One pathway of research on teachers' work seeks qualitatively to document the practical intersection of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, ie what teachers do day-in, day-out in classrooms to make sense of the official curriculum for the benefit of their students. At its most basic, research in this tradition means talking with empathy to teachers about their work and seeking to document their explanations of what they do, when, how and why. This is a far from straightforward process as it depends almost entirely on teachers' willingness and capacity to articulate the reasons for doing what they do; what is sought is an account of teachers' practical wisdom, or phronesis (Halverson, 2004); what the researcher is after is an informed understanding of what the teacher is saying in this account.In methodological terms, this pathway of enquiry blends, for example, the research traditions of: policy scholarship; policy ethnography, sociology, and archaeology, critical discourse analysis and interactionist ethnography (O'Neill, 2003). While use of these approaches continues to grow in education among critically minded scholars, their influence on official educational policy development and teacher education is seemingly marginal, and their resonance with the practices of hard-pressed working teachers, even less. Amid the technicist and managerialist discourses of the global knowledge economy, folksy anecdotes gain precious little credibility.Notwithstanding, such approaches offer the potential to illuminate our understanding of teachers' work and decision-taking in ways that are not amenable to positivist modes of enquiry, which all too often tend to excise context and local meaning making from the field of enquiry. How do teachers accommodate the demands of external policy texts to better meet the needs of students within deeply sedimented occupational traditions of teachers' work? To what extent do individual teachers act in ways that maintain (the sacred) or challenge (the profane) taken for granted ways of planning, teaching and assessing students' learning? This paper illustrates commonalities and differences of focused enquiry among a group of teacher-researchers all of whom are investigating the tensions of practice that underpin classroom teachers' day to day endeavours in specific and diverse curriculum areas.Like John Olson, we believe that teachers' folkways or seasonal patterns of work carry with them thoughtful and considered ways of doing teachers' work. Although often unstated, these folkways constitute deeply embedded, valued and maintained ways of working in classrooms and social groups of adults within the school.Equally, we believe that an important, if not the only way, to gain an authentic understanding of these folkways, how they operate and why teachers continue to value and cherish them, is through the medium of words. In researching teachers' work, we need to ask and listen to teachers as they explain and justify what they attempt to do in their work.Moreover, in attending and remaining faithful to teachers' explanations of what they do and why, we are bound to report these descriptions of teacher agency in context and not to pare the words from the contexts in which they are uttered for the purposes of abstract academic analysis - nothing in our view could be more barbaric or unethical. If the choice is sacred or profane, we choose profanity.This paper, then, in short is an attempt to describe how several teachers and former teachers have begun the process of exploring aspects of classroom and teacher workgroup practices in ways that both meet the demands of the 'marketplace of ideas' and maintain a commitment to ethical and authentic portrayals of teachers' work that remain respectful to the folkways which teachers struggle day in, day out to keep alive (Smyth and Hattam, 2004). 1 The paper has been collaboratively written by John O'Neill, Jenny Boyack, Judith Donaldson, Zoe Miller, Rowena Taylor and Kama Weir. The requirements of ECER proposal submission preclude all the authors being named.