Raindrops on roses

November 4th, 2011 by Angela Rees

November is Sharing Good Practice Month at the college where I lecture so I thought I’d jump on the Chalkface blog and share two of my favourite things.

I love historypin. It’s a Google Maps mashup where you can upload pictures from the past and compare them to the current street view. You can add video and audio too. There’s heaps of potential for school projects and it’s a great tool for digital storytelling. Have a look at the Beatlemania tour for inspiration!

Continuing with the maps theme, every maths teacher needs to know about the Maths Maps project.  Again using Google Maps this collaborative resource links maths questions to physical places.  For example, a pin in Real Madrid Football Stadium invites you to zoom in and calculate the area of the pitch. Further more, one map can cover many topics and colour coded pins allow for age or level differentiation. There’s more information on how to join in with the project on the edte.ch blog.

Opportunities and challenges presented by the fast-changing pace of technology

May 8th, 2011 by Cristina Costa

Last week I took part in a JISC event where participants were asked to have an active role and share their thoughts about “how institutions can and should respond to the opportunities and challenges presented by the fast-changing pace of … Continue reading

Skilled performace as a basis for professional practice?

February 4th, 2009 by Graham Attwell

Chris Sessums asks: “What would a knowledge base for the teaching profession look like? How can we get one?”

He goes on to say: “Imagine teachers collaborating around the globe to improve education. Sound like a fantasy? Is there a path that could lead from classrooms to a shared, reliable professional knowledge base for teaching? Is it because practitioner knowledge is highly personal, highly contextual, and lacks the vetting process associated with scientific research that such a path has never been developed? Given the millions of teachers producing knowledge of classroom practice everyday, is it worth examining what would be needed to transform teacher knowledge into a professional knowledge base for teaching? What would such a path look like?”

These are good questions. However, they pose problems over the nature of practice. Chris bases his idea of practioner knowledge around the idea of “elaborating a problem” and alaborating and testing answers to such a problem. But surely this is only part of the practice of a teacher. Can teaching be reduced to a knowledge base? In struggling to envisage what form such a knowledge base might take Chris suggests it could be developed around lesson plans. Although a readily accessible and open bank of lesson plans might be a valuable resource, it still ignores many elements of the practice of teaching. It is perfectly possible that no two teachers would use the plans in the same way. Of course that is not important. But such a knowledge base might then fail to capture the essence of professional practice (I am unconvinced of Chris’s distinction between practioner knowledge and professional knowledge).

Reckwitz (2003) distinguishes 3 different meanings or understandings of practice:

  • Practice as embodied knowledge;
  • Practice as a skilful performance with artefacts;
  • Practice as implicit knowledge, as the implicit logic of doing things

It may be possible to develop a database of the background knowledge and of the artefacts. Far mor problematic is the skilful performance. Yet it is this element of practice which would seem to be most useful for teachers and trainers.

Is one of the problems the divisions we have made between so called scientific (or professional) knowledge and practice? I wonder if it might be possible to develop taxonomies for practice embodied as skilful performance and then develop social software which would allow the sharing of such practice. If, so how and what might it look like? Does anyone have any ideas?

Reference

Reckwitz, A. (2003). Grundelemente einer Theorie sozialer Praktiken. In: Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Jg. 32, H. 4, 282-301.

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