by Donald Freeman 

But lest we end here on a pessimistic note, I'd like to make a case for how I can see reconciling imported knowledge and local understandings. Much of what I am about to say comes from the work of the Teacher Knowledge Project (88sit.edu/tkp/index.html), an ongoing collaboration between my institution, the School for International Training, and teachers, schools, and districts throughout Vermont, under the leadership of our home district, the Windham Southeast Supervisory Union. The Teacher Knowledge Project gives teachers opportunities and support to examine their work, to articulate what they know about what they do, and thus to challenge and expand the tools that this knowledge provides. In addition to organizing and facilitating forms of reflective professional development, the project is conducting a sustained research program that examines the influences of this work with teachers on their students' learning. We are identifying and tracing what we call durable linkages among reflective professional development, participating teachers' work, and their students' classroom learning. What we are finding speaks to this question of how teacher knowledge works.

The second misconception, which follows from the first, treats teacher knowledge as a product. Again evidence of this mistaken view is widespread. Seen as a product, we act as if teacher knowledge can be packaged and taught in preservice teacher education, can be tested in teacher tests, and can be upgraded through professional development simply by introducing new concepts and ideas. Further we argue about the status of the product itself, about linguistic or content knowledge in our field. We have long suffered from the myth that if you can speak English, you can teach it. Thus, the value of professional knowledge about English language as content is severely downplayed, and competent, knowledgeable nonnative-English-speaking teachers are often overlooked in favor of people who speak the language as their mother-tongue. Seen as a product, knowledge of English can be gained by accident of birth rather than by professional education.

In contrast to this view of knowledge as a product of cultural capital, in our research we are looking at teacher knowledge as instrumental, as an emerging loose group of tools. These tools are ideas, concepts, ways of knowing, of seeing, of responding that teachers develop through experience, including -- but not limited to -- their professional training. At best, university-based professional training can only introduce the tools and put them into circulation. Learning to use them has to happen on the job. And as we have said, the tools change when and as you use them.

Which leads to the third misconception, that knowledge in teaching is sequential, that it can be learned first and then applied or implemented. This misconception is largely responsible for how professional education functions in learning to teach, that the settings in which knowledge is introduced (e.g., universities or training programs) can be separated from the classrooms and schools in which it is used. In contrast, we are finding that teacher knowledge emerges in and from use. As a loose set of tools, teachers make their knowledge in what they do. Thus the critical variable has more to do with the social and professional structures of work -- with whom teachers work and how they work together -- than what they bring to the job.

Teacher knowledge is not a toolbox that does the individual's job of teaching nor is it a set of prepackaged ideas that are acquired in one place and used in another. In terms of my title, "Imported Knowledge/Local Understanding," all knowledge in teaching comes from (or is imported) from somewhere: from professional training and/or personal experience. Although these tools come from somewhere else, however, they are always used locally. In this use, they are re-created, reformulated. As Marcel Duchamp might have said, there are no ready-mades in this business.

I started this talk with an anecdote about the naming of the River Niger. I want to return to it now to draw an analogy. The River Niger is like the knowledge that flows through the day-to-day work in the classroom. Knowledge is the set of tools that teachers use on a daily basis. They do exist. Unfortunately, we believe that they need to be named in encyclopedias, or mapped in professional publications, in order to recognize their existence. We have accepted this industry of naming as the way to understand and to improve teaching. To counter this trend, we need to recognize and name the unique nature of teacher knowledge, as socially based and thus reliant on others, as emergent rather than fixed, and as dynamic and in constant use. We need to put local names on the map.

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