What teachers know, what teachers do

Abstract

it would be difficult for us, as authors, to tell you, as readers, how we go about writing this editorial. We could describe a few steps we take, like brainstorming, reading and re-reading the articles, formulating a throughline and finding connections, and creating an outline. But how precisely we go about writing sentences, creating paragraphs, and weaving ideas together is not something we can quite explain, even though we do it all the time. While we do this thing called writing, how different knowledges and experiences inform or shape the way we write is hard to describe. the same is true of teaching. the practices of teachers in classrooms are perhaps more complex than writing an editorial—and the consequences are of course much more significant! How teachers teach has a direct impact on the kinds of experiences students have, what and how they learn—or do not learn—and to some extent, who students become. While some aspects of what teachers do can be described, codified, explained, and made explicit, much of what happens in classrooms is implicit, subtle, based on instincts, and moved by assumptions that are hard to pinpoint or identify, much less explain. often, experienced teachers do what they do simply because they know—or think they know—that it works, without necessarily being able to explain why it works. this is what some curriculum scholars have framed as teachers’ “practical knowledge,” the things teachers know that implicitly shape what they do in practice (Clandinin, 1985; Elbaz, 1981). Since its development as a way to understand what teachers know and how it informs what they do, the concept of teachers’ practical knowledge has had a significant influence on curriculum studies and teacher development in particular. as a powerful way to understand teacher practice “as being driven by an intuitive, often inexpressible, and fundamentally situated know-how,” practical knowledge “captures the contingent and situated nature of the day-to-day lived experiences of many teachers” (aspbury-Miyanishi, this issue, p. 480). Yet, as Edmund aspbury-Miyanishi points out in the first article in this issue, titled “the Skilled teacher: a Heideggerian approach to teacher Practical Knowledge,” the concept of practical knowledge does not sufficiently account for the contextual circumstances that lead teachers to take some action instead of another. in other words, relying on practical knowledge assumes that teachers take actions based only on what they know and does not account for the external conditions that shape whether and how teachers make decisions about which knowledge is relevant for action under which circumstances.