Imported Theories/Local Understandings: Part 1

by Donald Freeman

Note: This is an abridged version of a plenary address given at the 34th Annual TESOL Convention in Vancouver, March 2000. The oral character of the talk has been retained. Part 2 will appear in the December/January issue.

I want to talk about the knowledge we teach by, and I want to start with this point: We are looking in the wrong place if we turn to academic disciplines to define teaching and learning and make them understandable. The knowledge that animates language teaching can--and needs to--be found within the activity of teaching itself and not beyond it, in work about teaching. In the phrase "the activity of teaching," I mean something more than just the actions of individual teachers in the classroom, or the actions and reactions of learners. I'm referring to the teacher and learners as participants: to the ways in which they conduct their work together; to the background of that work; to the tacit norms and the explicit rules they evolve to do the work in the classroom, institution, and wider community; and to the tools they use to get the job done. All of this together constitutes knowledge--knowledge that comes through discovering and testing what teachers know in and through classroom practice. It is knowledge composed of local understandings. It does not need to depend on importing ideas from elsewhere. This is my argument; let me set the stage for it.

The dynamic of knowledge in language teaching is an interesting one. It can be framed in two interrelated questions:

1. What counts as knowledge in language teaching?
2. What knowledge do language teachers teach by?

The first question is purposefully ambiguous. When I ask what counts as knowledge in language teaching, the retort comes: counts to whom? to researchers? teacher educators? administrators? policy_makers? learners? Or to the folks who are doing the job in the classroom? That is precisely my point: What counts as knowledge to one group may or may not be what counts as knowledge to another. The problem is that we assume that there is common knowledge that everyone in the field of language teaching does or should subscribe to. This is where the second question comes in. By asking about the knowledge language teachers teach by, I want to focus directly on language teachers themselves, on how they know what they know to do what they do, regardless of where that knowledge originates.

Let me draw an analogy. A while ago, I heard a radio interview with an academic who had contributed to a newly published UNESCO encyclopedia. In the discussion, the interviewer pressed the author on why a new venture of such magnitude was necessary. After all, she queried, didn't we basically know most of the facts already? The author replied with a story. He explained that his family had lived for generations on the banks of a major river that they knew as the River Niger. Years later, when he was in elementary school, he learned from a then-available encyclopedia in the school library that the River Niger had been "discovered in 1796 by a Scotsman named Mungo Park." This left him with the question: Because the river had been "discovered in 1796," how could his forebearers have lived beside it and never known it was there?

I want to explore this notion of the river that has not been formally named. There is a river by which those who are now working, and who have worked, in classrooms live. But it is unnamed because it has not yet been discovered ... at least by those whose job it is to draw maps, write encyclopedias, and to codify knowledge. Teachers' knowledge is the river that has not been recognized because it has not yet been formally mapped or named.

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