Based on my pedagogical and research practices, I understand that Exploratory Practice (EP) is indeed sustainable. Searching for understandings maintains the exploratory process alive, generating new puzzles. In this presentation, based on the EP principles, I analyze some in-service teachers’ narratives that show sustainability as an EP pillar in research.
Is Exploratory Practice sustainable? This question, posed by Allwright and Hanks (2009), has inspired this presentation. Based on my pedagogical and research practices, I understand that Exploratory Practice is indeed sustainable. Searching for understandings, both as exploratory teachers and as academic researchers (for Master’s or Doctoral degrees, for example), is what maintains the exploratory process alive in us, generating new puzzles. My Master’s research was, thus, motivated by my experiences as an undergraduate participant in a scientific initiation project and in a research group. Guided by the ethical and methodological-theoretical framework of Exploratory Practice (ALLWRIGHT; HANKS, 2009; MILLER, 2012; 2013), its principles and its continuous work for understanding (MILLER et al., 2008), I (re)invited some former colleagues, currently in-service teachers, for us to seek, jointly, understandings about my puzzle ‘Why was participating in the research group so significant to me?’. I wished to enhance my/our understandings of the time that my colleagues and I had spent as participants in different research and discussion groups during our process of becoming teachers. Collaboratively, we engaged in a warm exploratory conversation (MORAES BEZERRA; NUNES, 2013), generating different posters and narratives, which helped us organize our discussion in small presentations and guided our quest for understanding. In our discussion, we realized that aspects such as Quality of Life (ALLWRIGHT, 2008; MILLER, 2010), Affect (ZEMBYLAS, 2003; 2005) and Socioconstruction of identity(ies) (MOITA LOPES, 2001; BASTOS, 2004; 2005) emerged as having been highly important aspects in our initial teacher education years and as elements to be observed and discussed in teacher preparation. These emerging themes also helped us to build intelligibility(ies) about the sustainability of Exploratory Practice as ‘work for understanding’ in academic research and in teaching (MILLER, 2013), as well as to understand that every teacher is a researcher (ALLWRIGHT, 2016).
