Michale Eraut is University of Sussex and SCEPTrE Senior Research
Fellow, University of Surrey. Here is a photograph of him. I don’t know how recent it is.
The article ‘Non-formal learning and tacit knowledge
in professional work’ by Michale Eraut (British Journal of Educational
Psychology (2000), 70,
113–136) is not a very recent
article, but it presents very significant views for the Structure, Culture and
Agency project. It would be a disservice to oversimplify this article in order
to summarise it here. For this reason I am rather providing the author’s own
abstract:
Background. This paper explores the conceptual and
methodological problems arising from several empirical investigations of
professional education and learning in the workplace.
Aims. 1. To clarify the multiple meanings accorded to
terms such as ‘nonformal learning’, ‘implicit learning’ and ‘tacit knowledge’,
their theoretical assumptions and the range of phenomena to which they refer.
2. To discuss their implications for professional practice.
Method. A largely theoretical analysis of issues and
phenomena arising from empirical investigations.
Analysis. The author’s typology of non-formal learning
distinguishes between implicit learning, reactive on-the-spot learning and
deliberative learning. The significance of the last is commonly overemphasised.
The problematic nature of tacit knowledge is discussed with respect to both
detecting it and representing it. Three types of tacit knowledge are discussed:
tacit understanding of people and situations, routinised actions and the tacit
rules that underpin intuitive decision-making. They come together when
professional performance involves sequences of routinised action punctuated by
rapid intuitive decisions based on tacit understanding of the situation. Four
types of process are involved – reading the situation, making decisions, overt
activity and metacognition – and three modes of cognition – intuitive, analytic
and deliberative. The balance between these modes depends on time, experience
and complexity. Where rapid action dominates, periods of deliberation are
needed to maintain critical control. Finally the role of both formal and
informal social knowledge is discussed; and it is argued that situated learning
often leads not to local conformity but to greater individual variation as
people’s careers take them through a series of different contexts. This
abstract necessarily simplifies a more complex analysis in the paper itself.
This paper is so important for researching
professional development for several reasons:
1. It sets out very well the role of the immediate
environment for learning and professional development, and why the immediate
work context is so important
2. It explains why an individual learns both from
formal programmes and informal settings, thus that both are important and
require attention in strategies to enhance professional development
3. At a more theoretical level, the article discusses
the value of ‘deliberative’ or more overt, explicit learning, as well as the
value of more tacit learning. There is a tendency sometimes to emphasise the
value of theory and explicit learning and criticize the role of non-formal or
experiential learning, and vice versa, to overemphasize informal learning. A particularly
deleterious outcome of the latter, is the statement, heard often in
universities, that academics do not need to be trained to teach, as they have been
doing it all these years. I find this polarization of views particularly
unhelpful, and don’t believe that it advances our understanding of how
academics learn to teach.
