ABSTRACT
Teacher narratives are a powerful source for understanding teachers’ thinking and the way they construct professional knowledge, as they reveal how they try to make sense of educational aims, curriculum development, teaching practices, and of learning processes and outcomes. In this text, professional learning narratives are used both as a teacher development strategy and as heuristic devices for reading teacher work and addressing critical questions related to teaching and learning in public schools, within post-graduate programs in Brazil and Portugal, from 2013 to 2018. Using data from 45 teacher narratives and five semi-structured interviews to the teachers who wrote narratives, we identify conceptualizations of successful teaching, while discussing the conditions that facilitate it. The analysis highlights the benefits of narrative writing in promoting critical reflection on teacher work, but also the constraints and difficulties. These teachers’ texts arise as counter-narratives to the grand neoliberal narratives that populate teacher education and teacher work, decontextualizing them and stripping them of their historicity.
