THE KNOWER AND THE KNOWN: THE NATURE OF
KNOWLEDGE IN RESEARCH ON TEACHING*‡
Gary D Fenstermacher
University of Arizona, Tucson
I. INTRODUCTION
This chapter is a review of conceptions of knowledge as they appear in
selected bodies of research on teaching. Writing as a philosopher of education,
my interest is in how notions of knowledge are used and analyzed in a number of
research programs that study teachers and their teaching. Of particular interest is
the growing research literature on the knowledge that teachers generate as a
result of their experience as teachers, in contrast to the knowledge of teaching
that is generated by those who specialize in research on teaching. This
distinction, as will become apparent, is one that divides more conventional
scientific approaches to the study of teaching from what might be thought of as
alternative approaches.
A number of good reviews of the teacher knowledge literature are available
elsewhere. Though these tend to be confined to a particular genre of teacher
knowledge research, they are thoughtful, probing and helpful. Among them are
Kathy Carter's (1990) chapter in the
Handbook of Research on Teacher
Education
, Alan Tom and Linda Valli's (1990) philosophically grounded review
of professional knowledge; and Peter Grimmett and Allan MacKinnon's (1992)
extensive analysis of craft conceptions of teaching in a previous volume in this
series. What distinguishes the present review from these others is that it seeks to
be fairly inclusive of the teacher knowledge literature, though restrictive in its
analytical categories. I shall examine a number of different research programs
that either explicitly purport to be about teacher knowledge or that expand what
is known about teaching. The examination, however, will be restricted to the
____________
*A significant portion of this chapter is based on prior work done in collaboration with Virginia
Richardson. This work resulted in an earlier, substantially different version of this chapter,
presented at a conference on teacher knowledge in Tel Aviv, Israel, in June, 1993. Frederick
Ellett, Peter Grimmett, Hugh Munby, Nel Noddings, Robert Orton, and Denis Phillips, offered
extended and extremely helpful critiques of this chapter, for which I am deeply indebted. For
the many errors of fact and interpretation from which they have spared me, I thank them. They
bear no responsibility for what remains. Peter P. Grimmett and Lee S. Shulman were the
editorial consultants for this chapter, a role they performed with diligence and grace.
‡This text is the manuscript version of the following published chapter: Gary D Fenstermacher
(1994), The Knower and the Known: The Nature of Knowledge in Research on Teaching, in Linda
Darling Hammond (Ed.),
Review of Research in Education, 20
(pp. 3-56), Washington,
DC:: American Educational Research Association. The text of this manuscript version may not be
identical to the published piece; the pagination will definitely be different..
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epistemological aspects of these research programs. By epistemological aspects,
I mean those features of the research that assert or imply notions about the
nature of knowledge: What forms it takes, how it is justified, how it is
differentiated from such related concepts as belief and opinion, and how it figures
into different conceptions of science and human reasoning.
One may with reason wonder whether any benefit is to be gained by
working one's way through the epistemological underbrush while traversing the
teacher knowledge terrain. The value is in having a better understanding of what
is involved in researchers' claims to know something about teaching as well as
their claims that teachers know some things about teaching. These claims can
and do become the basis for educational policy, even when our acceptance of
them is more a matter of ideological tilt or cosmetic appeal than of clear-headed
analysis and reasoned deliberation. Take, for example, the frequently lauded
"knowledge base" for teaching.
In the United States, many members of the policy making community are
embracing a view of teacher knowledge and skill that represents a limited
epistemological perspective on what teachers should know and be able to do.
This perspective is classified in this review as the Formal perspective. It is
grounded in a conception of the social and behavioral sciences that are
themselves constructed isomorphically to the physical sciences. It is from this
perspective that we have built the much-vaunted "knowledge base" for teaching.
It is this knowledge base that in turn gives rise to such policy initiatives as
national certification for teachers, accountability and performance assessment in
teaching, research-based programs of teacher education as well as research-
based designs for the accreditation of teacher education, and some (though not
all) of the current initiatives in the development of subject field, grade level, and
state level standards for student learning.
If our educational policies are defended on the basis of their foundations in
science, and science in turn rests on epistemology for an understanding of the
nature and scope of its knowledge claims, then epistemology is crucial. Suppose
it turned out that the epistemology was faulty, or that it was more limited and
constrained than previously thought, or that it was but one among a number of
possible epistemologies, or that it was the wrong epistemology for the nature of
the inquiry. What then? If educational policy is grounded in weak or erroneous
assumptions about the nature of knowledge, there is a high likelihood that it will
fail to address the problems and aspirations of education in positive and
ameliorative ways.
This review is an occasion to reconsider the epistemological character of
what is and can be known by and about teachers and about teaching. It begins,
in part II, with a description of a number of different research programs in the
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study of teaching. These programs are grouped in ways that open useful avenues
into issues of epistemology. After examining the research literature, we turn, in
part III, to an analysis of its epistemological structure. Of particular interest here
is the kind of knowledge that researchers and teachers claim to have, and how we
know they have it. This inquiry into the nature of teacher knowledge raises issues
beyond the confines of epistemology, leading us to look, in part IV, at conceptions
of science that undergird the various forms of teacher knowledge research. The
inquiry into science shows both promise and problems for gaining firmer
epistemological ground. The problems lead to a search for other ways of
establishing the knowledge that researchers claim they or the teachers they study
have. Part V introduces the topic of practical reasoning in teaching, with an eye
toward recasting portions of the teacher knowledge research as research on
teacher reasoning. The chapter concludes with an assessment of what needs to
be done to continue the high potential of newer research programs for the study
of teacher knowledge.
Throughout this review consideration is given to the knower and the
known in teacher knowledge research. Questions will be raised about who is the
knower, and what it is that the knower knows. Is the knower the researcher
(typically thought of as a university professor), or the teacher, or both researcher
and teacher? Is whatever it is that is known known only by the researcher, only
the teacher, or by both? If both teacher and researcher are considered seekers
and producers of knowledge, how are they different with respect to the research
endeavor? These are the questions that come to mind as one pursues the several
literatures on the subject of teacher knowledge. We turn now to these literatures,
examining them in ways that address these questions about the knower and the
known.
II. AN OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHER KNOWLEDGE LITERATURE
After struggling with a number of devices for arraying the literature in
ways that would facilitate epistemological scrutiny, a series of questions offered
the best approach to setting forth the relevant research. There are four questions,
as follows:
A. What is known about effective teaching?
B. What do teachers know?
C. What knowledge is essential for teaching?
D. Who produces knowledge about teaching?
These four questions do not exhaust the research studies dealing with knowledge
in teaching. Instead they prompt consideration of those research initiatives that
raise substantial epistemological questions. Hence many studies that, on their
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face, appear relevant to the topic are missing from this review. That is because
the point of the review is to grapple with research that raises substantial, and on
occasion, controversial issues in epistemology. Thus the work included here is
foundational to a particular research program, it is exemplary of that program, or
it is a very recent and extensive study within a particular approach to research on
teaching.
Some foreshadowing of the answers to these four questions will prove
helpful in following the overview. The question,
What is known about
effective teaching?
permits us to address the concept of knowledge as it
appears in standard or conventional behavioral science research. In this chapter,
this concept of knowledge is called Formal knowledge, and it is abbreviated TK/F
(Teacher Knowledge: Formal). The process-product studies of teaching are
perhaps the most well-known instance of this form of knowledge. The second
question,
What do teachers know?
points to research that seeks to
understand what teachers know as a result of their experience as teachers. Quite
a few kinds of knowledge are suggested in answer to this question, including
practical, personal practical, situated, local, relational, and tacit. These types of
knowledge are designated TK/P, for "Teacher Knowledge: Practical."
These first two questions encompass the epistemological types of
knowledge suggested in the research literature, but they do not exhaust the range
of the literature itself. The third question,
What knowledge is essential
for teaching?
directs us to the research program of Lee Shulman and his
colleagues. It will be argued that Shulman's work does not introduce types of
knowledge different from those represented in answers to the first two questions,
but rather seeks to show what forms and types of knowledge are required in
order to teach competently. The fourth question,
Who produces
knowledge about teaching?
permits us to address the difference between
knowledge generated by university-based researchers and that generated by
practicing teachers. The work of Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle is quite
prominent in this category, and thus serves as the exemplar in addressing the
fourth question.
Before turning to the specific questions, it is necessary to attend briefly to
matters of definition. In this review I frequently refer to research programs. This
expression typically refers to Imre Lakatos's (1970) notion of a broad group of
research studies united by common methodological rules. In this review, the
expression refers to the work of certain researchers, and the studies based on the
work of these researchers. Thus, for example, I will refer to Michael Connelly and
Jean Clandinin's work on personal practical knowledge as a research program,
and in doing so I mean to include within the category their own work on this
concept as well as the work of collaborators and like-minded colleagues. Hence
all research studies that use Connelly and Clandinin's notions of personal practical
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knowledge as their core concept are a part of this research program. A similar
grouping is made for Schön's work on reflective practice, Shulman's work on types
of knowledge about teaching, and Cochran-Smith and Lytle's work on the teacher
researcher.
The second definitional matter is the notion of knowledge
type
. A survey
of the teacher knowledge literature turns up a host of knowledge names.
Examples include strategic knowledge, propositional knowledge, relational
knowledge, craft knowledge, local knowledge, case knowledge, situated
knowledge, tacit knowledge, personal knowledge, and so forth. All these names
do not necessarily pick out different
types
of knowledge. These knowledge
names are, in some ways, like the names we give to people. Each of us has a
given (formal) first name, usually a nickname, and often another name that is a
family favorite; we may have still other names because of our membership in
certain religious or social groups. These names all pick out the same person,
though their context of use is different. While this aspect of naming is easily
understood in connection with persons, it can be hard to follow with ideas or
concepts. For this reason I restrict the term
type
to discrete epistemological
categories, allowing the knowledge names to flower according to the preferences
and inclinations of the researchers who coin, adopt, or adapt them. The notions
of formal and practical knowledge mentioned above are instances of
types
of
knowledge. More will be made of this point in the section that follows the
overview; enough has been made of it here to carry us through the current
section.
A. What is known about effective teaching?
This first question permits us to consider a key approach to the topic of
teacher knowledge, that of the social and behavioral sciences (hereafter the
expression "social sciences" includes the social and behavioral sciences). Though
the question reads,
What is known about effective teaching?
it could
as readily have been framed as,
What is known about successful
teachers?
or
What is known about what makes teachers good at
what they do?
The answer to these questions embraces all of the research
that deals with relationships between or among variables, including nearly all of
the process-product research, as well as a portion of the research pertaining to
teacher thinking, cognitive processing, teacher expectancy, as well as a number
of studies dealing with the topics of learning to teach and staff development.
This body of research does not explicitly mention teacher knowledge; it
does not specifically identify itself as teacher knowledge research. Yet research
programs that study relationships between variables entail a conception of
knowledge about teachers and teaching that some believe to be critical for the
advancement of the field. Researchers in this category do not see themselves as