The teacher-leader’s dilemma: authority and knowledge building in collaborative practice

This case study of a teaching team investigates the ways in which authority operates in the development of professional knowledge. The study analyzes the interaction of a teacherleader and a science teacher team across two settings of professional development organized to promote curricular reform in their U.S. secondary school. The analysis reveals how acknowledged expertise, or epistemic authority, functions to open up or close down possibilities for engagement around subject matter, teaching, and student learning. The study advances an expanded view of epistemic authority in knowledge building as the negotiation of difference through implicit control.