Evidence receives elevated attention in teacher education today, and this attention fuels the urge to identify the impact of evidence for teaching, both on international and on national level. On a national level, Austria established a federal agency for educational research and development (BIFIE) in 2008, and assigned to this agency the innovative development of both schools and teaching. On an international level, the identification of evidence that enables this development turns out to be difficult. Empirical studies show that some teachers use research knowledge as a resource to think about their teaching, but only very infrequently to explain or justify their action (Cain 2015, 484). This well documented situation may be due to a missing connection between ‘evidence’ and contingent decision-making in teaching, and a lack of recognition of characteristics of teaching in research that produces evidence. The argument points to a schism between the knowledge researchers construct about teaching, and the knowledge that teachers rely on when they teach. To address this schism, educational research needs a robust conceptual understanding of different types of knowledge that teachers draw on when they explain and justify action, and how evidence may be integrated into practice. This paper draws on Polanyi’s epistemology to conceptualise teaching as practical knowledge. A Polanyi perspective on teacher knowledge argues that both involved practices of teaching and detached practices of reflection are neither critical nor uncritical, but based on sets of personal beliefs, which guide situated attention, and effect judgements about what needs to be done with respect to a specific pedagogical situation (Wieser 2016, 595). Drawing on Foucault’s conception of care of the self, belief can be conceptualised as the outcome of recollection, a reflective practice in which previous experiences are problematised. From this Foucauldian perspective, teachers ground their practice in professional values and personal concepts of teaching, knowledge that can be made explicit and which is refined through problematisation (Wieser 2018, 645). Problematisation allows a teacher to arrive at beliefs that are both justified and true, and evidence can become an object of thought when it is presented in a way that resonates with professional values and concepts. Ultimately, this perspective highlights that evidence is contested when a teacher cannot link it to personal knowledge, and when it does not provide a resource for problematisation – but also that evidence may become a resource when it enables the problematisation of pedagogical experience.

Cain, T (2015) Teachers’ Engagement with Research Texts: Beyond Instrumental, Conceptual or Strategic Use. Journal of Education for Teaching 41 (5): 478–492. Wieser, Clemens. 2016. Teaching and personal educational knowledge – conceptual considerations for research on knowledge transformation. European Journal for Teacher Education, 39(5), 588-601. Wieser, Clemens. 2018. Evidence and its integration into teacher knowledge: foucaultian perspectives to link research knowledge and teaching, Journal of Education for Teaching, 44:5, 637-650.