Abstract:
In this paper the claim is made that if a 'practicality ethic' dominates teacher work as the literature suggests, then for teachers)educational knowledge and other theoretical knowledge has no intrinsic privileged status. That is, when faced with a choice between the acceptance of theoretical knowledge and the maintenance of practical/instrumentalist practice, teachers are likely to reject the former or colonise it. The example of teachers' conceptions of the culture concept is used to illustrate the claim ~hat teachers reformulate 'theory' into 'practical ' forms that 'work'.