From teachers' behaviour to teachers' action: Understanding what context means in research in teachers' knowledge and practice

The researches of teaching have moved from investigation of teacher behaviour to the consideration of the thinking and decision that teacher made for their action in their teaching. In this paper, I have adopted Shulman’s (1986) notion of research programme to summaries the types of research in this area. An attempt is made to describe and examine the ‘hard core’ of the different types of research programmes on teachers’ knowledge and practice. The typification of the research programmes is based on the work of Hoyle and John (1995) and Noel (1993). A discussion is make on how of the notion of context is being dealt with in the various types of research programme. The aim is to bring out some of the issues of current concern with context and to articulate the implications of this trend for research in teacher knowledge and practice. The discussion is organized round the questions: What is context? Why is it significant? What are its implications? The process-product research programme purely ignores the teachers’ context. The teacher-thinking programe focuses on the figure-ground conception of context only. It failed to explore the interconnections of teachers’ action with the instructional system under study. The pragmatic programme recognizes the context in teachers’ practice, but sees the need of its transformation. An argument is made that future research programme should focus more on understanding the ‘context’ of the practice of the teacher. Copyright © 2000 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.