Revisiting Voice

Abstract

Drawing on case vignettes of teachers at work, this article revisits how to conceptualize and represent teachers' voices and the teacher's voice in educational research, and in dialogue about educational change more generally. Though the article argues that representing and sponsoring teachers' voices should remain an important research priority, it also criticizes how much of the literature in this area selects and portrays particular teacher voices as exemplary or generic voices. The literature on teachers' voices has tended to represent them in a decontextualized way—in isolation from other (dissimilar) teachers, from the contexts of teaching which give rise to those voices, and from other (nonteacher) voices that also have legitimate if sometimes discrepant things to say about teaching and learning The result has been that the teacher's voice has often been unduly romanticized. More comparative and contextualized studies of teachers' voices, and of other voices alongside them, it is argued, would avoid such dangers of romanticization.