Abstract:

The main goal of this paper is to show the possibilities offered by combining oral history and life history in researching contemporary formal education and to show the importance of grounding the research in life stories of teachers in theory. Grounding the life story in theory prevents, among other things, simplification or random selection of information from teachers’ life stories, which is an issue crucial to researching the period of communism and socialist formal education.

The first results of our project called “Everyday life of basic schools in the normalization period as seen by teachers. Applying oral history to research in history of contemporary education” (Czech Science Foundation, grant no. 14-05926S) were presented at the Czech education research association conference in 2014. We focused on project methodology and our preliminary results. Our research is based on the oral history method but it is proving increasingly fruitful to combine oral history with life history, specifically researching life stories of teachers. We are drawing on Czech research as well as works by I. Goodson (2012; 2014) focusing on the teacher, their professional life and theorizing the role of narrative theory. Researching life stories or career path stories of teachers provides unique insights into personal and professional lives of teachers including the social and political context.

The method of oral history can be interpreted like specific kind of heuristic. The main “source” for the authors of report are teachers/respondents who acted at primary school in the period of normalization. Acquired data were analysed with two basic methods. The first analytic approach was based on research of life stories of teachers. Other methods of analyses were also based on open coding but they were mostly interested in themes of story-telling (content analysis). Authors used not only the method of oral history but also the traditional methods and historical sources.

The life history of the teacher presents information not only on everyday life of schools and the teaching profession but also on education during the rise of the communist dictatorship. The study also shows how some events of the “big” political history influenced the life of the teacher while others hardly did. The research leads us to believe that studying life stories of teachers holds a great potential for uncovering new information on lives and teachers in totalitarian society but also the everyday reality of the communist regime and the education of the period.