Narrative with teachers: possibilities for the constitution of data in educational research

Abstract

In this article, we present an overview of research that used narrative interviews with teachers in research in the educational field, aiming to understand the characteristics that narrative interviews encompass, their possibilities and how they are organized. In view of this, searches were carried out in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), limiting themselves to finding theses published in a time frame of the last ten years (2013-2022) and using the simple search operator with the compound terms written in quotation marks: “narrative interview” and “narrative”. Therefore, we found a total of 34 theses that included the corpus of our investigation. After the analysis, it was found that 32 theses conducted their interviews individually, and only one chose to conduct group interviews. In one of the theses, it was not possible to be clear about the choice of how the interviews took place, whether individual, mixed or in a group. Individual interviews allow you to get closer to the interviewee, making them feel welcomed and safe. The main results evidenced in our analysis indicate that the narrative method using individual and face-to-face interviews with a small group of teachers allows us to go beyond the transmission of information about what we want to investigate, providing the opportunity to learn about the life story and the construction of a career. teacher based on the speeches of the interviewed subjects.