Uncovering Cover Stories: Tensions and Entailments in the Development of Teacher Knowledge

Abstract

Building on the research of Crites in theology and Clandinin and Connelly in education, the authors map out three variations of cover stories lived and told by pre-service and in-service teachers in order to clarify their scholarship and inform the research of others. We examine how these narratives are formed around canonical stories that teachers publicly claim to know (or show) and actually do know (but not as favored interpretations), and personally authorized stories that teachers publicly claim not to know (or show) but that they personally do know (as favored interpretations). We illustrate how this necessarily deceptive double storying may give rise to miseducative situations. We then offer our conceptualizations of knowledge communities and teachers’ narrative authority as ways to create spaces for all stories to be reflectively heard and examined, and to address inherent challenges that arise when narrative knowledge goes unacknowledged because of pervasive sacred stories embedded in institutional prescriptions, stories of school, and competing philosophical positions.