La investigación educativa, un trabajo de creación. Entrevista a Nieves Blanco

Abstract

Nieves Blanco is Professor in the Department of Didactics and School Organization of the Faculty of Education Sciences at the University of Malaga. She has a long teaching and research career that has led her to participate in more than 30 national and international research projects, whose results have been reflected in a hundred publications, including scientific articles, books and book chapters. Most of her research activity has focused on three areas: the curriculum, teacher training from the perspective of teaching knowledge and coeducation. In the interview, Professor Nieves Blanco talks about rigor, flexibility and trust, as the three fundamental pillars in research which she has learned throughout her career. Thus, for her to investigate is to investigate about oneself, which means that research is a work of creation that implies the researcher. It is a perspective that demands a disposition of understanding and not the one that tries to discover and confirm theories. Besides that, the author explains another idea about the position occupied by the researcher in the research process: “You are your first research tool”, which means that the researcher is always present, he/she is in the investigation. In short, the author brings us a vision about the research that adjectives as “educational”, that tries to take care of the meaning of what it tries to understand, that helps to enrich the professional criteria and that makes it possible to maintain a real and careful contact with the live practice of schools and different educational contexts.