Contextual Knowledge

Contextual knowledge is a set of features intertwined with an environment, within which a person makes connections, comparisons, and analogies. The existence and use of contextual knowledge enable people to make their decisions and perform different organizational tasks; thus, organizations focus much of their attention on this area.

Knowledge can be broadly defined as congeries of information, the objectivity of which humans implicitly and explicitly argue for and value, a view that is based on the usefulness of meaningfully organized information accumulated through experience, communication, and inference. It can be viewed both as objects pending storage and manipulation, and as a sequential process of knowing and acting (i.e., the application of expertise). Knowledge has several types and functions. Comprehension about something is known as declarative knowledge, a shared, explicit understanding of concepts, categories, and descriptors that lays the foundation for effective communication. Comprehension about how something occurs or is performed is known as procedural knowledge. Shared procedural knowledge provides for the efficient coordination of actions in organizations. Comprehension about why something occurs is known as causal knowledge, which, often in the form of a story, enables organizations to coordinate strategies for achieving goals and outcomes.

Knowledge ranges from general to specific in organizations. General knowledge is broad, often publicly available, independent of particular events, and can be easily codified and meaningfully exchanged, in particular between different organizations. In contrast, specific knowledge is context dependent. Codifying this specific knowledge, so as to be meaningful across organizations, requires its context to be described in conjunction with its focus. This requires intercommunal, explicitly defined contextual categories and relationships.

Often knowledge is highly contextual, categories of which are first developed in local contexts, their names and their meanings socially negotiated. Even in the event that two processes are identical at a higher level of abstraction, they are likely to differ in the minutiae embedded in the meaning systems of their implementers. Some of these differences stem from the context of a process, others from coincidental circumstances. In general, this dependency is termed contextuality.

Contextual knowledge development is a cognitively complex process, which requires a great deal of information processing from people, mostly through implicit and explicit efforts to form schemas while [Page 202]interpreting associated information. This necessitates having both declarative and procedural knowledge to subsequently arrive at an understanding of the pedagogical environment. Contextual knowledge is more or less people's connotation for the term context; it contains general information about the situation or environment associated with a problem, which implicitly delimits the resolution space. It is evoked by a task or an event but does not focus on that task or the achievement of a goal. The proceduralized context is a part of contextual knowledge that is invoked, structured, and situated according to a given focus. This proceduralization is somewhat an instantiation.

Contextual knowledge can be seen as known information with an affiliation to an associated subject and developed consequential to predisposed ideas, or formerly substantiated schematic routes leading to the relevant subject. This affiliation can effectively be emotional, instinctive, habitual, or intellectual. It is strengthened by awareness, predisposition, or affiliation toward the subject and suggests the level of attraction people have for new knowledge.

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