[NLA] knowing/saying

[Eileen Eckert]

In the last few weeks, Andres Muro has raised some issues that I'd like to 
try to address. First, in an exchange with Janet Isserlis (sorry if I 
spelled your name wrong, Janet) he said, "There are great theoreticians who 
are lousy practitioners, and excellent practitioners who know very little." 
Later he said, "Some great practitioners can practice and cannot articulate 
what makes their practice good, sort of like musicians that play great by 
ear. At the same time, they could improve on their practice by learning some 
theory in addition to being able to articulate what they know and cannot 
express."

And Janet said, "We need to be able to speak to/about what comprises good 
practice, what learning is and how it occurs."

Both have raised issues of tacit knowledge (see Polanyi, 1967), knowledge 
that is at the unconscious, non-verbalizable level, but that affects 
practice. The great practitioner who "knows very little" may in fact have a 
lot of good tacit knowledge informing her/his practice. The great 
theoretician who is a "lousy practitioner" may have lots of explicit 
theoretical knowledge but very little (or a lot of incorrect) tacit 
knowledge because s/he lacks experience with teaching a particular 
population of learners.

Tacit knowledge can be correct and useful; that is, it works, or in cases 
where it is verbalized (for instance in another person for whom that 
knowledge is explicit), it can be supported. It can also be in the form of 
what Bruce Torff calls "folk intuitions," tacit assumptions that are 
incorrect but persistent (see Torff & Sternberg, 2001, "Understanding and 
Teaching the Intuitive Mind: Student and Teacher Learning").

Andres also turned the poverty/illiteracy causality question on its head by 
asking if poverty causes illiteracy rather than illiteracy causing poverty. 
For people whose academic background is within schools of education <and> 
focused narrowly on methods and content areas, issues of connections between 
literacy and poverty, or literacy and other social/economic/political issues 
may fall in the realm of tacit knowledge or folk intuitions. Direct study 
and explicit consideration of historical, cultural, economic, political, and 
social contexts can add important dimensions to practitioner understanding 
and skills, even though they are rarely considered in discussions of teacher 
competency. In fact, several people on this list have talked about how prior 
training and experience in other fields (chemistry, history) has added to 
their knowledge.

When we are communicating with each other and with policy makers, it may 
help to communicate that tacit knowledge exists as an important part of 
practice, even if we can't fully articulate what that tacit knowledge is 
(and it varies from person to person). Sometimes it can be brought to the 
conscious mind for examination and revision, especially in dialogue with 
others. If we put all practical knowledge in the realm of measurable, 
observable, explicit knowledge and competencies, I think we do ourselves and 
our learners a great disservice. We need to advocate for the recognition 
that there are dimensions of teaching and learning that are not observable 
or measurable by current standards, and that can't be reduced to a 
competency checklist.






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