A Critical Complex Epistemology of Practice

Abstract

In the 1980s questions began to emerge in a variety of fields about how one learns to engage in the practice of a profession. Profound questions were raised about the role of professional knowledge and how it is used in the process of educating prac- titioners in a variety of domains. Teacher educators have learned from researchers studying situated cognition and reflective practice that practitioner ways of knowing are unique, quite different from the technical ways of knowing traditionally associated with professional expertise. Indeed, professional expertise is an uncertain enterprise as it confronts constantly changing, unique, and unstable conditions in social situa- tions, cultural interchange, sci-tech contexts, and, of course, in classrooms. The expert practitioners studied by socio-cognitivists and scholars of reflective practice relinquished the certainty that attends to professional expertise conceived as the repetitive administration of techniques to similar types of problems. Advocates of rigorous complex modes of professional practice insist that practitioners can develop high-order forms of cognition and action, in the process becoming researchers of practice who explore the intricacies of educational purpose and its relation to everyday life in the classroom. This paper explores what exactly such higher-order forms of cognition and action might look like in relation to the process of learning to teach.