voices

language mediating teacher voice in narratives (i)

Anthony Petrosky (1994) provides a counter-narrative of narrative-as-a-search-for-truth. He challenges what he calls ‘essentialist’ notions of teacher knowledge as ‘a collection of discrete truths.’ Rather, he argues, ‘Knowledge is… what people produce in and with discourse in response to problems’ (p. 24)

(Petrosky, 1994, Producing and assessing knowledge: beginning to understand teachers’ knowledge through the work of four theorists, in T. Shanahan (ed.) Teachers thinking, teachers knowing: Reflections on literacy and language education, Urbana, IL, NCTE, pp. 23- 38.)

We should note that Petrosky’s perspective is not a romantic one. Teachers should not be seen as innocently using the tool of language to produce some objective notion of truth or some essentialist knowledge in their narrative. As he stresses, the discourse in and with which teachers write, is also operating to produce the voice or the knowledge or the identity of the text (or the writer of the text).

Teachers … create knowledge with language within a particular educational discourse in response to various open-ended problems they solve, and they are also created as teachers and thinkers by the language they use within that particular educational discourse.
Petrosky, 1994, p. 25.



	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