Teacher Lore Research

Teacher lore research is a form of narrative inquiry based on rich teaching accounts written by or about the teacher involved. Through these contextualized accounts, collectors of teacher lore hold that teachers will discover their own theory through sharing their own voices as they reveal their beliefs, understandings, and knowledge. Most of the teaching stories are true; some have been fictionalized. Often, education scholars and policy makers are blind to the expertise of individual teachers, making sweeping decisions with little attention given to those teachers and students most directly affected by mandates. Within the field of curriculum studies, which seeks to reveal and analyze the complexities of curricular decision making, teacher lore research provides a way for the voices of practitioners themselves those who engage in teaching day to dayto be part of the ongoing professional conversation regarding what it means to teach and what it means to be well educated.

Teacher lore is a practical form of writing reflectively about critical incidents in the teaching and learning of individual teachers. Editors of teacher lore volumes, including William Schubert and William Ayers, Gretchen Schwarz and Joye Alberts, and Carol Witherell and Nel Noddings, hold that teachers think deeply about the myriad of classroom decisions they make. Though not theoretical in the traditional sense of relying on professional literature as the basis for decision making, teachers form theory through examining the experiences of themselves and other teachers.

Most curriculum writers who collect teacher lore find authenticity in teachers' own stories, though Schwarz and Alberts extend the general concept to include fictional accounts from novels and films. All edited volumes of teacher lore posit a belief that teachers' stories, richly told, are an appropriate basis for grassroots reform of education.

Situated within the reconceptualization of the curriculum field, teacher lore research gives voice to teachers. Part of the negative reaction to increasing demands to quantify educational goals and outcomes following publication of A Nation at Risk, the teacher lore movement respects the voices of practitioners and seeks to honor their experiences, blurring the commonly touted dichotomy between theory and practice. Also in response to academics criticizing the apparent lack of theoretical foundation for individual teachers' decision-making processes, teacher lore researchers see their work as a way to respect teacher voices and recognize that building teaching theory is personal rather than academic, practical rather than distant. [Page 864]Multiple voices of teachers, across time, geographic distance, PreK16 teaching level, and content area, are valued.

As long as there have been teachers there have been teaching stories, but teacher lore as an accepted narrative research method came from a combination of the rise of teacher research as a form of systematic inquiry and Donald Schön's advocacy of reflective practice, calling for teachers to write about teaching decisions and events as a basis for deliberative reflection. As a separate research method, teacher lore became popular during the late 1980s continuing through the 1990s.

Teacher lore research is also connected directly to Elliot Eisner's notion of educational connoisseurship, in which teachers analyze decision making from an aesthetic viewpoint, rather than a meansends or technicalrational viewpoint. Also related to teacher lore research is the use of case studies as vehicles for preservice and inservice teachers to examine practice. However, there is a clear distinction between teacher lore and case study, with the former including richly contextualized detail and the latter eschewing context as much as possible. One purpose of teacher lore is to provide thickly described context as a means to increasing the reader's understanding of a particular event, whereas a case study depersonalizes a described event to make it apply to as wide an audience of teachers as possible.

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