Teacher Knowledge

In the late 1970s, the concept of teacher thinking began to appear in the curriculum studies literature. Christopher Clark and Robert Yinger published the first review in the field of teacher thinking, gathering the work of U.S. researchers, work that, for the most part, originated conceptually with the scholarship of N. L. Gage. Researchers worked from a cognitive information-processing approach that was concerned with teacher judgment, decision making, and planning and focused on research that studied the psychological aspects of thinking in the areas of teacher planning, teacher judgment, teacher interactive decision making, and teachers' implicit theories or perspectives.

Around the same time, another focus, teacher deliberation, emerged from Joseph Schwab's understanding of curriculum. Initially, F. Michael Connelly focused on teacher deliberation, but he, with Freema Elbaz-Luwisch, developed research on what they called teacher practical knowledge. For them, teacher practical knowledge emerged from a view of a teacher as an active agent deploying practical knowledge in teaching and planning for teaching. They described teacher thought as prescriptive toward action and as occurring through deliberation, a process on which there has been some research. However, they noted little research on the nature of the practical knowledge with which each teacher does his or her thinking. They defined teacher practical knowledge in three ways: (1) as having content; (2) as being oriented to situations, to the personal, to the social, to experience, and to theory; and (3) as structured in rules, practical principles, and images.

As D. Jean Clandinin began work with them, the focus became teachers' personal practical knowledge defined as the convictions and meanings, conscious or unconscious, that have arisen from experience (intimate, social, and traditional) and that are expressed in a person's practices. They drew on Michael Polanyi's argument that knowledge has a subjective, personal character, Mark Johnson's view of knowledge as embodied and expressed socially, and John Dewey's idea that knowledge and knowing are dialectical combinations of subject and object, of the cultural and the individual.

Eventually, the research focused on narrative ways of understanding teacher knowledge that attended to the dialectical relationship between teachers' personal practical knowledge, itself a dialectic between the personal and social in each teachers' knowledge and between the personal and the social of the contexts in which teachers lived and worked. The social of school, school contexts, was conceptualized through the metaphor of a professional knowledge landscape, a metaphor that created a discourse of space, place, and time. Teachers' knowledge landscapes were seen as both intellectual and moral landscapes and were understood as narratively constructed with historical, moral, emotional, and aesthetic dimensions. The landscape metaphor drew attention to the relational, temporal, and shifting nature of school contexts.

Research programs in these two distinct but related areas, that is, teacher thinking and teacher knowledge, eventually came together into one of the most intellectually vibrant research areas in curriculum studies in the late 1900s and early 2000s. By the mid-1990s, Gary Fenstermacher reviewed the literature in the area of teacher knowledge, noting that there were three strands of research: one with origins in the work of Connelly, Elbaz, and Clandinin, a second with origins in the work of Donald Schön, and a third with origins in the work of Lee Shulman. Schön, also working from a Deweyan view of experience, described practitioner knowledge as tacit, implicit in each person's patterns of action and as in each person's action. Shulman viewed teacher knowledge in terms of pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge that went beyond subject matter content to embody aspects of content relevant to its teachability.

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