ABSTRACT
Before I launch into ‘what I do’, it may make more sense to the reader to have a broad orientation on where this chapter is headed. I want to report on a ‘project’ I have been involved in for more than a decade, in which I have been working with teachers (as a university academic) individually and collectively, to analyse and reflect on what they do as classroom teachers, what it means, the wider forces shaping it and what they see as the limits and constraints emerging from the broader contexts in which they operate. I do this, at the outset, by making the point that in Australia we have become besotted with economic discourse to the point that it virtually saturates almost all discussions about matters educational. The consequence, I argue, is that in this country there is an educational discourse of a very decided genre, that powerfully shapes and informs educational possibilities. I go on to explain, as the chapter unfolds, how I have worked at trying to develop a counter-hegemonic discourse of teaching, and how this operates in practice. It is true that I don’t have the space to go into all of the detail required to provide a comprehensive account on teachers’ terms (and that is one of the disadvantages of case study styles of renditionthey are very wordy), but I hope I am able to give at least a glimpse of the alternative public sphere within which this discourse might occur. The process I describe is one that is descriptive of what is occurring within their teaching, while being informing as to the generalities and the specifics, confronting in terms of how it arrests the taken-for-grantedness, while providing the spaces within which the reconstruction of transformative action can occur.
