This paper fits into the framework of a research project into “experience-led knowledge” in the initial stages of teacher education (EDU2011-29732-C02-01. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Spain). Its objective is to explore the meaning and ways of looking at teacher education, the necessary knowledge and capacities in the professional practice of educators who open themselves to experience, and always establish a thinking relationship with it.

In using the word experience we are referring to that which is lived through that affects us, that leaves a mark on us, that requires us to think about it (Gadamer, 1977; Jay, 2005). Experience always supposes the surprise and the mystery of the other, of what is other. Experience is always the experience of alterity (Ricoeur, 1996; Nancy, 2006; Todd, 2003).

From this point of view, experience-led knowledge is a thinking relationship with what we live through, with what happens to us (Zambrano, 2000; Skliar and Larrosa, 2009; DIÓTIMA, 1999; Contreras and Pérez de Lara, 2010), which is brought about by the surprise and the mystery of the other, of what is other. It is a knowledge that not only asks itself about the other, but also about yourself (and what to do) in relation to that other. It is also a knowledge that needs to take on our subjective dimensions, with our own stories that contribute to making us women and men who live, think and act (Connelly and Clandinin, 1988; Van Manen, 1991).

In this research we seek to bring together three dimensions of experience-led knowledge in teacher education: a) our own experience-led knowledge as educators; b) how to encourage it in our students teachers; c) how to bring the experience-led knowledge that we learn about in the study with teachers in practice to teacher education.

In this paper we want to share our experience in our studies with teachers. These studies were born out of the desire to share a thinking relationship with teachers based on what they live in their classes. In this process of sharing their experience-led knowledge, we, as teacher educators, seek to sustain a thinking relationship with our own practice as teachers. These studies are in themselves, for us as researchers, experiences of alterity that deal with teachers’ experience of alterity. But they are, in what they seek to do and in the practices that are put into play, the experiencing of a thinking “in presence” (Zamboni, 2009), bearing the other in mind. The research is not framed as an interpretation of the other (of their experience-led knowledge), but rather as a desire to know that comes out of the relationship with the other and what it generates in us: as a way to generate in us an understanding of the educational world and of the necessary knowledge that their perspective, their doing and their saying brings about in us.

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