Teaching and research are an academic's two main responsibilities. The performance of these two roles (teacher and researcher) can be clearly separated or noticeably interwoven in a continuous reflective process that shares and interchanges positionalities and references. Research projects, in the context of the quality research group ESBRINA -contemporary subjectivities and learning environments (2009SGR 0503) -are usually started by making explicit the group's personal viewpoints regarding the topic they are scrutinising. As a result, different autobiographical accounts have been developed which provide complex and in-depth explanations of the process of constructing the research topics and relationships that are delved into. This article starts by offering a context for the research group's epistemological frame and argues for the need to conduct autobiographical accounts as a research strategy. This approach is illustrated by looking into the narratives recently written for two research, development and innovation projects. The first one was aimed at understanding how novice teachers are learning to become teachers under post-Fordist working conditions, and the second endeavoured to explore how teenagers are learning from multiple literacies inside and outside of school. The article concludes by pointing out the European dimension of the research and the lessons learnt regarding the dilemmas on writing autobiographical accounts as part of a research process.
The Reflective Frame of a Research GroupA few years ago, when starting a new research project aimed at exploring how university teachers cope with social, academic, technological and biographical change over time, we decided that, being academics ourselves, we could not investigate the experiences of others without putting our own experiences under scrutiny (Hernández & Rifà, 2010;Hernández et al, 2010). Under the effects of this epiphany, as an act of epistemological, methodological and political coherence, we decided to start this study by writing our professional autoethnographies (Sparkes, 2002). We chose this methodological approach since we considered autoethnography as one person's life experiences placed in a broader cultural and social context, in this case related to change in higher education. As a consequence, and as Brockmeier points out (2000), adopting an autoethnographic perspective means interpreting and reconstructing significant experiences, and placing them in relation to the social and cultural discourses of our time. In this vein, we consider that 'autoethnography is research, writing, story and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political' (Ellis, 2004, p. xix). And that, as Ellis and Bochner (2000, p. 733) argue, this research approach constitutes 'an autobiographical genre of writing and research that plays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural'.What led us to consider this epistemological position was consistent with our situation at the universit...