How Do Teachers Reason about their Practice? Representing the Epistemic Nature of Teachers’ Practical Knowledge

This article was published in Teaching and Teacher Education, Volume 26, Issue 8,
Author(s): Khalil Gholami and Jukka Husu, ' How Do Teachers Reason about their Practice? Representing the Epistemic Nature of Teachers’ Practical Knowledge, Pages 1520-1529, Copyright Elsevier (November 2010).

This study focused on the epistemology of teachers’ practical knowledge.
The study addressed the following research question: how do teachers attempt to reason about their practices and their practical knowledge?

The results indicated that teachers supported their practical knowledge claims using the “practical argument”.

Within this conceptual framework, they relied on contextual grounds that call for the fact that something should or should not be “done”, rather than something is “true” or “false”.

Depending on what kind warrants they used, teachers’ practical knowledge was interpreted to be based on two different epistemic statuses: “practicable” knowledge and “praxial” knowledge.