Accounting for Our Accounts: Autoethnographic Approaches To Teacher Voice and Vision

ABSTRACT

The voice and perspective of teachers, the educational majority, have traditionally been obscured and silenced by the purposes of others. In contrast, Weber as an educational biographer reported on the personal practical knowledge of six teacher educators, while Trumbull as an autobiographer told the story of her own teaching development. More ethnographers are adopting postmodern literary theory by seeking to have their representations of teachers' knowledge corroborated by the teachers themselves. However, teachers need not only to have their voices listened to but also to be enabled to speak in them. Conversely, Weber and Trumbull prompt the recovery and reconstruction of the powerful voices of teacher educators who have seldom been studied. Despite clarifying second order concepts and methods of analysis, voice still defies easy categorization, even by its source. Being both embedded and embodied, teacher knowledge needs to be rendered dialogically and collaboratively. Although each teacher's interpretive register or position is partial and relative, it is capable of renewal. Autoethnographic procedures help in such critical retheorizing or transformation. Caring and attentive ethnographers can assist teachers to act as their own stage managers and to produce polyphonic accounts of practice as co-knowers.