Recent studies of teachers and teaching pay greater attention to relationships among teaching contexts, teachers' practical knowledge, and enacted curricula. As a contribution to this body of work, this study grappled with the problem of understanding the knowledge teachers use to create curricula within workplace demands. Survey, participant observation, and case study methods were used over a 3-year period to investigate teachers' practical knowledge about connections between their efforts to create curricula and the employment relations at their workplace. Data from two case studies showed that employment relations were both a source of dilemmas and a resource for dilemma management. Competing educational and work imperatives became entangled and engendered teaching dilemmas. The teachers' differing educational considerations and dilemma management strategies reflected the different positions they occupied. In managing the dilemmas, the teachers considered a range of options and sought to utilize whatever resources they had, including the resources available to them due to their position as employees. Their use of positional power was not always conscious, as the central focus for reflecting on their dilemmas was their educational beliefs. It was predominantly against educational criteria that they judged the utility of strategies they used to manage their dilemmas. The strategies teachers devised to manage their dilemmas often led to new practices, at times upsetting the ways of being and behaving that had been established at the workplace and therefore requiring further reflection on desired ends and probable means. (Contains 16 references.) (EV)