The purpose of this study was to delve into matters perceived as relevant by physical education teacher education (PETE) students’ in regard to their schooling body experiences. The context was a subject matter titled Didactics of Corporeal Expression, which was part of the PETE program at the University of Almería (Spain). The data were obtained from the students’ (self)narratives developed throughout the course. These were used for three reasons: (a) as a way of giving voice to the students (Márquez, Prados & Padua, 2012), (b) to foster their understanding of the holistic relation between corporeal expression and verbal communication, and (c) to elicit pedagogical theory from first-hand corporeal experiences. Students are asked to critically reflect on issues related to their corporeal experiences linked to their own feelings, thoughts, and actions (Poveda, 2011). In this way, their narratives became a way to recount themselves and others (Penac, 2012) while giving context and meaning to what they lived, learned, discovered, reproduced and created in the class (Bruner, 1997). As such, this type of corporeal-oral (self)narrative became a methodological tool that revealed meaningful relations and structures in terms of corporeity that transcended the traditional pedagogical approaches in PETE (Fernández- Balboa y Prados, 2012). Thus, by creating dialectic relations among the body, the experience and the learning, prospective teachers could see that “the experience and the memory of the social world are strongly structured, not only by deeply internalized and narrativized [sic] psychological conceptions, but also by the historically rooted institutions that a particular culture creates to ground and reproduce them” (Bruner, 2003, p. 68). Furthermore, this type of (self)narratives also manifested the ties between the personal experiences and the social, institutional, political, and cultural structures that characterize academic life (Rivas Flores, 2009). In this way, (self)narratives were a way of entering new realms of meaning (Braddock, 1999), including feelings that are incarnated by the learner (Keleman, 1999), particularly given the fact that, “by trying to remember something, what comes to us first is not the remembrance as such; but, rather, an affect or attitude charged with meaning followed, immediately, by a manner of relating, that is, a narrative” (Bartlett, 1932, in Márquez & Padua, 2011, p. 78). This implies a quite complex process considering that, while “the narrator lives, explains, re-explains, and re-lives his/her stories, all at once” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1995, p. 22), his/her stories are neither in the world nor reflect concrete events in and of themselves; instead, the person who tells them is who creates and reconstructs them according to his/her own experience-existence and own way of living it (Bruner, 2003).
