{"id":782,"date":"2018-05-24T16:42:59","date_gmt":"2018-05-24T16:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/lli\/?p=782"},"modified":"2025-02-26T13:27:44","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T13:27:44","slug":"the-knowledge-versus-skills-debate-part-1-forgetting-what-we-know-about-knowledge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/staffblogs.le.ac.uk\/lli\/2018\/05\/24\/the-knowledge-versus-skills-debate-part-1-forgetting-what-we-know-about-knowledge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Knowledge ‘versus’ Skills Debate, Part 1: forgetting what we know about knowledge."},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the many poorly-framed, point-missing \u2018debates\u2019 that regularly plague contemporary education goes something like this: \u2018should education be focused primarily on teaching knowledge, or on developing students\u2019 skills?\u2019 Even attempts to reconcile the (apparent) \u2018knowledge .v. skills\u2019 opposition with reasonable-sounding appeals to its being \u2018a bit of both\u2019 miss the main point \u2013 namely, that the whole debate itself betrays a narrow and reductive view both of knowledge and of the skills<\/span> practices of knowledge production (practices which themselves entail various forms of knowledge and ways of knowing) without which there wouldn\u2019t be any, er, knowledge to argue about in the first place.<\/p>\n

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When people refer to \u2018knowledge\u2019 in such debates, what it often turns out they actually mean is \u2018course content\u2019 or \u2018subject knowledge\u2019 \u2013 that vital, precious stuff that quite appropriately constitutes the bulk of the teaching on university programmes. However, a too-narrow equation of knowledge as such with course content in particular, fails both to account for how this content comes to exist in the first place and also (and this is where the debate becomes particularly dishonest and unhelpful in the context of HE) just how preoccupied we are with precisely with this very question. As educationalists we are, after all, interested not simply in how students come to know vital course content, but also in how they come to know the following: how to engage with that content more critically; how to produce it themselves, individually and collaboratively; why all this matters in the first place; and, last but not least, how to perform these various forms of knowledge in ways we\u2019ve decided are credible and legitimate (performances which, in turn, imply they also know<\/em> what \u2018credible\u2019 and \u2018legitimate\u2019 mean and are supposed to look like). An academic discipline is not, after all, simply a body of content. It also comprises all of those practices, values, beliefs, methods, genre conventions, debates, controversies etc. that both inform and shape (indeed, make possible at all) the production of that content. And each one of these can be understood in terms of the particular kinds of knowledge and ways of knowing they require of participants.<\/p>\n

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(NB. As Dr Matthew Allen<\/a> (School of Business) explains, on the aptly-named Foundations of Knowledge<\/em> module, the idea of knowledge itself taking various forms and serving various purposes is actually a very ancient one (for example, and as Matt teaches his students, it’s a central theme of Aristotle\u2019s The Nichomachean Ethics<\/em><\/a>\u00a0written in the fourth century BCE). Over many, many centuries, numerous scholars from a wide range of fields have debated what knowledge is,\u00a0what forms it takes, what it\u2019s for, who it’s for and so on (Kautzer, 2015). For an excellent discussion of how debates concerning different types of knowledge (declarative, procedural, technical, ethical, existential etc.) relate specifically to student learning in HE, see Chapter 4 of Johnston et al<\/em>., 2011).<\/p>\n

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It\u2019s far more helpful, in my view, to think about what knowledge we want students to develop, both in terms of relevant course content but also, crucially, its production \u2013 the latter being, in any case, inextricably related to the former. After all, so much of what students are asked to do involves this process of knowledge production. This is true even when students are in lectures, listening (hopefully!) to the knowledge produced by others. The notes a student leaves a lecture with are themselves an outcome of this process, produced by the student in some form of dialogue with the lecturer and the materials presented. (I could digress at this point into a rant about how a quite bizarre orthodoxy concerning lectures being the apparent\u00a0enemy of \u2018active learning\u2019 seems to have taken root in parts of HE, but that’s for another blog post, perhaps\u2026<\/em>) Beyond more formal lecture settings, students are also constantly required to engage in knowledge production \u2013 for example, when they\u2019re getting on with coursework. This practice itself requires, indeed presupposes, various forms of knowledge without which no piece of student coursework would ever materialise. What is more, it is precisely these kinds of knowledge that we regularly assess students on and implore them to develop. Take a look at any number of marking and assessment documents and you\u2019ll find explicit references to \u2018subject knowledge\u2019 form just one component of overall judgements, with qualities like \u2018depth of analysis\u2019, \u2018critical engagement with ideas and assumptions\u2019, \u2018quality of argument\u2019, \u2018coherence of structure\u2019, \u2018fluency of writing\u2019, \u2018relevance to the question\u2019 etc. also strongly emphasised. All of these phrases themselves signify \u2013 often somewhat opaquely it has to be said \u2013 certain forms of knowledge and ways of knowing. It\u2019s worth pointing out, too, that few if any of them can be meaningfully or helpfully understood by reference to \u2018skills\u2019 \u2013 at least not in the reductive and de-contextualised sense that (alas, still all too common) notions of supposedly generic \u2018study skills\u2019 seem to imply (Lea and Street, 1998; Wingate, 2006).<\/p>\n

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To take an example from my own experiences as a History undergraduate, whenever I handed in an essay, I was developing and drawing on (well, in the case of the half-decent ones, at least!) the following kinds of knowledge:<\/p>\n