The cultural formation of teachers' class consciousness: teachers in the inner city

Currently the job of teaching is being reconstructed through a technicist a nd managerial account which bleaches out the 'authentic' voice of the teach er. This paper is an attempt to recover the commitments which a particular group of teachers (urban teachers) bring to their work and explore the way their perspectives are infused with their class histories, class consciousn ess and their teaching experiences. The paper is divided into two main sections. The first part briefly examine s the contested classed position of teachers and argues that there is a nee d to distinguish between economic and subjective class identities. The seco nd part draws on a small data set of interviews conducted with seven experi enced and long-stay inner-city teachers and argues that (these) teachers do what they do because of their classed identities and subjectivities. While these sorts of teachers may always have been in a minority (Grace 1978), n evertheless they are still out there teaching in the city. Through their pe rceptions, values and sometimes their actions, they are contesting normaliz ing discourses of what it is to be a teacher.