Project: How do you explain a vague concept?

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More about the project

The project is an ongoing pilot study on the intelligibility of open, interpretable concepts. My focus is on didactic choices and strategies regarding the understanding of non-specific concepts and how vocational teachers work practically to create a good learning situation for students. The questions that I initially chose to explore are based on some empirical examples and pilot interviews, which is why the study has so far had the character of work-in-progress.

In addition to this, I will continue with ethnographic studies in different learning situations. Within practical knowledge, terms of “good judgment” or “professional judgment” have once again come into focus. Jonna Bornemark (2020) has highlighted “the forgotten human judgment” and questioned the lack of trust in the experience-based judgment of public servants. The concept of judgment can also be further relativized by asking the question of whether it can be assumed to be a personal character trait or something that can be developed. Gradually, the concept of professional judgment has been abstracted, discussed and redefined, but it is sometimes perceived as vague and is still open to personal understanding and design. The ability to make informed decisions and choices in a stressful situation has always been relevant in most professions that vocational education is about, but in our recent discourse it is also questioned based on the recent advances in technological development.

Another non-specific concept that is an essential part of the practical and epistemological basis for vocational knowledge is “tacit knowledge”. Understanding the elasticity of these concepts is important for didactic choices in a teaching and learning situation, where conceptualization and intelligibility of incorporated vocational knowledge should be made visible and transformed into meaningful knowledge in addition to being integrated with an appropriate theoretical basis.

Judgment can also be understood as “pactivity” (Bornemark, 2020:72ff) and its function in relation to the individual’s need for room for action, which can be associated with a working life that is undergoing rapid transformation. This opens up the possibility of empirically investigating how the concepts of “professional judgment” and “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi, 1966, Jahnke, 2019) are used in classroom dialogue within vocational education today; “if” and if so “how” are open, unspecific concepts such as “judgment” and “tacit knowledge” used and explained within vocational didactics and in what contexts? How are these concepts made understandable in the physical and virtual spaces where learning takes place today? What conversation strategies, models, reality-based examples and or other forms of representation does the vocational teacher use in his teaching around elastic, practical knowledge concepts?

How is a learning interaction stimulated and created on site? How are these linked to a specific profession and a developed professional knowledge and in what contexts of teaching? Bornemark, J(2020) The horizon always remains: About the forgotten judgment. Stockholm: Volante Förlag Haregreaves, A & Fullan, (2013) Professional capital: developing teaching in all schools. Lund: Student literature Jahnke, A: (2019) Developing education: scientific basis, proven experience, tacit knowledge. Stockholm: Liber Polanyi, M (1966) The Tacit Dimension, Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

The project is part of the research in the Research Group focusing on vocational education (webpage in Swedish) and within the Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Education in change