Practical Knowledge of Teaching: What Counts?

Abstract

In the domain of professional education, the relationship between theory and practice and the nature of and role of disciplinary knowledge in ordering the acquirer’s understanding of the practice have occupied research for many decades. The return to this question now has a specific context. Broadly speaking, this context is characterised by a proliferation of policy evaluation research at the expense of disciplinary-based research, an attack on professional knowledge, and a turn away from a discipline-based curriculum to an interdisciplinary practice-based one. Specific to teacher education, there are increasing calls for pre-service curricula to increase the amount of time spent in schools and to focus students’ learning on authentic assessment tasks and personal accounts from the outset of the degree. A common rationale behind these calls is the idea that it is by actually being in the school — in the presence of ‘old timers’ — planning, teaching, and revising one’s lessons, by iteratively being involved in aspects of practice — that student teachers acquire practical knowledge or the know-how of professional knowledge and that this is key for learning professional expertise. In other words there is an increasing tendency to downplay the systematised conceptual reservoir of teaching and to emphasise tools for practice. In South Africa, this view is expressed in claims such as ‘experience is the most important bridge to practice’ (Henning and Gravett, 2011, p. S21) or ‘the enterprise of teacher education must venture further and further from the university and engage ever more closely with school’ (Darling-Hammond in Osman and Casella, 2007, p. 35) or that in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice, teacher educators need to develop curriculum artefacts to personalise theoretical work (Petersen and Henning, 2010).

I am not arguing for not having pedagogical training — that is the last thing I want. But I claim that the facts mentioned prove that scholarship per se may itself be the most effective tool for training effective and good teachers. (Dewey, 1964, p. 327)