Methodological reflection on a teaching and research case with qualitative methods: the backstage of the research process and its archive as key concepts

Drawing from the analysis of three experiences between teaching and research with postgraduate students in Social Sciences, at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), this article argues that both training in qualitative methods and methodological reflection on their possibilities of application and innovation, can benefit from the concepts of backstage (Wainerman and Sautu 1997; Castillo, Valles and Wainerman 2009) and archive (Corti 2011). First we trace a conceptual line of teaching while doing research with roots in the Americas and Europe. Main attention is paid to concrete ways of combining different methods practiced with three promotions of postgraduate students with diverse curricular, academic and labor origins. Methodological reflection and lessons learned from the three ways of teaching and research practice are extracted. Among the practices with each promotion, around common projects of investigation, exercises of biographical writing and ethnographic diary were shuffled, also qualitative interviews and discussion groups. Forms of theorizing and doing qualitative fieldwork with the key concepts of archive and backstage are focused on both the researcher and on what is investigated, from coordinates of sociological methodology open to other social sciences.