Most arguments in support of teacher research have been epistemological and political. They have focused on its potential benefits for improving instruction and for reforming the culture of schooling. Advocates of the teacher-research movement have claimed that it can empower the teacher as a maker of knowledge, encourage collaborative inquiry between teachers and their students and colleagues, and bring insider expertise to the understanding of teaching and learning. In this essay, the author focuses on how the teacher-research movement has produced a new written discourse within the English language arts that has the power to shape and even change how teachers and teaching are represented in the profession. She discusses the works of three teacher researchers: Edith Gioseffi, Ginny Seabrook, and Patrice Baker, and offers several brief narrative examples of how the discourse of teacher-research movement can be understood as just such an interpretive repertoire and rhetorical tradition. She ends this essay with some frankly polemical arguments about why she believes that the teacher-research movement matters even more in English education today than it did when it began. (Contains 3 notes.)