Reshaping the Teacher Education Landscape: Teacher Educators' Secret Stories as Sites of Professional Knowing and Resistance

• In Event: Challenging the Status Quo Through Leadership, Policy Reform, and Teacher Education

Abstract

Connelly and Clandinin (1995; 1996) describe teachers’ work as framed by three kinds of stories: sacred, secret and cover. Sacred stories are officially sanctioned stories imposed on teachers by policy makers and theoreticians; secret stories are those that teachers actually ‘live out’ within their own private spaces; and cover stories are stories that teachers tell others in order to conform to the sacred stories of the time. Inspired by this metaphor, and in light of an increasingly standards driven environment in Australian teacher education driving particular kinds of sacred stories about teachers’ professional knowledge, this study reports a collaborative, longitudinal self-study researching the secret, sacred and cover stories of a group of Australian teacher educators.

Authors

• Amanda K. Berry, Monash University

• Rachel Forgasz, Monash University

• Robyn T. Brandenburg, Federation University Australia

• Sharon McDonough, University of Ballarat

• Amanda McGraw