and Marla, to move her to action, despite that action being previously uncharacteristic of her

and her teacher life.

A related facet of practical reasoning and teacher life that we see in Annie’s

experience is deliberation. Not only did she make a moral judgement toward right action,

but she also deliberated about how best to act within the existing rules (written and

unwritten), power structures, and webs of relationships within the school. She chose to let

her students’ teacher know about her plan (and asked permission, in fact). This deliberative

process, for Annie, was complicated by the fact that helping her students felt, as she

commented, like she was “stepping out of her lane.” The deliberative process is closely

related to and is a factor in the moral action that Annie took.

Stories in teacher life

Teacher life, like life in general, is comprised of moments. These moments, some of

which are illustrated by the stories in Chapter 4, are the building blocks with which we

teachers build a teacher life. While they are discrete moments in time and seem to be

nothing more than snapshots in the photo album of a teacher’s personal and professional

experience, they are more than that. These moments, when stitched together, are teacher

life. Once again, they are both the material through which a teacher builds a life—how we

grow, learn, and develop as teachers—and also the outcome of our learning and growth.

One of the reasons that I chose narrative inquiry as the epistemological and

methodological framework for this study was that stories offer a unique and authentic means

to access the practical knowledge the teachers possess—we can bring the knowledge to light

and discuss, ponder, analyze, and begin to learn from it through the medium of story. In this

study, teachers’ stories appeared as recollections and representations of moments in their

considered in ways that are meaningful and insightful for both the storyteller and the

listener.30

In Chapter 4, we heard the stories of six teachers. Their stories were evocative, and

resonated deeply with me, as I suspect they did for many who have spent time, especially as

adults, in schools and classrooms. Having read these stories, you now know something

about teachers and teaching that you didn't know before. These teachers, through their

stories, tell us something about teacher life, about how teachers live, think, and work. The

beauty and the power of using narratives to understand a concept is that they speak directly

to us, entering into our minds as well as our hearts—even our souls (Toulmin, 2001). As we

interact with stories, we process them through our own unique filter of experiences,

emotions, and knowledge (Bateson, 1989). The stories that I included in the previous

chapter surely spark many diverse thoughts and feelings about teachers and teaching—

indeed, this is what stories do. In this dissertation, however, I have used the stories given by

the teachers as a springboard and a window into the process of growth and development

throughout the lives of teachers.

The stories that we31 tell about moments in our lives are of two types, generally.

Secret stories are stories of our practice, “lived stories [that] are essentially secret ones”

(Craig & Olson, 2002, p. 25). These stories are lived out in our classrooms and are relatively

30
The telling of stories is a very human endeavor. Many, or even most, of us communicate our truths and our
experiences to others using story. In this, teachers are no exception. This study uses this very human process to
understand the very human act of teaching.
31
The “we” in this sentence applies to both “we teachers” as well as “we human beings.” As ‘we’ have seen
above, the personal is intertwined in meaningful and intricate ways with the professional in a teacher’s life.

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secret, autonomous spaces according to Craig and Olson (2002). When these stories are told

to other teachers, they are told generally in “safe spaces that they or others have created or

found” (Craig & Olson, 2002, p. 25). The inquiry group in this study was just such a space.

This physical and metaphorical space formed an important part of the implications of this

study which will be explored in greater detail below.

When teachers move out of the classroom into more public spaces in their

professional knowledge landscapes (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995), teachers “often live and

tell cover stories, stories in which they portray themselves as experts, certain characters

whose teacher stories fit within the acceptable range of the story of school being lived in the

school” (Craig & Olson, 2002, p. 25). I would add that as we teachers create, tell, and

inhabit stories with the public at large (non-teachers), we further deploy cover stories that fit

within a publicly and socially acceptable narrative of “teacher.” These stories are often, if

we are to be honest with ourselves, very different from the secret stories that we live out in

our classrooms.

In addition to the dichotomous nature of teacher stories, Richert (2002) suggests that

teachers do not talk often enough about “the challenges that they encounter, the puzzles they

have not solved, the things they don’t know” (p. 51). She continues, adding that using a

narrative methodology raises a challenge to this silence by provoking careful examination

about the inherent uncertainty of teaching. Once again, the creation, recognition, and

intentional maintenance of spaces that can hold these conversations will prove to be an

important part of the implications of using teacher life to conceptually understand the

growth and development of teachers.

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 I would locate the stories that the teachers in this inquiry group generously and

graciously shared as somewhere between “secret stories” and “cover stories,” as there are

elements of both in each story, in varying amounts, including my own story. All of the

teachers in the inquiry group were and continue to be colleagues and friends. As a result,

there was a sort of trust, familiarity, and intimacy that was born out of both those pre-

existing relationships as well as the common professional and personal bond that we felt as

fellow educators.

There is still, however, a very human inclination, even among friends and

colleagues, and even in such an august setting as an inquiry group that is part of a doctoral

dissertation study, that inhibits us from being perfectly ourselves, from telling our secret

stories. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that while we may tell most of a secret story, my

suspicion is that something is generally held back in the telling. As is true with everyone, the

stories that we tell have elements of both secret stories and cover stories—even the stories

that we tell ourselves. Layered on top of that need is the basic fact that all stories are based

upon and colored by one’s own perception, biases, and positionality. 32

The stories that we teachers tell and the mélange of elements of secret and cover

stories that they contain can perhaps best be understood using the concept of horizons. A

horizon is a location in space and time, sometimes physical, other times emotional or

intellectual, from which certain aspects or layers of reality can be seen or apprehended.

Alcoff (2006) suggests that a horizon

32
Hence the notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony, in every situation from courts of law to second
grade classrooms.

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 is a substantive perspectival location from which the interpreter looks out at the

world, a perspective that is always present but that is open and dynamic, with a

temporal as well as physical dimension, moving into the future and into new spaces

as the subject moves.” (p. 95)

By understanding that our stories originate in and flow from a particular and unique horizon,

it is clear that the telling of a secret story (or a cover story) does not automatically imply or

assume subterfuge, dishonesty, or nefarious intentions, although it can. I would argue, with

narrative epistemology, that the ‘truth’ is in the words and in the story as meaning is co-

constructed in the real world and in real time. By sharing a story, either with others or

simply with oneself, we are telling a truth, describing and interpreting—in fact creating—

our own reality, viewed from our own unique horizon.

Commitments in teacher life

Teacher life is based upon the commitments that we teachers make. It is not the

personal characteristics that we possess, but rather the active, agentic construction of an

existence—a life. Teacher life is not, strictly speaking, about who we are, but rather what we

do. The commitments that we make, in addition to being active, are also intentional—we

choose them, seek them out, and pursue them. They reflect our values and are responsive to

our experiences.

I wish to underscore at this point that while these commitments are different from the

personal characteristics that a teacher may have, the commitments that define teacher life are

related to and built upon these characteristics. Personal characteristics can lead a teacher to a

situation and even, perhaps, cause it—or at least cause a teacher to be in a situation where a

significant moment/story can happen, as we saw with Dominic in Chapter 4. A brief return
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to practical reasoning will help illustrate this fact. Pedagogical tact and tacit knowledge each

form a part of phronesis, or, rather, contribute to and describe practical reasoning. Tact

stems from personal qualities or characteristics of an individual, such as compassion,

empathy, caring, love, and responsibility. These qualities are who teachers (or teachers-to-

be) are, intrinsically. While they can be cultivated and perhaps even learned, they often

operate on a subconscious level, in the background. They contribute to a teacher’s practical

reasoning in a manner that is analogous to the way that a given medium contributes to an

artist’s product. They do not solely determine the end result, but they are the starting point

for and are constitutive of an artistic endeavor. Much more important in the ultimate

production of a piece of art is the process by which it is made—what the artist does with the

materials that they have at hand.

While the legal/technical manner by which one becomes a teacher (e.g., earning a

college degree, completing clinical experiences, passing licensure exams) is somewhat

standardized, the “real” way in which teachers become teachers is much more nuanced,

complicated, and individual. Teachers, and the teacher life that they build, are the gathering

and merging of their experiences, beliefs, and values. A teacher life is the actualization of

these experiences—the way that we act upon them and put them into motion. This

mobilization of our lives as teachers is intertwined with and driven by our commitments—

the things that we deem important, worthy, and integral to our practice and ourselves.

Teacher life is defined by the commitments that teachers make, claim, and hold.

Importantly, these are also what emerges when we teachers tell stories. We saw in Chapter 4

that Annie’s work with her former students grew out of her commitment to equitable

practices in our schools. Similarly, Thomas’s story demonstrated his commitment to creating
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and maintaining a loving and caring environment for his students. Elizabeth recounted a

dedication to her craft and her students that is rooted in a deliberative and reflective stance.

Ralph’s dedication to learning about and becoming better at teaching stemmed from his

commitment to the profession and a desire to making his life as a teacher as meaningful and

authentic as possible.

The commitments that we teachers make and live by and with are, by nature,

practical. We do not make commitments, in this moral and ethical, personal and emotional

manner, to the technical aspects of teaching, such as lesson planning or classroom

management; although our commitments can and do manifest themselves in those areas. The

commitments that we make move us, propel us, and guide us toward the actions that we

take. The circular, auto-constitutive construct inherent in practical reasoning can be seen

here again, in that commitments provide, enable, and structure our agency as teachers, while

simultaneously being the outcome of those same agentic moves, in a phronetic feedback

loop.

Practical reasoning is, as Aristotle reminds us, based upon experience. The

commitments that we make are, as I stated above, practical in nature. The commitment that

is evident in my story (Jake) in Chapter 4 is illustrative of this experiential base. The fact

that I was drawn to our new student Abdi reflects, I think, a commitment to inclusion and

belonging, as well as an empathetic stance in my teacher life. While some of this is a

product of personal characteristics, as we saw in the discussion of Dominic’s story earlier,

this commitment is more directly connected to experiences that I have had throughout the

course of my life. I can, for example, recall being the only boy, and the only white person, at

my best friend LaToya’s birthday party in second grade. I remember going to a new school
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in sixth grade, knowing no one, and struggling to fit in. I recollect being a member of the

soccer team in college and being left off the organizational chart repeatedly, as though I did

not exist. I can still see—no, feel—these moments; they are a part of me, a part of my

history. These stories inform who I am, as a person and as a teacher. As such, they help

determine my commitments, and led me to respond to Abdi’s arrival in our classroom as I

did.

To this point, I have described teacher life as built of moments collected and shared

in stories and as being formed by and anchored in the commitments that teachers make and

live out. In the following chapter, I will expand upon this discussion, to include the

interaction between how we teachers choose to live our teacher lives and the means by

which we construct them. I will also discuss how we teachers and those in the business of

teacher development can develop more intentional ways for constructing a teacher life, for

teachers at all stages of their careers.

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 Chapter 6
Implications and Conclusion

“Powerful windows into the lives of teachers.”

W hen I was in college, in the previous century, I had a thoroughly intimidating and

incredibly intelligent political science professor. Dr. C. was famous (many would

say notorious) around campus for his oral final exams. At the end of each semester, he

would schedule a 45 minute individual exam with each student, in his office. His in-class

admonishment—the only preparatory advice that he offered—was to “bring items to talk

about for 45 minutes, young people, or I will start asking questions.” When the Political

Theory course that I took with him in the fall of my sophomore year came to a close, I

dutifully, but with much trepidation, penciled my name in a time slot on the form hanging on

a clipboard on his office door.

At the appointed time, I entered Dr. C.’s office, sat down in the proffered rocking

chair across from the manual typewriter on which he did all of his writing. Remembering

Dr. C.’s advice, I took out the stack of note cards on which I had written themes and notes

from all of the texts that we had read over the past four months. As I launched into a semi-

rehearsed and marginally coherent comparison of Plato’s Republic and Thomas Hobbes’s

Leviathan, Dr. C. interrupted me, politely but firmly. He said, “That’s fine, Jake. But what is

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the implication of your thesis? What does it mean?” After I took a deep breath and collected

my wits, I offered my thoughts.33

This final chapter is the answer to that daunting, but essential question that I

(repeatedly) answered in a rocking chair on the third floor of Old Main many years ago.

Below I discuss three broad areas of implications from this dissertation study: implications

for practice, implications for policy, and implications for research. These implications

supply the answer to my second research question, which was: What do these insights from

teachers’ lives suggest for teacher education practices? Or as Dr. C. would have phrased it,

“What does it mean?” Finally, I end the chapter with some closing thoughts on this

dissertation and the process by which I completed it.

Implications for practice

The first category of implications for this study is perhaps the most important one, or

at least the one that is closest to my professional heart—implications for practice. This is

especially true as it is the category that contains that which is most “of use” to teachers and

teacher educators. As such, it is also the longest section in this chapter. It represents the

answer to the omnipresent question of every teacher after a professional development

learning session: “So what?” The “so whats” that I describe in this section have bearing

33
In the end, Dr. C. became my undergraduate advisor and mentor, as well as a friend well beyond my college
years. When I became a college professor, I used oral final exams in all of my upper level courses.

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directly on our practice as teachers—the ways we learn about, improve, and live out our

lives as educators. Considering the impact that the concept of teacher life could have in,

with, and for teachers, there is a corresponding and important connection to the work of

teacher educators—both those who work with pre-service teachers as well as those who

work with those already in the profession.

Teacher life, like the commitments that we make within our teacher lives, is

autopoietic—we make the life by living it, and by living it, we define what teacher life is. As

the poet said, “Caminante, no hay camino/se hace camino al andar” (Traveler, there is no

path/We make the path by walking).34 Walking this path of creating a teacher life in an

intentional and meaningful way is fundamentally an act of constructing. My choice of the

word “constructing” is intentional. Like others who have described a similar process as

“composing” (most famously, perhaps, Bateson, 1989), “creating” (Hollis, 2001), or

“inventing” (Savigneau, 1993), the verb “constructing” is both active and personal.

“Constructing,” however, connotes an additional physicality and concreteness that is a part

of a teacher life, with its dual nature of embodied emotions and tangible outward actions.

Constructing a teacher life is more than composing, which intimates the arranging of pre-

existing entities into something new. Similarly, it is not creating or inventing, both of which

imply a product that is sprung from one’s own creativity or imagination wholly new and

unique. Teacher life is not a new arrangement of things or a singular formation—it is a

34
Antonio Machado, Caminante no hay camino. (Machado, 1965/1917), p. 229. (Translation mine.) Thank you
to Sen͂ora Crespo, IB Spanish, Patrick Henry High School, for giving me this poem.

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rather a new edifice, built piece by piece through a process of making meaning from

interactions and experiences in collaboration with and influenced by other people.

In the following discussion, I will consider four implications for practice of this

study that surround and support the construction of a teacher life that the stories told in

Chapter 4 helped me to identify. The first is what I term “narrative spaces.” These spaces are

physical as well as emotional and metaphorical. The second aspect of constructing a teacher

life that I will discuss concerns the importance of stories and narrative epistemology to

understanding the practical knowledge of teachers and the relationship that this

understanding has to the knowledge base of teaching. Next, I bring the power of stories and

storied teacher knowledge into the realm of teacher development by suggesting that stories

can form a key aspect of the pedagogy of teacher education. Finally, I present a new way to

consider the role and position of teacher educators that includes and foregrounds the value

and importance of narrative in the lives and development of teachers.

Narrative spaces

Clandinin and Connelly (2000) and Clandinin (2006) refer to the “three-dimensional

research space” for narrative inquiry (see Chapter 3). They delineate the three dimensions in

which inquiry takes place as a) temporal (past, present, and future), b) personal and social,

and c) place. We have seen elements of each of these dimensions in the stories that we heard

in Chapter 4. They took place in the past, the near-present, and they hinted, certainly, at the

future. They all also necessarily contained a personal element, since they were stories from

these teachers’ lives. As we have seen, the personal and the professional are interconnected

and interdependent in the lives of teachers. In this section, I turn to the last aspect of the

three-dimensional research space, that of place. Interestingly, any consideration of place in

Smith, 2007).

Not only do the stories that we teachers live in and through often involve other

people, but the meaning that we make of and from them is also socially situated in and

mediated by the spaces and the people in them. These spaces are often actual physical

locations, but due to the emotional and intensely personal nature of telling (and hearing)

stories, these physical spaces must also be emotional and intentional. With only a physical

location and no emotional connection and support, as well as the intention to tell, hear, and

learn from stories, we are left with the difference between conversations in the teacher’s

lounge at any school in the world and the conversations like those in our inquiry group.

While some of the same stories might be told, they are told in a different way, and are heard

in a different way. Recall the distinction that Craig and Olson (2002) drew between secret

and cover stories. If the space in which we tell stories is not one of intentionality, safety, and

trust, the stories that we—teachers or ‘civilians’—tell will inevitably fall more heavily into

the category of “cover stories.”

The narrative space that we established in the inquiry group was an intentional space,

one that I initially structured and the group collaboratively developed and maintained. It, and

we, supported an environment in which stories could be told and heard. Through the telling

and hearing of our stories, we learned about ourselves and our practice as teachers in ways

that had not happened in the scores of professional development sessions that we have

attended together and separately over the years. The growth and learning that occurred in

and because of the group suggests that finding and creating these spaces for teachers to tell

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their stories and hear the stories of other teachers can be an important part of facilitating

teacher development.

It is important to note that it is not necessary for these spaces to be formalized and

highly structured. They surely can be, as in the case of an inquiry group formed as part of a

doctoral dissertation (for instance) or a classroom within a teacher education program or

professional development regime. These spaces can be informal as well, such as within a

grade level or departmental team in a school or contained within a mentor-mentee

relationship. In fact, the most meaningful, authentic, and valuable professional conversations

I have had in my career as a teacher took place in a (long) carpool that I had with my good

friend and colleague Maurice.35 We commuted together an hour each way to our jobs as

teacher educators at a small college every other day for five years. The conversations that

we had and the stories that we told enabled me to reflect, process, struggle with, and

ultimately understand myself as a person and a teacher in ways and to depths that I would

never—could never—have reached on my own. The crucial element of a narrative space is

that it facilitates the learning and meaning making by serving as a medium through which

the practical knowledge that resides in teachers can be found, expressed, appreciated,

examined, accepted, and learned from.

Narrative spaces are also important to constructing a teacher life because one does

not become a teacher, nor live as a teacher, in a vacuum. Our teacher lives are a product of

our own experiences, as we have seen, but they are also socially constructed, supported, and

35
My friendship with Maurice echoes the discussion in Chapter 3 about the relationship between a narrative
researcher and their “research participants” being akin to friendship.

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developed. Our teacher lives are not built only by us, or by other people, but rather with

other people. Aristotle, in Nicomachean Ethics, and Dunne (1993) remind us that practical

reasoning is auto-constitutive. As a process, it encompasses both means and ends. The

growth and development of teachers—the construction of our teacher lives—is a similar

process. As we live our lives as teachers, we make choices and decisions, struggle with

puzzles and wrestle with moral and ethical dilemmas and try to determine and do the right

thing(s) for our students. These actions are what define teacher life, certainly, but at the

same time, they are also inherently the product of teacher life—all of the experiences,

beliefs, and even the actions in the previous sentence inform and lead to those very same

actions. Working within an intentional narrative space to share stories enables teachers to

co-construct knowledge to understand and refine these actions, and therefore construct their

teacher life.

The spaces in which we tell stories have an impact on how the practical knowledge

that we teachers possess is communicated and understood. For example, I read

Troublemakers (Shalaby, 2017), the text that we used in the inquiry group, twice. I read it

once as a graduate student, as a class assignment, when I was on sabbatical from my

elementary school teaching position. I read it again, alongside my teacher colleagues, as a

part of this research project.

When I read it as a graduate student, having fully assumed and assimilated into that

role as a result of having the year off from teaching children, my fellow students and I read

broad themes of racism, oppression, and critique of schooling as an institution into the book

and had hearty and insightful debates about the role(s) of teachers as participants in an

oppressive (especially for students of color and/or who have learning differences)
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educational system. These debates and discussions were certainly informed by my previous

experiences, thoughts, and feelings, but were heavily colored by the group in which I found

myself. I was fully immersed in the more abstract and theoretical world of graduate school,

separated from the everyday concerns of a teacher in an urban public school.

In contrast, when I read Troublemakers again with the inquiry group of teachers for

this study, the discussion proceeded very differently, for me and for the group. Since I was

no longer on sabbatical, I was back at Marie Raymond Community School, teaching young

children. Additionally, I had finished all of my coursework and credits at the university, so I

was nearly fully disconnected from graduate school life. As I discussed in Chapter 3, I chose

the book because it was narrative-based, and I hoped that it would stimulate and promote the

telling of stories in the group. I also meant it to be provocative and evocative about the

issues that it presented, and about the role of teachers within our educational system—the

selfsame read that I had as a graduate student.

Within the cozy confines of the inquiry group, however, we teachers had a quite

different take on the text. From our teacher perspective, Shalaby’s writing came across as

oppositional or even anti-teacher at times to the group (including me). Her critiques of

schools, in this setting, transformed from the social critiques of schools and schooling that

my fellow graduate students and I read to criticisms of teachers and our practices from a “I-

used-to-be-a-teacher-for-a-couple-of-years-and-now-I-know-all-about-it-but-have-forgotten-

what-it’s-really-like-in-a-classroom-professor-type,” in the words of Thomas, during our

fourth inquiry group meeting.

In truth, the content of the text was of comparatively little consequence to the inquiry

group. While it served, during most meetings, as a jumping-off point for our discussion, our
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conversation typically moved on from the text rather quickly and into stories of our own

practice and our own school. Of greater consequence for the learning, in both of the

narrative spaces in which I read Troublemakers, was the space itself—and the people,

emotions, intentions, experiences, and contexts that filled it.

Storied teacher knowledge

If narrative spaces are the contexts in which teachers’ stories can be told and heard,

what of the content of those stories—the moments that they hold? These stories contain and

convey the practical knowledge that teachers possess. They are the experiences that we have

had as well as the manner in which we learn about them. While practical knowledge, as we

saw in Chapter 2, can at times be “subtle and hardly noticeable” (van Manen, 1991, p. 136),

it looms large in the lives of teachers. It guides the technical aspects of our work. Practical

reasoning comes from experience and contains both moral and deliberative elements, all of

which focus on knowing the proper action to take at a particular moment.

Paradoxically, the stories that we teachers tell are particular and unique to us, but

contain knowledge that resonates with other teachers, showing commonalities and even

kinship among our profession. This seeming inconsistency points to the nature of teacher

knowledge. A return to the distinction that Aristotle draws between techne and phronesis is

helpful here. Technical reasoning, by its very nature, deals with general cases (Dunne,

1993). Aristotle claims that

none of the technai [technical sciences] theorize about individual cases. Medicine,

for instance, does not theorize about what will help to cure Socrates or Callias, but

only about what will help to cure any or all of a given class of patients: this alone is

subject to techne. (Aristotle, Rhetoric, quoted in Dunne, 1993, p. 259)

individual cases as a matter of course. Dunne adds that “once we descend to particular cases

of dealing with this or this, we are no longer securely within the governance of the techne,

which always remains limited to general rules” (1993, p. 259). Toulmin (2001) agrees,

asserting that “we are more certain about the rights and wrongs of particular case[s] [than]

about the general principles we appeal to in explaining them. I know that my headache was

relieved by taking an aspirin with greater confidence than I can explain why taking an

aspirin relieves those headaches” (p. 136, emphasis in original).

The task (and challenge), then, for teacher development is to move beyond teaching

and learning experiences for educators that focus exclusively or even primarily upon

technical reasoning and de-emphasize (or do not even attend to or acknowledge) practical

reasoning, while at the same time not neglecting the technical aspect of teacher

development. When one is dealing with human behavior, it can be difficult, if not

counterproductive, to strictly apply theoretical and “scientific” knowledge to a given

context.36 Indeed, Kessels and Korthhagen (1996) echo Aristotle when they assert that “with

scientific knowledge, that certitude lies in a grasp of theoretical notions or principles. In

practical prudence37, certitude arises from knowledge of particulars” (p. 19).

36
By this statement I do not mean to be dismissive of work in the human sciences generally, and education
specifically, that seeks to understand cognition or learning processes in a broad, general manner. Rather, I
mean to say that in practice, the work that we teachers do is highly contextual and situation-dependent, and a
high level of proficiency in practical reasoning is paramount for educators. Practical reasoning governs the
technical aspect of what we teachers do on a daily basis in our work with our students. If a teacher does not
have a developed and well-honed facility with practical reasoning, it is possible, and even likely, that teachers
could very well be highly skilled technically, but still not a successful educator (recall our plumber from
Chapter 2).
37
“Prudence” is a common English translation of “phronesis.”

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 What if teacher development, as a field and as a practice, were to shift its

organizational, indeed its epistemological and ontological, framework from a focus on the

technical, skill-based proficiencies upon which we have come to rely? What might it look

like for teacher development to focus upon practical reasoning and stories as the foundation

of what we know (and subsequently teach) about teaching? These questions point to yet

another: What if we considered narratives and stories as both the framework for and the

content of the knowledge base for teaching—the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings

of what we know about teachers and teaching? I will consider that topic, and its implications

for the pedagogy of teacher development, in the following section.

Stories as pedagogy

More than forty years ago, McPeck and Sanders (1974) argued that a profession has

four requirements, the first of which has bearing here. They claim that a profession can only

be labelled as such if “there exists a specialized literature which forms an intellectual basis

for practice” (p. 64) 38. While McPeck and Sanders stipulated the existence of a specialized

literature, they did not clarify or codify what might comprise this literature for any particular

profession, including education.

Into this breach steps the seminal work of Lee Shulman on the knowledge base for

teaching. In his assertion that teachers should indeed be considered professionals and that

teaching should indeed be considered a profession, Shulman recognized several things. The

38
The other three are as follows: that the group concerned provides a needed social service to the public as its
reason for being; that it provides minimum standards for competency among its members; and individuals and
the group itself enjoy a broad range of autonomy in their practice. While these are interesting to consider
within the context of education and in fact integral to its practices and its identification and identity as a
profession, only the first is germane to the discussion in this dissertation.

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first was that teachers were the unique possessors and producers of what he called

pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987). Pedagogical content knowledge is

different than knowledge held by other professions, primarily because it is something of a

“third rail”—an amalgamation of content knowledge (the “what” that we teach) and

pedagogical knowledge (the “how” we teach). This context-specific and -dependent

knowledge clearly forms part of the knowledge base for teaching.

Shulman and Wilson (2004) also argued that a vital source of legitimate knowledge

for teachers, as professionals, comes from the “wisdom of the practice itself” (pp. 232-233).

It is well worth noting here that Shulman’s assertion that the knowledge base for teaching

stems from the practice itself hearkens directly back to Aristotle’s conception of phronesis

as experiential and auto-constitutive, as well as Dunne’s (1993) depiction of practical

reasoning as circular in nature (see Chapter 2). This is to say that the knowledge base of

teaching is less a collection of things to “know,” but is the practical understandings and

wisdom that result from the “process” of becoming a teacher itself. Shulman (2004) also

insisted that stories of teachers that involved pedagogical39 action, thinking, and reasoning

are inherently highly practical. As such, they are not isolated tidbits of information collected

over the course of an education program or a career, but rather are constitutive of and

resultant from our practice as teachers. This process is simultaneously the knowledge base

itself as well as the manner in which one develops competency or fluency in teaching. A

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“Pedagogical” in the same sense that van Manen uses the term—a broad conception of meaningful
interactions between adults and young people (see footnote 7).

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