Knowing What We Know: Children,Teachers,Researchers

Abstract

Issues within the educational research community concern the correct relation between research and practice, the status of various sorts of research-based knowledge, and methodological squabbles between practitioners of different research traditions. These issues reflect the intrinsic difficulty of knowing in complex domains. In this article, child language development is taken as a (neutral) field in which to contemplate the nature of knowledge, and three generalizations about knowledge are formulated and exemplified from data on language acquisition: (1) Becoming knowledgeable about any complex domain requires a balance between going beyond the known and being constrained by what experts have already discovered; (2) In the right environment, one can perform quite skillfully despite quite low levels of autonomous competence; nonetheless, skilled performance is typically poorer than one’s level of knowledge about how to perform would predict; (3) The capacity to reflect on and analyze one’s knowledge emerges only after considerable knowledge has been accumulated and embedded into practice. The reflections of skilled practitioners in any field deserve to be systematized so that personal knowledge can become publicly accessible and subject to analysis.