Professional knowledge is a much contested area not least because, in Bernstein's terms, of the tensions between sacred and profane knowledges. My research has sought to foreground teachers' voices in defining professional knowledge, and had thereby revealed a sharp divide between those teachers for whom professional autonomy drives professional knowledge constructs, and those for whom knowledge is a given construct legitimised in state policy. Evident throughout the research is the question of access to professional discourse, predicted by Giroux in 1986 as an outcome - and indeed a desired product - of the dominance of legitimised ('profane') knowledge above professional ('sacred') knowledge. I have sought to use practitioner research as a vehicle for developing professional ('sacred') discourse (see for example the work of Kincheloe (2001) and thereby reclaiming the agenda of professional knowledge.