The texts of educational research are replete with descriptions of teachers resistant to the pedagogical changes that others prescribe or mandate (Pajares, 1991; cf. Richardson, 1990). In the large body of research devoted to educational reform, teachers are often depicted – positioned – as unable, unwilling, unknowing, and/or unskilled. In this chapter, we aim to describe, instead, a professional learning environment in which teachers, who are seen as knowledgeable experts in their disciplines, are invited to engage in collaborative inquiry and to adaptively design classroom innovation. We describe the discourses that shape this learning environment and show how teachers, as a result of their collaborative experiences and exchanges, take up social and dialogical tools for imagining and authoring new pedagogical selves. We illustrate how, in the process, teachers begin to offer new possibilities for their diverse, urban students – themselves often positioned as unable, unwilling, unknowing, and/or unskilled – to enact new literate identities and practices in the classroom.

Bakhtin's key theoretical constructs of “dialogism” and “authoring” provide us with a theoretical framework for reflecting on the power and potential of inquiry-based professional development for teachers.