wider research and the aims are sanitized en three questions:

1) What are the main difficulties or problems that new lecturers face in their professional teaching activities?

2) What tensions do you perceive in relations with others (students and colleagues) within the framework of your professional development?

3) What do they see to be lacking and necessary in their training as university lecturers?

Research based on the voices of those participating has been called a narrative research path by Clandinin and Connelly (2000). This methodology is based on the interpretation of personal accounts and metaphors of professional knowledge interwoven in the diversity of life histories, and the extraction of knowledge from the social and professional context. In addition, the analysis of biographical discourse about a person’s career is, for Bordieu (2003), the base for observing social structure, especially the relationship.

In the methodological election, we consider that the consensus in current debate agree that quantitative evidences (Slavin, 2008) as qualitative approaches (Day, Sammons & Gu, 2008; Green & Skukauskaité, 2008) are valuable evidences (Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005). In this case, the qualitative methodology offers a way to interpret the answers in their own social knowledge framework.

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