Epistemology of Practice

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Advocates of “reflective teaching” have spurned the most successful trend ever to hit the educational scene. After all, who would argue that teachers should be unreflective in their practice? Thus there has never been a counter movement to reflective practice. And yet, the case of reflectivity has been made rather unreflectively, because anyone reflecting on the actual experience of the interactive teacher-student relation would discover that the relational activity of teaching is rarely, if ever, cognitively reflective in the sense that is usually implied by the term reflection. It is ironic that the attractive notion of reflective practice as “retrospective reflection” or as “anticipatory reflection” is unoriginal but likely, while the attractive idea of “reflection in action” is original but unlikely. In other words, we reflect on past and future actions to become thoughtful and we reflect on present actions by stepping back from a social situation in order to consider what to say or do next. The attractive, but problematic claim is that action, and reflection on this action, can be simultaneous: reflective teaching theorists argue that not only is it the case that “we can think about doing something but that we can think about something while doing it” (Schön, 1983, p. 54).

The social practice of reflecting-about-doing-something-while-doing-it is compromised by at least two considerations: the relational structure of the interaction, and the temporal dimensions of the practical contexts in which the action occurs. First, the relational dimension poses limitations upon the degree of reflection and distance one can take in a conversational situation. Strictly speaking one’s mind is not quite one’s own when one is actively involved in social interactions such as speaking together. The opportunity to reflect on what I say and do with an other while I am saying or doing these things can only be seized at a certain cost of the authenticity of the interaction. The temporal dimension of interactive practice also poses limitations on reflection. The thinking on or about the experience of teaching and the thinking in the experience of teaching seem to be differently structured. Retrospective reflection on (past) experiences differs importantly from anticipatory reflection on (future) experiences (van Manen, 1991). In contrast, contemporaneous reflection in situations allow for a “stop and think” kind of action that may differ markedly from the more immediate “reflective” awareness that characterizes, for example, the active and dynamic process of a class discussion, a lecture, a conflict situation, a monitoring activity, a one-on-one, a routine lesson, and so forth.

It seems therefore that, on the one hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to overestimate the possibility of introspective “reflection on action while acting” (van Manen 1994, 1995). Phenomenologically it is very difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to be emersed in interactive or dialogic activities with their students while simultaneously stepping back from the activity. On the other hand, the theory of reflective practice seems to underestimate the complexity of the organization of ordinary teaching practices, and the incredible intricacies of practical actions in teaching-learning situations. I would argue that the practice of teaching is so challenging not only because it is cognitively complex but also because the knowledge that inheres in our practices is in part noncognitive—and it may be this noncognitive dimension of practice that continually challenges us in our efforts to provide for quality teacher education or teacher professional development.

There are forms of knowledge that inhere so immediately in our body, in our actions, in the things around us, and in our relations with others that they seem invisible. This is how I try to make sense of the forms of noncognitive knowing.

Cognitive knowing:

is intellectual, propositional, textual, intentional, etc.

Noncognitive knowing:

Knowledge resides in action as lived

in our confident doing, style, and practical tact
in habituated acting and routine practices

Knowledge resides in the body

in an immediate corporeal sense of things
in our gestures, demeanor

Knowledge resides in the world

in being with the things of our world
in situations of at homeness, dwellin

Knowledge resides in relations

in the encounter with others
in relations of trust, recognition, intimacy

By noncognitive I mean that in their practice experienced teachers commonly demonstrate a kind of confidence that is really a form of knowing except that this “knowledge” cannot necessarily be captured in words. The study of the practice of teaching would need to be sensitive to the experiential quality of practical knowledge: the acknowledgement that much of knowing what to do, ensues from one’s body, doings, relations, and from the things of one’s world. We might even say that the practical knowledge of teaching resides in the things that surround us: the lived space of the classroom that, as a teacher, I recognize as my room to which my body is adapted. My practical knowledge “is” my felt sense of the classroom, my felt understanding of my students, my immediate grasp of the things that I teach, the moods that belongs to my world at school, the hallways, the staffroom, and of course this classroom.

This noncognitive knowledge is like a silent practice that is implicit in my world and in my actions rather than cognitively explicit or accessible to critically reflection. What Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Dreyfus have suggested is that this silent practice cannot necessarily be translated back into words, propositional discourse. Heidegger proposed provocatively that while Rede ordinarily means “talk” in the sense of reason, not all Rede manifests itself through words. Dreyfus uses the term Articulation to refer to this nonreflective implicit knowing. He says, “one does not have words for the subtle actions one performs and the subtle significations one Articulates in performing them.” And Wittgenstein suggested that this practical domain of our actions is ultimately nonconceptual, prelinguistic, noncognitive.