ABSTRACT
All knowledge is not equal in value or worth. Different kinds of knowledge have a different status in society. Thus the ‘hard’ quantitiative data of national tests, regardless of how flawed they might be, is preferred by some to ‘soft’ qualitative data, or using formative assessment to find out a great deal about what children know, can do and understand. Likewise, for the likes of Lawlor (1990) and the right-wing think tanks of the early 1990s, subject matter was seen as being of prime importance for teaching, and other sources of knowledge for teaching, such as knowledge about culture and society, about children and about pedagogy, were seen as being of little importance. To regard one knowledge base as being of greater importance than all the others is to misunderstand professional knowledge for teaching: each part of the amalgam of pedagogical content knowledge is as important as the others. This point is significant when one comes to examine the kind of knowledge I have labelled as empirical or social knowledge of learners. This is knowledge of what children of different ages are like; what interests or preoccupies them; their social nature; and how contextual factors can affect their behaviour and learning. It is this part of teachers’ knowledge which is most likely to be characterised as common sense, and dismissed as a potentially important knowledge base because the knowledge seems so obvious (to some) to acquire, so trivial, and so straightforward. It is sometimes characterised as intuitive because it is based on close observation, and indeed teachers may not be able to articulate this knowledge or reasoning which led them to teach in a particular way.
