voices

teacher narrative as contribution to professional conversation

For many of us, telling (and writing) stories about our practice and our professional identity constitutes a valuable form of professional conversation. Kathy Carter (1993) explains what she sees as the significance of this story telling in her research in recent years:

With increasing frequency over the past several years we, as members of a community of investigator-practitioners, have been telling stories about teaching and teacher education rather than simply reporting correlation coefficients or generating lists of findings. This trend has been upsetting to some who mourn the loss of quantitative precision and, they would argue, scientific rigour. For many of us, however, these stories capture, more than scores or mathematical formulae ever can, the richness and indeterminacy of our experiences as teachers and the complexity of our understandings of what teaching is and how others can be prepared to engage in this profession.

(The place of story in the study of teaching and teacher education,
Educational Researcher, 22.1 ,Jan.-Feb., 1993, p. 5)

The sort of story-telling to which Carter is referring here could be corridor conversations, a quick parley around a school printer, or a quick email response to a question raised in an email discussion list. All these could have a place in teacher conversations about their work. Beyond this, however, the mode of ‘story’ that perhaps best articulates the ‘richness’ or ‘indeterminacy’ or ‘complexity’ that Carter is referring to often requires the written word to do it full justice. And Carter, like many others, argue that when teachers story their lives, when they articulate a sense of their professional self in their narratives, can have a liberating and empowering effect on teachers and individuals and as a profession.



	If standards could be used to promote genuine professional development, improve knowledge of teaching practice and raise the professional standing of teachers, I welcome them. If all teachers could be involved in the kind of collaborative, productive development of literacy teaching standards we were involved in with STELLA – fantastic. Robyn Perkins 2000