This paper focuses on a careful review of the seminal work of Clandinin's (1986) Classroom Practice: Teachers Images in Action. Clandinin's study is a key reference in the rationale and justification for the furtherance of the 'teacher researcher' movement (after Stenhouse, 1975, Elbaz, 1983. It is also viewed as a central building block in the evolutionary 'growth' movement of narrative inquiry and personal experience methods within educational research. This paper considers how an in what ways Clandinin's original work remains radical within the qualitative paradigm and how its fundamental precepts are likely to challenge any request for cooperation or synthesis between qualitative and qualitative inquiry and ensure that important conversations about objectivity, knowledge, values, power and practical application persist in educational research at least for the foreseeable future. In unraveling the case, the core issue of epistemology will be pursued and its key role in all aspects of a research endeavour. It is argued that Clandinin's standpoint on the nature of theory and its inverted relationship to practice which pervades her entire study continues to hold a challenge to the dominant epistemology of practice. The paper will outline the current critiques of the teacher research movement and build on this to examine the 'leading edge' issues within genre some sixteen years on.