The final lens through which we can view our practice is the lens of theory. Although this book argues strongly for the importance of learning from experience, this doesn't mean that formal educational literature is, by definition, irrelevant. Far from it. If I believed this I would have wasted a good part of my own life writing words that meant nothing. Educational literature can help us investigate the hunches, instincts and tacit knowledge that shape our practice. It can suggest different possibilities for practice, as well as helping us understand better what we already do and think. In this chapter I want to examine how reading educational theory, philosophy and research can provide new and provocative ways of seeing ourselves and our practice.

Before examining the contribution of theory, I want to say a few words about the unsound and unworkable distinction often made between 'theorists' and 'practitioners'. The musings of educational theorists are often contrasted with the practicalities of teaching. Theory and practice are viewed as existing on either side of a great, and unbridgeable, divide. I believe that this theory-practice dichotomy is a nonsense. Making this distinction is epistemologically and practically untenable. Like it or not, we are all theorists and all practitioners. Our practice is theoretically informed by our implicit and informal theories about the processes and relationships of teaching. Our theories are grounded in the epistemological and practical tangles and contradictions we seek to explain and resolve. The educational theory that appears in books and journals might be a more codified, abstracted way of thinking about universal processes, but it is not different in kind from the understandings embedded in our own local decisions and actions. As Usher (1989) suggests, formal theory serves as "a kind of resource and sounding board for the development and refinement of informal theory - a way of bringing critical analysis to bear on the latter" (p. 88).


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