Three conceptions of knowledge

Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1999) describe three conceptions that help us to understand educators’ knowledge. The first two conceptions depict commonly held images of knowledge:

• Knowledge-for-practice is the formal knowledge generated by research and passed on by expert educators to other educators in order to improve practice.
• Knowledge-in-practice is the “practical” or “craft” knowledge embedded in educators’ practice and identified through inquiry and reflection in and on practice.

In the past, educators have tended to separate these conceptions of knowledge in ways that have revealed a lack of respect for practitioners’ knowledge-in-practice (Zeichner and Liston, 1996). For their part, teachers have tended to view knowledge generated by research as not readily applicable to their practice. Hiebert, Gallimore, and Stigler (2002) suggest that past decisions have led to the creation of distinct educator communities that lack mechanisms to share their knowledge. While they were referring to the United States, it is possible to discern a similar pattern here, though with some notable exceptions.

The research community has worked toward the goal of building a professional knowledge base and has developed an infrastructure for recording, sharing, and accumulating knowledge. But the problems framed and the methods preferred have produced knowledge represented in forms that make it difficult for teachers to use. The teaching community works toward the goal of improving practice at an individual level and many individual teachers gradually learn from repeated observations over many trials. But no infrastructure encourages, or even enables them to record, share, and accumulate the knowledge they construct. Educators live with two professional communities struggling to bridge the chasm and build a knowledge base that is relevant for classroom practice.

Hiebert et al., 2002, page 12

Cochran-Smith and Lytle’s (1999) third conception of knowledge provides us with a view that does not separate formal knowledge on the one hand from practical knowledge on the other:

• Knowledge-of-practice is generated “when teachers treat their own classrooms and schools as sites for intentional investigation at the same time as they treat the knowledge and theory produced by others as generative material for interrogation and interpretation” (page 250). The process of systematic, critical, and collaborative inquiry into teaching, learning, and schooling places teachers at the centre of educational change and generates local knowledge with a democratic agenda. Often, this knowledge is also useful to the broader educational community.

The basis of this knowledge-practice conception is that teachers across the professional life span play a central and critical role in generating knowledge of practice by making their classrooms and schools sites for inquiry, connecting their work in schools to larger issues, and taking a critical perspective on the theory and research of others. Teacher networks, inquiry communities, and other school-based collectives in which teachers and others conjoin their efforts to construct knowledge are the major contexts for teacher learning in this conception.

page 273

The third conception of knowledge may help us to work towards establishing a shared knowledge base that is valued and improved by teachers, researchers, and teacher educators working in a range of partnerships. Given that teachers already know a great deal as a result of their training and experience, their professional learning needs to inform and be informed by their knowledge-of-practice.

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