Teachers’ personal epistemologies and professional development

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article deals with the personal epistemologies developed by teachers who undergo academic continuing education on an advanced level at a time when conflicting discourses form the basis of teaching in today’s school, i.e. academisation on one hand and measurability and accountability in the name of New Public Management on the other. To give the interviewed teachers in this study an opportunity to clarify and become more aware of their epistemologies and to assist in getting started, we initially presented concepts developed in an academic discourse: Hofer’s account of different, interrelated dimensions of ‘personal epistemologies’, clustered in two areas: the nature of knowledge, and the nature or process of knowing. As a result, we interpret the students’ epistemological beliefs through a professional perspective, i.e. as justification of the profession’s academisation. In their unhesitating confident trust in practitioners’ knowledge, as mainly acquired from experience in the field, they express a vocational habitus. One may thus assume that practitioners possess proven experiences, i.e. experience-based knowledge that they have acquired and that should be recognised and added to the knowledge base of the field in an academic and vertical discourse.