This research, already underway and part of the project: Professional Knowledge in Primary Education Teachers and its Implications in Initial Teacher Training: Case Studies (EDU2011-29732-C02-01. Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Spain), seeks to locate the thinking relationship created between the educational practice of men and women primary school teachers, their pupils, and us as researchers. This study proposes to take the following into consideration: inquiry into experience-led knowledge and the teacher’s reflection upon pedagogical knowledge; the accompanying of students of pre-school, primary and secondary level in the development of their educational doing; and the development of a process of self-exploration of what happens to us as lecturers and researchers in university classrooms.

Likewise, we focus on connecting stories, on shared experiences with four teachers (two women pre-school teachers, one male primary school teacher and one male secondary school teacher) and on rethinking how these experiences and conversations with the teachers allows us the possibility of transferring them to the first stages of teacher training. As well, these same stories are interrelated with and enriched by the voices of other educators who form part of the initial project.

The research objectives that we are setting out in this first phase of the exploration are: (a) to investigate into our day-to-day work as trainers, with the aim of understanding what it is that sustains our teacher practice; (b) to look at where we act from, or find out what guides us, asking ourselves as to its meaning; (c) to analyse what we have observed and experienced on studying the educational relationship, the practices that sustain it, the tensions we have and the uncertainties that these cause us; (d) to understand what educational experience-led knowledge implies in order to be able to incorporate it as disciplinary knowledge into teacher training.

From our epistemological positioning, experience-led knowledge does not suppose discovering and/or describing the qualities or characteristics in themselves of academic theoretical knowledge. This professional knowledge brings together aspects of educational knowledge, doing and being that is complex in its makeup in relation to the terms of academic disciplinary knowledge (Clandinin, 1985). Because of this, experience-led knowledge is not a simple accumulation of practical knowledge, a know-how or just a collection of experiences lived through (Skliar and Larrosa, 2009), but rather goes beyond that accumulative meaning of some practices. It refers to a way, always in movement, of questioning oneself about the meaning of what is experienced, and what the educational relationship means or implies as en encounter that takes place from a position of alterity. It is this knowledge that needs to take into account the personal dimensions, with our own histories that go to constitute us as subjects, and from where we live, think and act (Contreras and Pérez de Lara, 2010). A knowledge that is nourished from what is lived, and from the work on oneself, as a way of clarifying meanings and opening up aptitudes and directions in and for teacher training.

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