What knowledge is of most worth to teachers? A knowledge-use perspective

Abstract

In some ways, research in the area of knowledge dissemination and utilization (D & U) constitutes the pragmatist philosopher’s answer to the Hegelian. The construct of “knowledge” is not handled epistemologically but functionally put briefly, who wants (whom) to know what (from whom), in what form and to what effect? In framing and answering these questions, however, we are not sitting in an empirical dustbowl. At least five reasonably well-integrated conceptual frameworks can illuminate the creation, exchange, and use of knowledge: (a) communication theory, (b) theories of attitude change and interpersonal influence, (c) networking and interorganizational theories, (d) adult cognition and information-processing, and (e) the sociology of knowledge. This line of research also asks the question: If you do know what knowledge is of most worth to teachers or, in your view, of most worth for teachers, how do you get it to them? What kind of environment are you trying to breach to reach your “target” public? From what kind of environment is the knowledge base to be extracted? Such questions seem to evaporate from the concerns of more normatively inclined analysts. To read much of the prescriptive literature in the pre-service and in-service training fields is to derive a surreal, almost magical, sense of this issue, almost as if the very invocation of generous, high-minded goals were sufficient to get them achieved, whereas the task is long and difficult. Overall, mainstream educational practice does not seem to have profited much from D & U research, save in one highly visible and policy-relevant area: the study of “school improvement efforts,” usually in the form of implementing major innovations (e.g., Berman & McLaughlin, 1974-1977; Crandall et al., 1982). From the knowledge-use perspective, innovations are simply bundles of constructs, techniques, and materials being conveyed from one or several sources to one or several receivers; and the dynamics of this process can be laid bare and, theoretically at least, improved through the different conceptual lenses of the knowledge-use perspective. Elsewhere, however, the D & U approach has been marginal when, in fact, it could reward both researchers and practitioners. For example, pre-service and in-service education are likely candidates for networking and interorganizational theories. More generically, teachers’ “professional development,” notably in relation to the school-as-workplace literature (Dreeben, 1973; Little, 1981, 1984) is closely related to the D & U area, but has not been studied much from that angle. My brief in this paper will be to substantiate these claims by drawing on the knowledge-use literature, on studies of classroom life and of professional development, and on those segments of my own ongoing research that try to knit together these three strands. I will also retain the more functional or “ecological” perspective of the D & U literature, that is, a perspective that sees knowledge search and use as the response of teachers to the surround in which they operate (Doyle, 1978; Huberman, 1983). My claim here is that teachers will reach outside the classroom for information and