Chapter 1: Investing in the Formative Nature of Professional Learning: Redirecting, Mediating, and Generating Education Practice-As-Policy

What constitutes educational knowledge? This question is at the crux of competing discourses in and on education, although it is rarely acknowledged or addressed in the varied perspectives taken to offer answers. And, so, diverse assumptions, values, and beliefs about educational knowledge can undergird the practices of a veteran fifth-grade teacher waiting patiently for an answer from a student; prompt a research study of the value of smaller class sizes using randomized trials; suggest philosophical and theoretical frameworks for classroom strategies; and/or influence the efforts of a governor advocating to a state board of education for more rigorous content standards. Plausibly each of these suggests a viable, if incomplete definition of educational knowledge, but more relevant to this volume is that these four “draft” responses can be so disparate from each other. They might differ, in part, because we have become so accustomed to thinking in triumvirate terms of educational practice, research, and policy as if all involved understand these notions in the same ways and can easily distinguish and operationalize them to chart the future.