Only connect

1. Only connect Developing an integrated theory of professional knowledge and practice

2. What is a profession? • Socially sanctioned occupational group • Supported by a public consensus • Embodies a promise of service to the community • Sustained and dominant labour market position • Fiduciary relationship • Levels of autonomy from government and regulation • Licensing procedures, codes of ethics, and peer regulation • Reliable authority and source of knowledge regarding its client base

3. Why professional knowledge? • At the heart of this orientation is the image of teaching as knowledge work. Such work…involves the inter-related use of practical knowledge (routines, procedures, processes) and propositional knowledge (discipline based theories and concepts, pedagogical principles). Thiessen (2002) • The shifts in emphasis in professional development takes thinking away from individuals and courses to systemic, complex understandings of the ways in which professional knowledge is created and shared. Knight (2002)

4. Key questions • What constitutes a skilful practice? • How might such skilfulness evolve? • How can professional knowledge support the development of this skilfulness?

5. Theoretical position • My emphasis is on a situated theory of professional practice • To describe and explicate the ‘knowledge pools’ practitioners have at their disposal and how they might connect each to improve their practice • Such ‘pools’ are neither unquestioned nor undisputed.

6. Focus • The fabric of these ‘knowledge pools’ and in the ways in which they have been and continue to be constructed • Circulation, distribution, production and availability of the knowledge contained within them • Connections between such ‘knowledge pools’ and the improvement of practice

7. The professional’s perspective • All practitioners operate with varying degrees of knowledge inter-penetration • Much of this knowledge is only understood in the ‘flow of the action’ • This leaves much that is poorly articulated, tacit and embodied • A great deal of this knowledge, whether discursively constructed or based on an unacknowledged re-application of practical schemas, is often limited by the experience of the production practices and contexts that frame it.

8. Distinctions • Knowledge and information • Propositional and procedural • Tacit and explicit • Public and personal • Individual and shared • Rational and intuitive

9. Interwoven limits • Practitioners’ knowledge is: • grounded in biographically unique experiences • bound by the particular habitus used to generate practice • situated in time and space • partial imperfectly communicated and garnered • distributed amongst members

10. The limitations of practical knowledge • Perceived successful performance • ‘Neither a sufficient criterion nor a necessary consequence of understanding’ • Based on ‘folk pedagogy’ • Competing ‘common sense’ accounts • Sequestration of experience • One size fits all • Style shows • Teacher rather than learner centred

11. Routine Situated Tacit Experiential Intuitive Reflective External Communal Cultural Socialised Tradition Explicit Practical Proprietal Reflective Exchange External Internal Embedded Embodied Personal Propositional Reading Listening Reflection Tacit Beliefs Ethical Theoretical Research Convergent Explicit Generalizable Internal

12. Concurrent uses of knowledge • Teaching is not only about the application or translation of preferred skills and processes. • These skills and processes are aspects of practical knowledge but have to be combined with relevant forms of propositional knowledge if learning is to be purposeful • Concurrent uses of knowledge require a more interactive and mediating stance where different types of knowledge inform teaching • Opportunities are needed for practitioners to integrate these various forms of knowledge • These opportunities can be both intentional and incidental

13. Concurrent uses • Practically relevant propositional knowledge can be used to: • guide planning, teaching and assessment • evaluate relative success • improve assessment • Propositionally interpreted practical knowledge can be used to: • help make adjustments • challenge accepted practices • make reflection more meaningful • Propositionally interpreted practical knowledge

15. The academic profession • Expert knowledge • Knowledge worker • Primary identity • Secondary identity

16. Divisions • Splits between sectors • Divided hierarchically • Divided by subject • Separate subject discourses • Unrepresentative • Low mobility

17. Key questions • In what ways can we derive ideas about pedagogical good practices in HE from an analysis of professional knowledge? • How might we gain an improved understanding of our knowledge base and the ways it can be enhanced? • What role can continuing professional development play in encouraging further development of good practices in teaching and learning?

18. Knowing how and knowing what • Procedural knowledge • Propositional knowledge

19. An orchestration of knowledge • Theories of ‘social knowing’ and ‘situated social action.’ • The idea of ‘pools of knowledge’ that are: • grounded in biographical experience • a result of the particular habitus used to generate practice • situated in time and space • distributed amongst members • imperfectly communicated and garnered.

21. Knowledge pools

22. Knowledge pools

23. Key questions • In what ways can we derive ideas about pedagogical good practices in HE from an analysis of professional knowledge? • How might we gain an improved understanding of our knowledge base and the ways it can be enhanced? • What role can continuing professional development play in encouraging further development of good practices in teaching and learning?

24. Critical connections • Collaboration - connections across people • Community - connections between traditions and identities • Inquiry - connections between ideas and principles • Integration - connections across structures and programmes

25. Strategies • Link collaboration, communication, integration and inquiry • Focus on core and persistent problems • Engage a range of teaching resources - mentors, consultants, counterparts, support networks • Provide structural support • Develop unified images of quality teaching through the use of video, case material, narratives • Curriculum coherence • New media delivery - videopapers, multi-media representations, e-learning

26. Challenges • Warranted practice • Reflective exchange • Complex thinking • Implicit theories • Scholarship of practice • Learning theories • Knowledge by acquaintance • Knowledge for understanding

27. Professional knowledge and excellence • The current emphasis on professional knowledge is more than a re-statement of the latest interpretation of skilfulness. It is a new departure from the past and the beginning of a new direction; one that augers an era where teachers - of all types - use knowledge concurrently • Continuing professional development for academics will need to be structured across domains. It will have to be based on a curriculum that encourages complex thinking as well as challenging much of the prevailing wisdom that permeates many departments and faculties. Ultimately, it will have to challenge particular ‘privileged’ forms of teaching which are based on tradition, limited vision, and subordinated to research and scholarship.