Dynamic knowledge as a tool, not a framework

problems or questions in such practice. Instead, professionals need to be able to generate or assemble representations of the specific situation (and possible solutions) quickly and effortlessly.

A key feature of ill-structured domains is that a single prepackaged schema or prototype case will typically be inadequate as background knowledge to support the processing of a new case. Thus, intact schema retrieval (or prototype retrieval) as a knowledge-based processing mechanism must be replaced by situation-specific schema- and precedent-case assembly (Spiro & Jehng, 1990: 186).

Such dynamic construction of knowledge does not have to be done explicitly. In general, knowledge is not recalled whole, but the very process of recognizing something and recalling knowledge fundamentally involves the dynamic construction of knowledge to fit the situation (See LeDoux, 1996, for review of this research). “Information is created by the observer, not given, because comprehending is conceiving, not retrieving and matching” (Clancey, 1993: 91). However, for this to happen teachers need to have an organized network of implicit, practice-specific knowledge that they can use for this process.

Teaching is an activity filled with uncertainty. The activity that went so well in your 4^th hour class may bomb in your 5^th hour class; students who used relative clauses with great facility in one activity may struggle to do this in a different activity. This means that teachers are constantly constructing on-the-spot understandings of what is happening in the classroom. To do this teachers need dynamically linked knowledge; in other words, knowledge which is linked in such a way that each piece can be combined easily with other relevant pieces if a need arises. This might also be the answer to the problem pointed out by Larsen-Freeman (1983) that one cannot give teachers the specific knowledge they need for all teaching situations in an SLTE program. If teachers have a solid variety of knowledge about teaching in specific contexts, it is more likely that they will recognize the similarity between what they already know and phenomena in another context. In some cases recognizing similarity may not be not enough, so teachers need to be able to create understandings and practices which fit the particular configuration of factors in that contexts. If their knowledge is organized into a tight network for teaching, it will be easier for teachers to create dynamic, on-the-spot understandings of that context. For example, Gott and his colleagues studied aviation mechanics who were required to learn new activities due to restructuring in their organization. It was found that those mechanics who had actively worked on developing a deeper network of understanding of what they did before were able to use knowledge of their previous activity for the new one. Those whose knowledge was not as well connected were not able to do this and learned the new activity like beginners (Gott, Hall, Pokorny, Dibble &

Glaser, 1993)

reasoning and decision making can be modeled by fast and frugal heuristics that make inferences with limited time and knowledge. These heuristics do not involve much computation, and do not compute probabilities and utilities” (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999:

6). As an example, they cite emergency room procedures which classify heart attack patients according to only three variables, instead of taking all possibly relevant information into account. “Its simplicity raises the suspicion that it might be highly inaccurate, compared to standard statistical classification... Yet it is actually more accurate in classifying heart attack patients according to risk status than are some rather complex statistical classification methods” (Gigerenzer & Todd, 1999: 4-5). Thus, knowledge is used more as a tool, working on specific problems, than as an overall framework.

Knowledge as a tool suggests that people only use the minimal knowledge needed for completing a task, rather than constructing a complete representation of the situation to guide practice. For example, Chase (1983) did a very interesting study of taxi drivers in Pittsburgh by asking them to draw maps of the city. Instead of precise, 1-1 maps of the city, their maps accentuated features that were important for taxi drivers while mineralizing features that were not important to them. For example, distances on the maps were more related to time it took to drive those routes than actual physical distances. “If taxi drivers have access to a bird’s-eye metric view of the city, they certainly can’t draw it” (Chase, 1983: 396). Instead, taxi drivers have a lot of specific information about driving routes specific to particular neighborhoods which are linked together. When deciding on a route from A to B they activate only the knowledge of those routes and neighborhoods relevant for the specific task. Thus, instead of using their knowledge as a complete framework of the city to access all possible routes, the taxi drivers use their knowledge as a tool to figure out only the task at hand with minimal cognitive resources. Chase suggested that this eases the cognitive demands of memorizing locations in the city.

The absence of any skill effects in the various cognitive mapping tasks lends little support to the idea that taxi drivers navigate by means of a map in the head. The results do, however, suggest that the large-scale representation of locations is hierarchically organized such that locations are nested within neighbourhoods, and neighbourhoods are nested within large regions and larger regions are located with respect to more global features…Finally, it is suggested that the hierarchical organization of neighbourhoods is important in terms of economy of storage, and that this hierarchy serves as an integral part of planning a route…Hierarchical storage means that one need only store relative locations of places within a neighbourhood (Chase, 1983: 404) [emphasis added].

This emphasis on heuristics or knowledge as a tool rather than knowledge as an explicit calculational model is echoed in Vygotsky’s emphasis on the importance of tools for cognition. Vygotsky argued that humans do not work directly on reality in exactly its scale and with all its details. Instead, we use tools, both physical and mental, to help us process information both in terms of perception and in terms of controlling actions we wish to carry out.

The most fundamental concept of sociocultural theory is that the human mind is mediated…humans do not act directly on the physical world but rely, instead, on tools and labor activity, which allows us to change the world, and with it, the circumstances under which we live in the world…we also use symbolic tools, or signs, to mediate and regulate our relationships with others and with ourselves and thus change the nature of these relationship (Lantolf, 2000: 1).

These tools are taught to subsequent generations of users who continue to develop and improve them. “Physical as well as symbolic (or psychological) tools are artifacts created by human culture(s) over time and are made available to succeeding generations, which can modify these artifacts before passing them on to future generations. Included among symbolic tools are numbers and arithmetic systems, music, art, and above all language”

(Lantolf, 2000: 1). Tomasello (1999) has even argued that the principal difference between humans and other animals is not superior brain power, but our ability to collect and pass down cultural knowledge and tools, resulting in a gradual growth of knowledge for human communities. Feltovich, Spiro and Coulson argue that if people have “a large toolbox of cognitive (and interpersonal) processes and methods”, they will be able to act ably in a variety of circumstances (Feltovich, Spiro & Coulson, 1997: 138). It has also been argued that physical and cognitive tools are important part of learning to teach languages (Freeman & Cazden, 1991; Freeman & Johnson, 2005; Hawkins, 2004;

Winsor, 2001).

If teachers are not guided by general conceptions or knowledge, however, why have a number of studies shown a strong correlation between teachers’ general conceptions and their practice (e.g., Burns, 1992; Johnson, 1992; Woods, 1996)? One possible explanation comes from complexity (or chaos) theory. According to complexity theory, what looks like an overall pattern may be a dynamic combination of local factors, not an overall rule (Gleik, 1987; Larsen-Freeman, 1997; 2003; Merry, 1995). For example, the flocking behavior of birds cannot be modeled by general “rules” for the whole flock.

However, Reynolds (1987) showed three simple rules about how birds should relate to those birds in its immediate vicinity (“avoid collisions with nearby flockmates”, “attempt to match velocity with nearby flockmates”, “attempt to stay close to nearby flockmates”) could account for the overall patterns of flocking birds, even though these rules did not refer to flocking behavior at all. The same may be true for teachers: they may seem to use general rules at times; however, this may be a situation where they are acting according to local rules or factors but it looks like they are guided by general rules.

Take, for example, the study by Breen and his colleagues (Breen, Hird, Milton, Oliver, &

Thwaite, 2001) on patterns of 18 ESL teachers’ practice. Through observations, interviews and grid tasks they identified specific practices that teachers engaged in while teaching (e.g., group work, recasts, gestures, etc.) and elicited the pedagogical principles underlying these practices. One finding was that for any one teacher, there were several principles which supported the use of a particular practice and many practices which could be used to carry out particular principles. Furthermore, they found that the teachers’ patterns were idiosyncratic; teachers did not use the same practices to carry out the same principles and used different principles to justify the use of the same practices.

However, when the results were aggregated, the group of teachers as a whole did exhibit consistent patterns of practices clearly associated with principles and vice versa. Like the patterns made by migrating birds result from interactions between individual birds and not from any master plan to make a v-formation with a specific number of other birds, it may look like these teachers hold a common conception of teaching principles and the practices which support them. However, a more likely explanation for this is that these macro patterns emerge from the dynamics of teachers’ local rules and the local conditions of language teaching in that context.

In SLTE it has long been maintained that L2 teachers need to acquire well-developed, static knowledge of language and language learning in order to teach. It has been

suggested that teachers can use such knowledge, in a linear fashion, to figure out what to do in the classroom: if recasts are better than grammar explanations, then teachers should do the former and not the latter. As we have seen, however, research results indicate that it is not cognitively efficient for practitioners to use complete frameworks to address specific problems of practice. Instead, it seems that people seek and use only as much knowledge as they need to obtain a reasonablely accurate understanding of their situation and options. In other words, knowledge is not used as a framework to explain a whole situation, but rather it is used like a tool to work on very specific, situated problems. For teachers, this means instructional decisions that can flow well and seem to help learning.

Nevertheless, such knowledge is not accurate enough for teachers to feel certain about what they are doing.

Although I never learn exactly where to stand in relation to my students, I develop a reliable sense of what is too close and what is too far. Within these limits, I craft a workable relationship for the moment…I tune my stance continually to the values that seize me. Similarly, though I remain chronically unsure of what to teach and how to teach it, I develop an eye for productive linkage (McDonald, 1992: 1).

The organization of teachers’ knowledge is just as important as the amount of knowledge teachers possess. Knowledge organization helps teachers quickly build on-the-spot representations of a teaching issue or situation and recall appropriate responses without demanding much scarce explicit cognitive processing capacity. However, explicit, rigid theories which try to explain every factor of a phenomenon are not helpful for teachers.

First, teachers’ practice is very unpredictable, which results in teachers using their knowledge to create on-the-spot understandings of classroom issues such as student learning, student interest and the teachers’ objectives for the class. Continually working out a full model of the situation including all factors would require much more explicit processing capacity that is available. Second, people usually use only the minimum amount of knowledge necessary for solving problems such as judging L2 students’

language production or attention span because this is cognitively efficient. Therefore, teachers need knowledge which contains multiple linkages between different parts, for example linkages between communicative activities which could go before or after each other easily or types of student behavior that signal that they are not paying attention.