Let’s begin with ourselves: attempting resonance responses in the exchange of researchers’ professional autobiographies

Abstract

The economic, social, cultural, technological and labour changes experienced by Spanish universities in the last 40 years have had their impact on the professional lives of the university teachers. Our methodological decision to study, through the construction of life histories, how scholars cope with social and institutional changes in their professional lives led us to start by writing our professional autobiographies which were followed by a resonance practice in which each of us wrote a response to a partner’s autobiography. Results show that our responses appeared to have three different functions: give some feedback to our partners, tell our group our position about our partner’s autobiography and make sense of it for us. It became clear that writing about our resonance responses is a difficult task for academics like us and that our texts were bound by the position each one occupied in the research group and at the university. Our experience lets us rethink the interweaving of reflexivity, personal practical knowledge and resonance. The tension between our academic rationality and our efforts to give spontaneous resonance responses shows that even with narrative researchers, changing one’s personal practical knowledge may conflict with a rationalist point of view.

Keywords:

• resonance
• professional autobiography
• personal practical knowledge
• higher education

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia [grant number SEJ2006-01876].

Notes

1. By spontaneous thinking, we are referring to the spontaneous remembrance of personal stories but also to a way of thinking in which one accepts that not everything one does or thinks is or must be under his or her rational control.

2. All names have been changed.

3. If we had written resonance responses to other researchers’ autobiographies.