In this work, I tell the story of a research on emerging identities in an interaction among English teachers of municipal schools in Rio de Janeiro. While talking about scenes from the French movie The Class (2008), these teachers exchange experiences and establish connections between their everyday life at schools and the fiction the film portrays. Taking identity matters into consideration, I seek both to understand the relations established between the teachers’ reality and the movie’s narrative(s) and to analyze – by problematizing – my influence as a participant researcher on the emergence, maintenance or refusal of the stories and topics proposed. Doing so, not only do I analyze the data, but I also reflect on my development as a researcher. In order to ponder about the study design and about my participation in the process, I go on a journey from Arts Based Educational Research (Telles, 1998, 2006) to Exploratory Practice (Allwright and Hanks, 2009). To cope with the interactional complexity, I make use of theoretical constructs from Interactional Sociolinguistics and of some theoretical contributions from the field of narrative studies. The data of this qualitative and interpretative research is formed by excerpts from the interaction in which commentaries and discussions about the movie scenes and/or characters take place. Regarding identity constructions, the analysis indicates that all participants try to project themselves as competent professionals who are willing to resist any difficulties that may arise in carrying out their work. In this sense, the emphasis on the mishaps perceived in the interaction is commonly associated with some type of self-praise. In the analyzed context, complaining is a way of valuing the effort, of constructing oneself as the one who, despite everything and everyone, insists on doing a good job. Starting from theoretical and methodological dilemmas encountered in the course of this work, I reflect on the construction and development of this research, which leads me to notice and explore dialogic relations between Arts Based Educational Research and Exploratory Practice – an experience that, as I reflexively try to document, contributes to my development as a researcher.