Voice, Archive, Practice: The Textual Construction of Professional Identity

Abstract

If educators are to include stories of teaching in the pages of professional research journals, they ought to become more aware of what happens when experience is represented in text. In this paper I argue first, that the case for teachers' stories will not be strengthened by appeals to voice metaphors; second, that since we already possess an extensive archive of stories about teachers we ought to subject them to a searching rhetoric of inquiry in order to ascertain how they have constructed plausible representations of teaching; and third, that any hope for creating a space for this literature must be deferred until current conceptions of the purposes and practices of the research journal are radically reconsidered.