ABSTRACT
Language is both extraordinarily powerful in its capacity to give us new ways to see the world and equally powerful in its capacity to hold in place the very things we are trying to interrupt (Davies, 1994). Despite our newfledged desires, born of our access to post-structuralist discourse, we found ourselves knitting back up the unravelled world of the old discourses with the very patterns we thought we had just pulled undone. Over the eighteen months of this project, we talked and talked and talked, amazed at how many words it took to know with any certainty that we understood what each other meant. And yet so often, on return to school after a workshop, school reality would take over again, and we’d find we’d lost the way of seeing that felt so sure, so exciting the day before. It was particularly hard when other teachers or our principals cast doubt on what we thought we were coming to know, or when they demanded that we explain ourselves in situations where it was clear that nothing new was going to be able to be heard. But it was not just a struggle with others, it was also, sometimes, the way in which we thought about ourselves as teachers that crowded out the ways of thinking we were developing in the workshops.
