When educators refer to the knowledge base that informs teacher education, they usually refer to two interrelated areas of knowledge that need to be imparted to teachers, which could be termed pedagogical knowledge (knowledge about effective teaching and learning processes) and what Lee Shulman calls pedagogical content knowledge (not only knowledge about various subject matters to be taught, but an understanding of them as teachable subjects). I want to start by discussing the typical forms that these two areas of knowledge take within the field of education and how they are acquired by most teachers. Then I will try to problematize these typical forms of knowledge, and suggest an alternative way of thinking about pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. Then, finally, I want to consider what this rethinking means in the contexts of diversity, difference, and discontinuity, which are the themes of this conference.
I.
A starting point for any inquiry like this must be: What constitutes certain beliefs as knowledge? This is an age-old philosophical question concerning truth, evidence, and justification; the most pertinent aspects of this issue for my purposes here are the sources of credibility that underwrite what counts as pedagogical knowledge. Pedagogical knowledge, for teachers, typically derives from one of three sources, which I will call experiential, observational, and experimental. Each of these research methods provides a way of gathering information, drawing conclusions, and testing the results. Each yields an aura of credibility and legitimacy to recommendations about what teachers should do in classrooms.
Experiential research draws its conclusions from the lived activities that constitute the practices and relations of teachers' everyday lives. Teachers try out things, they make changes, they cope with unexpected events and watch for the results: sometimes these are as expected, sometimes they disappoint, sometimes they are a pleasant surprise. As circumstances repeat themselves in classrooms, teachers see familiar situations and rely upon familiar responses; patterns begin to emerge. Teachers find out what they think "works for them," and for their students. For most teachers, I expect, this is regarded as the most reliable source of pedagogical knowledge. There is a sense in which one can only perform this sort of research with one's own teaching, one's own classroom - though it is certainly true that teachers anecdotally share these self-discoveries, checking out their own experiences against those of others. But for reasons I will offer in a moment, these interchanges should be considered a kind of observational research.
Observational research, including most kinds of interview-based research, begins to move the research process in the direction of formality and impersonality. It is a type of research that teachers perform when they observe or listen to one another, and it is a type of research that is preferred by many university researchers today. It involves watching and recording teaching practices (with various degrees of formality or informality and using different types of recording technologies as research supplements: from note-taking and checklists of behaviors to audio or videotaping). What is most significant about this research method in this context is that the purposes and criteria that the observer/researcher brings to the situation may not be those of the teacher (something that cannot be true of the experiential case, since there the actor and researcher are one - although in certain cases a teacher might become a distanced observer and critic of her own practices). In observational research, what the teacher counts as a success may be regarded by the observer as failure; the teacher may be focused on certain student outcomes, while the observer sees and cares about others; what the teacher regards as unremarkable routine, the observer may find the focal point of attention (such as the gender patterns of who gets called upon for questions). The researcher is interested in the classroom events for her own purposes, and selects out a subset of all that happens, or all that the teacher talks about, in light of certain pre-existing, if tacit, criteria of what is important (to her). Hence, the reason that I am classifying interviews and other forms of teachers' self-reporting of experiences as a kind of observational research is that the significance of what one teacher recounts (though it may be based upon her experiences) is still filtered through the other's selective interest in what she wants to find out; indeed, she may often draw conclusions from the other's experience that are quite opposed to the conclusions that teacher draws from her own.
Experimental research is the most formal and impersonal of these research modes; it includes work done in field settings as well as in more "controlled" environments, in which processes of teaching and learning are studied by systematically varying inputs and comparing their results against unchanged "control" groups. For a long time, this was unquestioningly the high-status form of pedagogical knowledge in academic settings, although it was never the sole or even primary source of pedagogical knowledge for teacher education candidates or for teachers themselves. The essence of such a research model is to limit the factors that are being considered, so that, ideally, one can isolate discrete explanatory factors in accounting for differences in teaching and learning. Identifying a set of such factors, in turn, is thought to provide a scientific grounding for making changes in pedagogical practice.
Now, it is not my purpose here to critique these three models of research - the experiential, the observational, and the experimental. Each has its uses, I would argue, and each its distinctive strengths and weaknesses. My interest here is in how these research approaches underwrite the status of knowledge claims about pedagogy, and the kinds of knowledge claims they are thought to yield.
All of these forms of research rely upon trying out pedagogical approaches and assessing their results. Some are more systematic in this process; some show a greater regard for context; some seek generalizable results; some do not. But because they are all, in one sense, comparative studies of effectiveness, aimed at finding out "what works" in teaching and learning, they are all prescriptive endeavors; since once you have discovered "what works" (or at least what you think works for you), further choices and decisions about what to do in the classroom are greatly simplified. Hence all three approaches, despite their variety and degree of methodological rigor, tend to encourage the search for tried-and-true tricks of the classroom, which can reassure the aspiring teacher or redirect the faltering teacher by providing them with prescriptions about what to do. They have all, traditionally, reflected a very narrow view of practice. (Just the other day I was looking through a local Educational Psychology textbook and found a chart labelled, typically, "The Ten Commandments of Good Teaching.") Since not every teacher can or should try to redevelop an entire teaching strategy from scratch, it seems only reasonable to try to help beginning teachers by imparting to them the accumulated wisdom of teachers and researchers on teaching who came before them. Yet this approach to teacher education has a fundamental flaw, I will argue.
But first, I want to discuss briefly the other element involved in teacher education, pedagogical content knowledge. As I noted earlier, for Shulman, this content knowledge is not simply the book-knowledge of knowing one's field; it involves understanding such knowledge from the standpoint of what it means to teach it. The organization of a knowledge field by an expert - what are the core concepts, what is the natural sequence of ideas that led to its development, what kinds of questions still need to be asked, and so forth - may be, probably will be, a very poor approximation of the order in which things will make sense for a novice learner. Understanding a field of knowledge in this way, knowing what kinds of questions will spark learners to make their own new connections, knowing which examples or illustrations will help to explain difficult concepts, is a profoundly pedagogical endeavor, one for which experts per se may not be the best sources. A pedagogical grasp of content matter means being able to understand the ways in which new learners assimilate new concepts or relations, and to be able to think along with them in order to help find ways to respond to their questions, doubts, confusions.
Now, of course, this is rarely how content knowledge is communicated to teachers. Particularly when their content knowledge comes from courses within the disciplines, the form in which such knowledge is presented and the purposes to which it is put have little to do with comprehending its teachability for others: for example, the way a university course subject is structured may be a terrible model for teaching the same material to others, especially if they are very young. Added to this problem is the tendency, in my country and I assume yours as well, to assess the effectiveness of teaching by measuring the quantity of material covered, and testing student knowledge through their performance on standardized tests. This tends to elevate the importance of mastering a certain body of facts. So, for example, I learned the other day that "civics" is to become a significant part of the Australian curriculum, but that the benchmarks for this area will largely be a matter of learning isolated facts about the names of prime ministers, the dates when things happened in history, and so forth. Is this why we think civics is an important part of the curriculum? Is the knowledge of certain facts the stuff that makes an active, responsible citizenry? Of course not. But the assessment of a broader conception of the civic virtues could never take place on a standardized test. And critical questions about who is being counted as part of this citizenry and who, tacitly, is not, never get raised at all.
Hence, just as the forms in which pedagogical knowledge is constituted tend to assume that teacher development is primarily a matter of mastering certain effective techniques; so also do the ways in which pedagogical content knowledge is constituted tend to assume that successful teaching is the communication of information, of facts. But we know that information is not the same as knowledge; and that mastering facts is not the same as understanding them.
II.
The conception of knowledge that underpins these views of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge reinforces the traditional vision of teaching (and hence the traditional approach to teacher education). Like any constitution of knowledge, it is implicated in a network of human relations and interests. The representation of practical knowledge as "what works" and of content knowledge as information to be conveyed to students appears to be a means of enabling teachers, giving them the tools and raw materials with which to master the challenges of the classroom. These technicist views of practice and of school knowledge have been critiqued by many writers, as you know - my interest here is specifically with how this approach to teacher education disenables teachers, leaving them less well prepared to cope with the unexpected, the difficult, the ambiguous situations they will encounter. The best that can be said of these traditional approaches is that they might be useful in helping beginning teachers make their initial transition into teaching, when they need the sense of confidence and purpose that this mastery approach to teaching provides. Unfortunately, I would say, this is an illusory confidence.
If one begins with a different conception of what it is to engage in a complex practice, like teaching, then the kind of knowledge one requires comes to be seen in a very different light. The sense of confidence and capability coming from this latter sort of knowledge, however, looks very different from the technicist conception. I will discuss both pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge under three headings: the nature of phronesis, or practical reasoning; the context-sensitivity that good practice entails; and a pragmatic orientation toward the means and ends of education.
First, the conception of practical reasoning known by the Greek term phronesis places a great deal more weight on the role of judgment in deciding what to do. On the side of pedagogical knowledge, this means having a range of alternative strategies at one's disposal, not just a standard technique: it may mean knowing both phonics-based and whole language-based approaches to teaching reading, for example. It means selecting from these alternatives based on experience and specific contextual cues. It means putting approaches together that purists may think can't be mixed. It may mean shifting boats in midstream, abandoning what "should work" (but isn't) for the sake of what might work in an unfamiliar, difficult setting. It sometimes means, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein says, "making up the rules as you go along." And it means making these judgments in a manner that is not simply concerned with effectiveness, but that situates one's choices within a broader sense of personal responsibility; such practical deliberations have an essential ethical dimension, and part of the difficulty of making such complex choices lies in weighing many considerations that lie in tension with one another, not all of which are strictly "pedagogical" in the narrow sense.
On the side of pedagogical content knowledge, this means having more than an outline of material to be covered. It means being aware of the potential significance of ideas and information, in a particular situation, for a particular audience. Knowledge here is not just a set of givens, but a dynamic quantity, constituted in the interaction between certain ideas and the ways in which they are heard, understood, and appreciated by persons. From the standpoint of phronesis, knowledge is both the means and product of human activity; hence one always needs to interrogate a view of knowledge, or an approach to communicating it to others, in light of the sort of practices and relations it fosters. Hence a conception of pedagogical content knowledge that emphasizes coverage of material, that characterizes knowledge as a set of facts to be learned, is deceptive and manipulative however "true" those facts might happen to be: for they foster a relation to knowledge that hides the active, social element in discovering, negotiating, testing, and criticizing what should count as "knowledge."
There is a second, related aspect of this alternative view of knowledge, and again I will discuss it in terms of both pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. There is a necessary element of context-specificity in any complex view of practical reasoning, of adapting one's strategies to fit changing circumstances. Certain views of pedagogical knowledge cannot account for this. There is an old joke in the U.S., that if you give a kid a hammer they will see everything as needing to be hammered. Many educators are like this: they try to adapt circumstances to fit their favored methods, rather than vice versa. And many teacher educators see their job as one of handing out hammers.
A different view of pedagogical content knowledge, similarly, includes an element of perspectivism: not that all truths are relative, or that nothing is any more worth teaching than is anything else, but that belief claims can be evaluated differently given varying background assumptions. How did certain beliefs become established as credible; whose authority was given credence in this process; and whose was not? Now, I for one am reluctant to see this lead to a flattening of all perspectives; there are better and worse ways of adjudicating knowledge claims, and it is a responsibility of teachers to understand these and to help students understand them. But these ways of adjudicating knowledge claims are not autonomous or automatic; they are themselves practiced, in specific contexts, by specific people. Part of teaching pedagogical content should be to teach about how that knowledge came to be, which includes considering the disputes that were part of that process. The givenness or "obviousness" of certain truths, taught with the benefit of hindsight, obscures and mystifies the real struggles and differences that such conclusions contain hidden within them. A perspectivist view of pedagogical content knowledge would consider teaching knowledge claims as themselves the outcomes of human practices; as artifacts that (like any human artifact) can tell us as much about the process by which it was formed as about the thing itself.
The third way in which I want to re-examine notions of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge involves a more fundamental shift in attitude, which I'll call here a pragmatic orientation. On the side of pedagogical knowledge, this means teachers adopting a problem-solving orientation to classroom situations: one that expects difficulties and complexities that outpace the effort to manage them; one that accepts error, at a profound level, as a condition of learning and new movement, not as a sign of failure; one that replaces a hope for smooth sailing with an expectation of rough waters. The technicist view of teaching is based on trying to anticipate the range of possible problems one might confront, and to provide strategies for coping with each and every one of them. If one can classify a new situation in terms of a standard type, an appropriate treatment can be prescribed.
But what about situations that do not conform to those types? What happens when the prescribed measures don't make the difficulty go away? What about difficulties that never go away, but are the steady-state condition of certain classrooms? These require a different sort of problem-solving approach, one geared more toward achieving acceptable balances, moderate accomplishments, than toward once-and-for-all resolution. And they require a different sort of attitude, one prepared to accept the imperfectibility of educational settings, where there always will be the residue of the unresolved, the unfinished, the unlearned.
On the side of pedagogical content knowledge, a more pragmatic orientation would destabilize the finality and certainty with which much school knowledge is proffered. When knowledge has been resituated in the context of human practice, bounded by the conditions in which it was produced and by the circumstances of who was and was not involved in producing it, it loses its aura of objectivity. Its credibility, as it stands, is one that needs to be open to the possibility of future renegotiation and challenge. If the history of human ideas, including the history of science, teaches anything, it is that all views turn out to be wrong eventually, or at least to be seriously incomplete; why anyone should think that our current claims to knowledge are proof from such skepticism is beyond me.
I have written elsewhere about the educational fruitfulness of doubt and uncertainty, not as questions to be answered so that they will go away, but as ongoing attitudes toward the possibility of being wrong. Educationally and personally, we seem to have a problem with talking about doubt and uncertainty, and especially with admitting our own. We think that our task as learners, or as teachers, is to make doubt and uncertainty go away. Yet the fundamental educational task, it seems to me, the key to becoming what people like to call a "lifelong learner," is accepting the perpetually unfinished, flawed state of one's own understanding, and recognizing that one's present state of knowledge, however complete and encompassing it seems to be, can always be reconsidered from another vantage point as terribly inadequate.
What I have been doing is to sketch three ways in which pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge can be refigured beyond the technicism that predominates in much of teacher education: to go beyond pedagogical knowledge as technique and pedagogical content knowledge as a litany of information. I have tried to suggest, instead, that we think about these within a richer understanding of human practice: first, focusing on what phronesis, or practical judgment, actually entails; second, looking at the context-sensitivity that effective practice requires; and, third, adopting a more pragmatic orientation toward the means and ends we can realistically hope to serve. In all of this, the role of teachers as acting, individually and collectively, to formulate attainable goals, to consider alternative means of attaining them, to adapt their methods to changing circumstances, and - yes - to fail, to make their own mistakes, to accept the imperfectibility of teaching and learning, is given much greater latitude than in most teacher education at present.
From this pragmatic standpoint, the very sharpness of the distinction between pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge can be questioned: whether pedagogical knowledge, or the "how" of teaching, does not itself imply substantive content in terms of what is learned. This was the key insight of the "hidden curriculum" work of a couple of decades ago: that choices about whether to adopting cooperative learning activities, standardized tests, ability grouping, Socratic questioning methods, and so forth, were practices that yielded particular learning outcomes apart from the explicit content they ostensibly were meant to communicate. Similarly, pedagogical content knowledge, the "what" of teaching - especially under Shulman's characterization of it - clearly assumes certain methods in how that knowledge is organized for teaching purposes. Hence, the pragmatic turn I am describing here is a challenge to conventional knowledges about how to teach and what to teach, but also to the presumed boundary between them; both are reconstituted within a conception of practice that eschews simple means/ends dichotomies. Our engagement in particular practices implicitly expresses ethical and political choices, whether we are aware of them or not.
And with this pragmatic turn, also, we see that a limit around what we ordinarily include within pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge has itself been circumscribed. Once we think about teachers making these larger judgments, taking responsibility for them, making their own mistakes, and living with them, we realize that the ordinary curriculum of teacher education cannot suffice. For the issues of practice I have been discussing here are, at their heart, not purely pedagogical problems; they are problems concerning the values and attitudes with which one approaches teaching. They do not even encompass what we ordinarily refer to as the "foundations" of teacher education: the history of great educational ideas, or the social and historical contexts of schools as institutions. Rather, these values and attitudes touch upon the sort of person one is, the sort of outlook one takes toward life and its possibilities; personal qualities that are shaped much more by one's experiences in reading literature, or history; by looking at art; by learning a foreign language; by travelling or living in very different cultures from one's own. These sorts of experiences help one to recognize the boundaries around what one takes for granted, and to see what lies beyond them. They help prepare a person to accept the unpredictability, the difficulty, and the imperfectibility of human practices. They can heighten one's appreciation of human differences. And they can promote a broader understanding of the social, historical, cultural, and political contexts of one's practice - and of one's position within those contexts as an ethical/political agent.
Hence, paradoxically, as programs of teacher education insist on more and more intensive coursework in what they consider to be the areas of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge, the thinner the learning in those areas turns out to be. By trying to make teacher education more "practical," they actually make prospective teachers less capable of engaging in the complex practices that teaching requires. By worrying too much about what constitutes "good teaching," they have neglected what it takes to make a "good teacher."
III.
Now, the theme of this conference has three elements: diversity, difference, and discontinuity (the three D's). I take diversity as referring to the diversity of sites in which education takes place today: not only to classrooms, but to workplaces, to the media, to the Internet, and to the corresponding diversity of learners and learners' needs in each of these contexts. I take difference as referring to the social and cultural differences among these learners, and to the very different sorts of teaching approaches, and teaching contents, that may be appropriate for each. And I take discontinuity as referring to the problem that the assumptions that have traditionally guided teaching practices, the structures of existing institutions, the verities of what needs to be learned, and so on, may be impediments to thinking anew about the educational challenges we face on the eve of a new millennium.
With these themes, or these themes as I have formulated them, I could not agree more. I believe that they advance the types of challenges toward conventional understandings of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge that I have been talking about. They present us with such questions as:
1. Who contributes to the knowledge base of teaching? If pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge are, as I have argued, fundamentally prescriptive, then whose values are represented there? Whose are not? It is not just a matter of developing a knowledge base about how to deal with "difference," because there are different kinds of difference, and what works for certain kinds of difference may not with others. That is why, I think, we have to be careful of litanies of all the categories of difference that exist (class, gender, race, disability, ethnicity, sexual orientation...), because each of these is its own site of difference, with its own history, its own difficulties - and because many of our greatest educational challenges are in the intersections of multiple lines of difference, or in the blurry margins between them.
2. What are the sources of our teaching knowledge base? What authority do they possess? At present, university credentialling programs claim a virtual monopoly on the teacher education process, and claim a large role in defining and interpreting what the pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge bases ought to be. In an era of deregulation, this monopoly will begin to break down, and other credentialling agencies will come onto the market; when they do, what positive case can university programs make, in the face of competing alternatives, for the value of their programs over others? I am fairly certain that this case cannot be made on the basis of narrowly technical conceptions of teacher effectiveness. The capacity of universities to situate the development of teachers within the values of a broader liberal education could become one of their advantages - but they can hardly argue that they do a good job of that now.
3. How, where, and by whom is the teaching knowledge base questioned or contested? If one takes a view that situates knowledge claims in the context of human practices, relations, and institutions, as I mentioned earlier, questions of how and under what circumstances knowledge is made raise questions, in turn, about the inequalities and injustices of those circumstances. These considerations are no longer "external" to the question of the knowledge claim's credibility, but integrally part of it. What happens when such questions get raised about the pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge bases of teaching? Who benefits and loses from particular conceptions of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge? What are the limits of what we can expect from any particular knowledge base in providing general answers for the myriad situations and problems that teachers encounter?
For example, I began this essay by looking at the three primary sources of pedagogical knowledge: the experiential, the observational, and the experimental. From the vantage point of the three D's, what can be said about these traditional sources?
It is not as simple as asking whose experiences should inform pedagogical knowledge, for example, or responding "teachers' experiences." First of all, the population of teachers has its own exclusions and silences. Beyond this point, however, is a narrow professionalist view of who counts as a teacher. The result of conventional assumptions in teacher education about the value of experience has been that the culture of teaching is terribly hermetic and self-perpetuating. From the fact that many university education faculty are former teachers, to the requirement of student teaching under the supervision of an experienced teacher, to the formal and informal peer pressures of conformity once a beginning teacher arrives in school, the conventional "craft wisdom" of teaching - which does have many important insights, to be sure - continues to perpetuate itself. The spaces left for critical self-reflection, for non-conformity, for fundamental challenges to the meaning of the practice, are meager indeed.
The patterns of observational inquiry are often equally hermetic: whether as university researchers or as teachers informally watching, listening, and learning from one another, we tend to return to familiar settings and to cases that are variations on familiar themes. What would happen if one tried to radically break such patterns? What if someone interested in teaching secondary history observed preschools? (Though one might say, I suppose, that studying preschoolers can be a good preparation for dealing with secondary students.) If someone interested in teaching English observed science teachers? If someone interested in teaching history observed carpenters teaching their craft to novices? If someone interested in teaching ethics observed mothers talking to their infants? If someone interested in teaching young children observed how they interact outside of school with television, or with the World Wide Web? I am suggesting that from such observations one might learn something surprising and truly different about one's teaching - that one's conceptions of pedagogical knowledge and one's conceptions of pedagogical content knowledge within a subject matter might both be subject to change.
And what of experimental inquiry? Rather predictable questions come to mind, such as Who is carrying out such research, and who is not? Under what conditions is such research being done? How it is being funded? Where is it being published? What are the rewards for those who conduct such research? These, one might say, interrogate the material conditions of the production of experimental pedagogical knowledge. Deeper questions might challenge the very characteristics that define this as scientific, high-status knowledge, for many educators: Does the system of experimental controls make such research irrelevant to the murky, unsterile environment of classrooms? Does the selection of a particular population of subjects limit the relevance of such studies for students who are different from them? Does the non-diachronic character of most experimental studies artificially abstract their results when translated into the non-stop dynamics of a classroom, in which there are rarely discrete beginnings, middles, and ends to teaching moments? I raise these questions not, not, to argue that experimental studies are worthless, but to suggest that their authority, like that of experiential and observational studies, will be seen differently when viewed from the vantage point of the three D's.
In a sentence, the traditional forms of research on pedagogy have tended to be guided by the search for One Best Method of teaching, which I have argued relies on a thin and unrealistic conception of teaching practice. Hence one of the major challenges in developing a new knowledge base for teaching is in turning these research methods to new purposes, or developing new research methods. Similarly, with pedagogical content knowledge: the challenge of teacher education is not simply in packing in "more" content, but in asking what kinds of content; and in examining what we assume is necessary in terms of content against the background of the three D's.
To summarize these points briefly: Recognizing the diversity of educationally significant settings and purposes should make us wonder about the relevance of traditional classroom experiences and observations, or formal experimental arrangements, in generating the kinds of pedagogical knowledge needed to cope with these diversifying settings and purposes. Even more strongly, are such traditional sources of knowledge adequate in helping educators to rethink and reform those settings and purposes? Recognizing the radical, and possibly incommensurable differences among and within social groups should make us wonder about the genesis of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge claims: whose voices are privileged and whose are ignored in the research that substantiates them? Recognizing the discontinuities and impermanence of knowledge systems and traditions of inquiry over time should make us wonder about the stability of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge claims, and indeed the relative merits of conceiving teacher education primarily as the transmission of pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge.
Perhaps, given a richer conception of teaching practice, the characteristics and attitudes of a successful teacher will have more to do with adaptability; with the development of skills and dispositions of inquiry and ongoing learning; with a capacity for collaborative problem-solving with various partners; and with skills of communication with new and multiple constituencies demanding a voice in decisions about educational means and ends. What would it mean to reorient teacher education around such primary goals?
From this standpoint, the question of a changing knowledge base for teaching is dialectically linked with changing practices of teaching: yes, in the obvious way that changing knowledge informs and changes practice, but also by reconsidering the changing practices (and changing attitudes) that will be necessary for a continual rethinking of that knowledge base.
Let me then raise one last topic, by way of conclusion, where the three D's all come together: the globalized context in which the pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge bases of teaching now need to be rethought. In this context, the sources of knowledge, the conditions under which knowledge is produced and disseminated, questions of access to knowledge, the awareness of radical differences in perspective toward that knowledge, the question of the portability of knowledge from one context to another, the transience of knowledge in a rapidly changing and diversifying world, are heightened, if possible, even further. One context that exemplifies all of these elements is the Internet - a topic I have much to say about, under other circumstances. But here it must suffice to point out that a certain parochialism in thinking about the relevant contexts to which pedagogical knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge need to be applied has become a serious impediment to refashioning an educational vision for the future. The focus on teaching for "our" schools, "our" students, "our" communities - an attitude that I expect is as prevalent in your society as it is in mine - ignores both fundamental problems about the differences that already exist, hidden, behind those presumptive "our"s, and the even more striking differences between those settings and their relations to a growing transnational educational community. There is an opportunity now for rethinking new possibilities and new challenges in this global context. At the same time, there is a clear consequence for failing to undertake this rethinking ourselves: namely, that someone else, somewhere else, will do it for us.
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