Topic/background:

Over the past three decades, there has been an extensive discussion about the practice aspects of teaching and the limits to how much of teacher education that can be reduced to propositional or declarative knowledge presentable in books and open to written tests. Elements of this discussion can be found in a wide scholarship that, in different ways, takes its bearings from Aristotle and his distinction between techne (the craft-like aspects of knowledge, in this case teaching) and phronesis (the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom needed in order to exercise good situational judgment). Through this Aristotelian distinction two forms of practical knowledge are characterized, both being of central importance for teachers in their professional activities. These considerations have resulted in some insightful critiques of academic teacher training as placing too little weight on those aspects of the profession that require practice. Simultaneously, the degree to which both forms of practical knowledge must remain tacit and thus fundamentally outside of academic reflective practice may have been overstated. The issue can be framed in three steps:

1. Teaching is a matter of propositional as well as practical knowledge and know-how.
2. The practical aspects need practice (actual or simulated).
3. This practice needs to be reflective both in the sense Schön thinks of reflective practice and in the sense of critically deliberating about what constitutes good and bad practice respectively.

Research question/objective:

I will be joining the discussion at the third step by arguing for a better understanding of how narratives and imagination intersect with both aspects of practical teacher knowledge: the craft-like and matters of practical wisdom. The aim is to demonstrate how educational narratives constitute an articulation of both techne and phronesis thus allowing for critical reflection as well as the growth of teacher’s practical knowledge.

Conceptual framework:

In order to do this I will make some additions to the Aristotelian conceptual framework taken from narrative inquiry and works dealing with narrative imagination. First by arguing that practical knowledge, both in its craft-like form and in its form as phronesis, emerges from its tacit state through narratives because stories remain close to the particularity/situatedness of such knowledge. Second, by arguing that a vital part of framing practical knowledge-forms in narratives is their contribution to our narrative imagination, ie. our capacity to use them as sources for acting wisely and/or expertly in similar contexts.

Having established the conceptual framework, I will continue by presenting a group of narratives taken from a study of craft teachers remembering educational episodes and interventions. Based on these I will go on to argue that they represent examples of how the craft-like aspects of teacher knowledge come to be articulated together with those of practical wisdom and virtue.

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