Representing teachers

The article scrutinizes the currently strong movement in sponsoring teachers stories and narratives. At precisely the time the teachers voices are being enthusiastically pursued and promoted, the teachers work is being technisized and narrowed. As the movement grows to celebrate the teachers knowledge, it is becoming less and less promising as a focus of research and reflection. The teachers work intensifies, as more and more central edicts and demands impinge on the teachers world leaving the space for reflection and research progressively squeezed. Stories and narratives therefore, can form an unintended coalition with those forces which would divorce the teacher from knowledge of political and micro-political perspectives, from theory and from broader cognitive maps of influence and power. Hence new modalities using teachers stories and narratives as a starting point need to embrace wider historical and political discourses.