No. 18 (10): The social biography of teachers: new horizons of knowledge. January-June 2019

This thematic issue aims to enrich our view on several aspects of the field of teaching by focusing mainly on the teachers themselves. As a theoretical and methodological approach, social biography allows us to learn about the social and cultural life of a collectivity and an era through personal experiences. By studying the subjects of teaching, and especially the teachers, we seek to show their capacity of agency in the daily work of education. Describing and tracing their careers makes it possible to shed light on the ways teachers interact with the material and symbolic conditions of teaching, school communities, educational policies, pedagogical models, didactic approaches and educational materials that circulated in their working environments.

This approach to the school world seeks to disclose how, within the framework of educational policies and teaching conditions, the everyday work of teachers, students and parents can reveal specific aspects of teaching on different spatial and temporal levels.

This field of enquiry arose from the renewal that social and cultural history has undergone in its search to disentangle the complex web of relationships between structure and subjects, the collective and the individual, the prescribed and the actual. As suggested by historians like Dosse (2007) and Polgovsky (2010), social biography allows us to identify events and processes that had a defining role in the subject’s history, taking into consideration their family, training and work, a dynamic in which teachers undoubtedly express their capacity to create and recreate their teaching experiences. In this respect, in Mexico the work of Mary Kay Vaughan, Milada Bazant, María Teresa Fernández Aceves and Carlos Herrejón Peredo has stood out and opened an important debate that has offered interesting suggestions for the study of teachers’ histories.

Issue coordinators: María Guadalupe García Alcaraz y Luciano Oropeza Sandoval