An Experience with Rural Teachers: Triangulating Evaluation. A Reflection on Teachers’ Reflections in the Training Process

Abstract

In this work, we recover the voices of teachers, principals, and supervisors of the Departments of Iruya and Santa Victoria (province of Salta, Argentina), collected through an evaluation instrument foreseen within the framework of an experience of continuing training among the teachers of rural schools of the mentioned area and the participants of Workshop IV of the Teacher Training Program in Educational Sciences of the UNSa., formalized in a participatory research and development project that extended from 1993 to 1996.

Putting into practice the triangulation of the evaluation of the teachers arises as a demand of the project itself, with the objective of contributing to the reflection on the teachers’ reflections in the formative process.

The methodological option was “to read the voices of the teachers as a transactional act” (Dubois, 1985), in which the reflections-evaluations of the teachers establish a dialectical relationship with our own reflection-evaluation of the successive approaches to the definition of teaching practice in rural schools.

To recover the voices of the teachers: “what” they say and “how” they say it, without neglecting “when” and “from where”; this allowed us to refer them to coordinates of time (historical process) and space (performance contexts), finding movements and permanent restructurings in the identity of the participants that converge in an approach from the I to the we.

We identify four key moments that account for the dialectical development of the history of the group and of the group processes generated within it.

a) Of personal-professional crisis.
b) Of reconceptualization of the self and of practice.
c) Of consolidation of the I in the group.
d) Of crisis arising from conflicts generated by personal and professional growth.

At the end of the training process, the rural teachers begin to register in their experience the construction of new “viewpoints” from which to contemplate what happens in their daily practices: “construction of meta-points of view” (Morin, 1995), from where the observation of the outside (the course of events) continually interacts with the inside (self-observation and self-criticism) for the conceptualization of the “reality” of teaching practice in rural schools, revealed as “a space of social and cultural exchange among the teachers of a certain work area” (teacher of Iruya, July 1996).