'Teachers are meant to be orthodox’: counter-narratives in the development of a professional identity in teaching

Citation

Watson C (2007) 'Teachers are meant to be orthodox’: counter-narratives in the development of a professional identity in teaching. In: Robinson D, Kelly N & Milnes K (eds.) Narrative and Memory: Selected papers from the sixth annual conference. Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield, pp. 1-12. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/4577/

Abstract
First paragraph: Counter-narratives have been defined as ‘the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly, to dominant cultural narratives' (Andrews, 2004:1). Telling a story is power to oppose master narratives and represents a potentially subversive positioning of self. McQuillan (2000) regards the production of counter-narratives as a necessary condition of narrativity and argues that the direction of the relationship between the narrative and its counter is an effect of power. The narrative and its counter therefore create a site of contest, but should not be thought of as binary opposites. Rather, the relationship is aporetic. Any narrative is necessarily selective, a way of not saying something. Potentially there are limitless ways of not saying something each of which constitutes a counternarrative, and each of which is related, not as an opposite, but as a simultaneous presence occupying, indeed productive of, the contested site. In this way counter-narratives do not seek simply to oppose the dominant narrative but offer both resistance and complicity to it.

People

Professor Cate Watson

Emeritus Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences