ACCOUNTING FOR OUR ACCOUNTS - AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES TO TEACHER VOICE AND VISION

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 au tobiographer told the story of her own teaching development. More ethn ographers are adopting postmodern literary theory by seeking to have t heir representations of teacher's knowledge corroborated by the teache rs themselves. However, teachers need not only to have their voices li stened to but also to be enabled to speak in them. Conversely, Weber a nd Trumbull prompt the recovery and reconstruction of the powerful voi ces of teacher educators who have seldom been studied. Despite clarify ing second order concepts and methods of analysis, voice still defies easy categorization, even by its source. Being both embedded and embod ied, teacher knowledge needs to be rendered dialogically and collabora tively. Although each teacher's interpretive register or position is p artial and relative, it is capable of renewal. Autoethnographic proced ures 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.