Personal Practical Knowledge Research

Research studies in personal practical knowledge have had a significant impact on scholarship in curriculum studies and how educators think through problems pertaining to teaching and [Page 640]learning. Personal practical knowledge is often characterized as a form of situated knowledge and associated with feminist standpoint theory. It is generally understood to be shaped and influenced (but not solely determined by) one's social position, emotional life, politics, institutional demands, conscious and unconscious desires, tastes, and aesthetics. Personal practical knowledge is also described as implicit, taken-for-granted, fluid, and tacit. The term personal practical knowledge has been used in curriculum studies to account for what has been termed the tacit knowledge that influences teachers' practical action in the classroom. Studies that use personal practical knowledge as a unit of analysis have explored how experienced teachers make decisions about teaching in the classroom based on practical experiences cultivated during their careers.

The use of the term tacit suggests that practical knowledge is implicit and not available to consciousness. It also summons the concept of tacit knowing developed by the philosopher and scientist Michael Polanyi who wrote about a process of knowing that is apparently inexplicable. Relevant to the idea that personal practical knowledge is often tacit is the fact that such knowledge is believed to consist of habits, cultural practices, beliefs, and rituals that are so taken for granted in a person's daily life that they remain opaque and, consequently, are not passed on through explicit instructions or in formal settings. Tacit knowledge is understood as involving skills and technique, a sense of timing and a repertoire of methods, but following Polyani, remains unspoken.

Personal practical knowledge has long been recognized as having broad relevance for research in teacher education, autobiographical studies, curriculum theory, and professional development for teachers and administrators. One can trace the discourses of personal practical knowledge to studies interested in “how teachers think,” as well as “teacher lore,” and scholarship that has focused on studying teachers' lives. Understood at its most foundational level, personal practical knowledge is constituted by a set of discourses that have worked to engage the productive tension between theory and practice, educational scholarship and classroom practice, and, to illuminate the value of inquiry in education that involves practitioners and scholars in discovering modes of research that serves students, teachers, and communities by recognizing the vital role that social context plays in educational experience. Implicit in the study of personal practical knowledge is the work of reflecting and elaborating on one's educational and pedagogical experiences for the purpose of provoking deeper insights and understandings into education in and out of school.

Research in curriculum studies that understands personal practical knowledge as tacit is vulnerable to critique from a range of disciplinary fields, particularly given that educators are often consciously aware of the practical theories they use and are articulate about these theories. Research critical of the notion that personal practical knowledge is tacit works toward elaborating the complex conceptual structures, metaphors, and visions that educators use to justify why they act as they do in the classroom and for choosing curriculum materials, teaching activities and classroom arrangements to effectively engage their students. They refer to the principles and propositions that underlie and guide teachers' approximations, decisions, and actions as “practical theories of action,” which might be understood as a more refined articulation of earlier understandings of personal practical knowledge as tacit.

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