How do teachers rely on their educational knowledge in order to teach professionally? A professional teacher knows how to manage even challenging classroom situations, and displays professionalism in teaching because appropriated reflective knowledge corresponds with knowing, a practical mode of knowledge that enables comprehension of a situation and affiliated situated action (Schön 1987, 157). Knowing accommodates the singularity of a situated event and integrates subsidiary awareness into a focal awareness in order to experiment within in a situation (Ryle 2009). This awareness is directly fed back into action without interrupting the primary process of action, which indicates knowing is not a process separate from action, but part of it “to free possible futures” (Geerinck, Masschelein & Simons 2010, 388). Empirical educational research addresses professionalism predominantly from a macro-level perspective (Beijaard, Paulien & Verloop 2004) by attending to elements of professional teaching and modelling teacher competency in order to ensure institutional quality of education (Hill, Umland, Litke & Kapitula 2012). This project addresses professionalism in empirical analysis from a micro-level perspective by providing an account on how teachers frame practice in order to support transfer between conceptualisations of professionalism and professionalism in practice.

The project addresses professionalism in practice from two perspectives: From a post-critical perspective (Polanyi 1998), teaching is enacted professionally by tacit comprehension of classroom events and situated reaction (Schön 1983; 1987). Tacit comprehension itself relies on situated involvement of a teacher (Neuweg & Fothe 2011). From a post-structuralist perspective, involvement is expressed by the teacher self whose practice corresponds with educational aims. Educational aims point to the moral dimension of schooling, a morality that sets an ideal of effects educational practice should have and that teachers acquire to set a horizon for comprehension (Foucault 2005; Touraine 2007; Butler 2005). A complementary use of post-critical and post-structuralist perspectives indicates that professionalism of teachers is dependent on both involved self that knows and reflects in action and moral subject that provides the analytical horizon for doing so. The project combines both perspectives to explore educational knowing of teachers and comprehend professionalism in practice.

Professionalism in practice is analysed as indexicality in which teachers frame their practice and is examined as a cultural fundament of shared understandings underlying everyday professional teaching. Everyday professional teaching is an increasingly important focus in educational research because teachers have persuasive practical knowledge that asks for academic attention. Teacher practice relies on typically tacit situated educational knowing, which signifies that teachers are unable to readily explicate the educational quality of action in class. Action in class is affiliated with professional educational demands due to a subjective horizon that provides reflective educational knowing. These epistemological distinctions of modes of knowing and states of subjectivity provide theoretical sensitivity for empirical analysis and link practical knowing with the reflective horizon necessary to qualify practice as professional. The central aim of this project is to explore and reconstruct the orientation framework teachers rely on for professional teaching based on documented educational knowing. 

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