The Knowledge Infrastructure Language Education Never Built

If you are online often, you have probably come across a genre that I call teacher populism, posts (often just memes, because populism travels better without the burdened of too many words) that flatter teachers into believing that they face more overwork than every other profession, that nobody outside the classroom can really understand what teaching involves, and that we should trust teachers blindly because they are the ones who “actually do the job”. Fighting populism is not my concern here, except where it concerns the research-practice continuum, which is a big part of what I do professionally as a language teacher educator. And I would like to take as a starting point a meme that I came across recently, claiming that ‘teachers don’t need training or paperwork”

I don’t think it’s worth our time to even discuss the ‘no training’. But I did spend some time thinking about the “paperwork” claim, wondering not just what the author of the post had in mind but also what kind of paperwork other professionals engage with. In the process, this led me to problematise what, I think, is a serious infrastructural problem in the epistemology of language education, that is, in the way we teachers approach knowledge building.

Between anecdotal and formal knowledge

When dealing with teacher populism, it is often useful to start by comparing the claims with other examples. Often this shows that teaching is not that different from other professions, invalidating claims to exceptionalism.¹ On this occasion, I tried to compare teaching with three other professions that invest heavily in learning from accumulated experience: medicine, the military and aviation, a partial and arbitrary list assembled by accident of my own professional trajectory and encounters. What I ended up, however, was a fundamental difference in epistemic² infrastructure.

For many other professions, from medicine to aviation, documentation is one of the principal ways in which practice becomes knowledge, because individual experience is not automatically assumed to be equivalent to collective expertise. In this post, I draw on examples such as medical case reports, military after-action reviews and incident reports in aviation, to show how all these professions have created a meso-level of knowledge building between anecdotal experience and formal research reports — essentially a bridge between theory/research and practice. And I argue that language education would benefit a lot from such a way of sharing experience and transforming it into knowledge.

Learning from unusual cases in medicine

Some time ago, I agreed to proofread a medical article by a friend, a doctor in the local hospital, who was not confident in her English. I was expecting to receive a 20–30 page document, so I was quite pleasantly happy to see that was just six pages long: It began with a case history describing a patient and their symptoms, went on to list the differential diagnosis (a list of possible different health issues that could explain some or all of these problems), and went on to describe the diagnostic procedure through which the medical team identified what was, apparently, an unusual manifestation of a common issue. The article finished with a list of very practical recommendations and a set of photographs.

This is an example of a medical case report, a well-established genre of medical writing in which clinicians document an unusual, difficult or otherwise instructive case. Not every doctor routinely publishes case reports, of course. But producing them is a recognised part of medical scholarship, particularly in training and academic medicine, and clinicians regularly read this kind of literature when it is relevant to their practice. (This is a good time for me to ask: how often do language teachers read about cases that can inform their practice? Why is this different?)

The case report provides a mechanism for turning situated professional experience into knowledge that can travel. Alongside practices such as morbidity and mortality (M&M) meetings, where clinicians collectively review difficult cases, complications, adverse outcomes or deaths, and case conferences, where practitioners discuss complex or diagnostically challenging cases, this constitutes a substantial epistemic infrastructure through which the knowledge generated in practice can circulate back into practice.

How the military generates lessons learned

The military is probably not an institution that comes to mind when thinking of professions that work with knowledge. However, they do have surprisingly robust procedures for transforming evidence into institutional learning. One of these is the After Action Review, a structured inquiry that takes place after training exercises. An AAR can be oral (hence the term “paperwork” may not apply strictly), but it often ends up in a report for circulation both up and down the chain of command.

The structure of an AAR report is actually quite simple: It contains sections that look to answer the following questions:

• What was supposed to happen?
• What actually happened?
• Why was there a difference?
• What should we sustain, and what should we change?

But despite looking simple, AARs can do quite sophisticated epistemic work: A well-written report reconstructs an event against an explicit standard or plan, distinguishing between intention from outcome. It brings together multiple participants’ perspectives, validating individual perception but reconstructing events collectively. It attempts causal explanations rather than merely describing outcomes, uses this analysis to generate specific recommendations in future practice.

These recommendations are then fed back to participants and sent upwards to specialists whose work it is to develop training standards and doctrine. Publications with ‘lessons learnt’ are often required reading, especially in training courses, and officers are expected to be very aware of them. In this way, the military sustains a formal pathway through which for scrutinising local experience, generalising with caution, and informing collective professional practice.

Learning from incidents in aviation

Aviation provides another useful example, as I learnt from a participant in a seminar, who is also an amateur pilot. Whenever something unusual happens in a flight, pilots need to file an incident report. This doesn’t just include accidents, but also events where things almost went wrong or could have gone wrong (no ‘pilots need more time to fly, less paperwork’ nonsense there either).

These incident reports are quite practical and event-focused. Typically they describe what happened, under what conditions it happened, what factors contributed to the event, what actions the crew took, and what –in the pilot’s opinion– might reduce the likelihood of such incidents recurring. Mechanics then use these reports to guide repairs, while specialists read them to identify hazards, recurring patterns, and weak points in procedures, training, equipment, or organisational systems.

Aviation, from what the participant told me, has also developed a strong “just culture” tradition around this process: pilots are not afraid to share what they observed and what they think, and disclosure of mistakes does not generally lead to repercussions. The idea is that a pilot’s individual experience is a useful starting point, but the profession becomes stronger through collective knowledge.

The missing link in education

Which brings us to (language) education. Teachers generate potentially useful professional knowledge all the time, and anyone who claims that this is not as valuable as the knowledge coming from the laboratory is misguided. But this valuable resource is often epistemically stranded. Most usually, it remains locked in private experience; it frequently becomes an anecdote; it might be converted into a reflective assignment; but only very infrequenlty, if someone undertakes practitioner research, it could be reconstructed along the lines of academic research conventions. I am not aware of (m)any intermediate genres, above the anecdotal level but below the level of the research report,³ through which teachers can say: “Here’s something unexpected; these were my competing interpretations; here’s what I tried, and here’s the evidence; and finally here’s what colleagues might want to learn from it.”

Some historical background

Part of the reason, I think, is historical. Many of the practices in our teacher education programmes grew out of what Wallace (1991)⁴ termed the applied science tradition, itself in part an alternative to older ‘apprenticeship’ or ‘craft’ models of teacher education. At the risk of oversimplifying, this involves a division of level where university-based specialists produce general knowledge about teaching, teacher educators transmit it, and teachers then apply it in classrooms. In the ‘applied science’ model, evidence from the classroom is irrelevant, and deviations from what the ‘science’ predicts must be failures in the ‘application’.

The training hospital

This is in quite stark contrast with the professional formation practices in other fields. In medicine, for example, the division of labour is much less clear-cut: clinical academics commonly combine research and teaching with the practice of medicine itself, and we can see this clearly in the concept of the teaching hospital. In this context, it seems almost natural that medicine created legitimate professional genres below the level of the research article: Case reports, clinical audits, grand rounds, M&M conferences and clinical guidelines are not all “research” in the strict sense, but they are part of the profession’s epistemic machinery.

The Prussian General Staff

We can see something similar in the military tradition. The Prussian General Staff, which became an influential model for the professionalisation of many modern armies, was not a separate academic body commenting on warfare from outside the army. It was an organic part of the army itself. General Staff officers were career soldiers, alternating between staff appointments and command or line duties. The same officer might therefore spend one period analysing operations, developing plans or contributing to doctrine,.⁵ and another commanding troops and confronting the practical consequences of those ideas. This rotation did more than blur the line between theory and practice: it gave officers a direct stake in the quality of the work they produced.

What counts as evidence

Because the educational ecologies in these fields developed so differently, they have tended to produce different approaches to the question of what counts as evidence.

Educational research and practice has tended to be cautious about single classroom examples; a single case does not establish a universal rule, and we shouldn’t pretend it does. But, then again, neither does a single medical case, military exercise or aviation incident. Medicine, the military and aviation have not solved the problem of the single case by pretending it generalises; they have solved it by understanding that while it may not be proof of something, it is not nothing either. An aviation incident report matters even if the failure it describes has never happened before, because it detects a technical problem or a weakness in a procedure that a million uneventful flights would never reveal.

The single case is not proof of anything, but it is nothing either.

In professions that invest in learning from experience, genres developed to accommodate this type of ‘intermediate’ knowledge. With the possible exception of classroom-based research, which I will address shortly, language education seems trapped in a crude binary, in which individual experience is either treated as sufficient because “teachers know what works” or it is discounted because it does not meet the standards of formal research. Both moves skip past the category that I am trying to describe: evidence that is honest about being partial, and valuable precisely because it doesn’t pretend otherwise.

But what about classroom-based research?

This seems like a good place to address the counterclaim that language teacher education is not entirely without a candidate for this middle layer between anecdote and formal research. Action research, exploratory practice and other formulations of classroom-based inquiry have been part of the field’s vocabulary (and required course reading) for decades. They have their own journals, their own methodological literature, and their own place on most teacher education syllabi. In my own teaching, I ask teachers to identify problems in their practice, plan interventions, observe their effects, and reflect on what happened. On paper, this looks very much like the kind of bridge genre I have been describing.

And yet classroom-based research⁶ has not, in practice, come to occupy the position that case reports occupy in medicine or after-action reviews occupy in the military. I think the reason lies less in the method itself than in what exists, or does not exist, around it.

Making knowledge building ordinary

The first difference is one of ambition. In medicine, a case report is a modest genre: a clinician does not need permission, funding, or a supervisor to write one, and nobody expects it to yield a generalisable claim. An after-action review is written the week after an exercise,⁷ not at the end of a semester. But in much of our teaching, classroom-based research takes the form of a scaled-down version of formal research, complete with literature reviews, ethical clearance, and narrative scope spanning several chapters.

Where the other genres I have discussed are deliberately low-key, ordinary events, in many teacher education programmes we seem to have absorbed the ceremony of a thing it was never meant to be. Producing a classroom research report has become an effortful undertaking tied to a qualification, rather than something a language teacher might do routinely, the way a pilot files an incident report.

Creating pathways for sharing knowledge

The second difference is infrastructural. An M&M meeting in a teaching hospital is a recurring event with a standing time on the calendar and a room full of colleagues obliged to attend. In a military unit, an S3 (operations and training) officer will expect to receive an AAR, and (s)he will feed upward, where people will read it and write up ‘lessons learnt’ brochures.

We do not have equivalent circulation systems for the knowledge that teachers produce in class, even when they do so in a systematic way. Typically, the audience who will read the report is just a supervisor, or a small committee, and then the report will end up in a file that nobody will ever read. The specialist journals that do publish action research provide a valuable dissemination venue, and they help research reach an interested audience, but they operate on the same submission, review, and prestige economy as any other academic outlet. This means that the knowledge produced is gated by exactly the conventions the genre was supposed to sit below.

There is a form without a pathway: there is nowhere for the resulting knowledge to travel, and no institutional actor whose job it is to notice patterns across many teachers’ projects and feed them back into training or standards.

Fostering conditions for candour

The third difference is cultural, and I think it’s the deepest one. The reason why the incident reporting system in aviation works so smoothly is that it takes place in what we might call a just culture. By this I mean a culture in which a pilot who reports an error or a near-miss can reasonably expect protection, rather than punishment.

Classroom-based research, on the other hand, tends to take place in assessment contexts, and because of this it is likely to invite the exact opposite disposition. A document that exists for assessment is not a promising context for the candid, exploratory account that a genuinely useful case report requires.

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Just to be very clear, none of this is an argument against classroom-based research. The argument that I am trying to make is that we need to take this more seriously as infrastructure than as mere method; we need to build on the good work that solved the methodological half of the problem and extend this to solve the institutional half.

Revisiting the research-practice gap

What all this suggests, to me at least, is that we may be approaching the research-practice gap in language education in unhelpful ways. One usual formulation frames it as a problem of dissemination, research literacy, relevance, or practitioner engagement. Another treats research as parasitic on language teaching and irrelevant to teachers’ actual needs, and calls instead for teacher autonomy untethered from theoretical foundations and empirical constraints (remember the ‘teachers don’t need training’ slogan at the beginning of the post?). Both formulations are, of course, sketches drawn to bring two positions into stark relief, and both are wrong in this unnuanced form. But their disagreement obscures a shared blind spot.

Neither side, in insisting that teachers should either blindly defer to research or exclusively trust their own judgement, asks why language education never built the institutions that would let it do both at once, the way medicine, the military and aviation have. Language education is missing an entire middle layer between private experience and academic research: recognised, rigorous, practitioner-facing genres through which teachers can document, circulate and challenge experiential knowledge.

Notes

1. I once came across a claim that teachers need longer vacations than other professions because “they make as many as 15,000 decisions a day”. I have no way of counting decisions, but I did ask how many decisions a taxi driver makes, and never received an answer. ↩︎
2. I will be using this word a lot in this post. It just means ‘of knowledge’. Epistemology, which you will also encounter a few times, means ‘everything connected with how we build knowledge’ ↩︎
3. Which is not to say that there are none – the earliest issues of journals such as ELTJ were quite close to what I have in mind, as was a book by Keith Richards and Julian Edge, entitled Teachers Develop, Teachers Research (get in touch if you have a copy you don’t need). More recently, work in the IATEFL Research SIG, and the kind of modest-by-design and practitioner-facing Exploratory Action Research developed by Richard Smith and colleagues, comes close to the middle layer I have in mind. Such exceptions aside, I think the point stands that such work is very far from being an institutional feature of the profession. ↩︎
4. In the book, Wallace contrasts three different approaches to teacher education: an apprentice-craft model, an applied science model, and what he proposes as a new approach, a reflective model. ↩︎
5. Typically, officers would study tactical problems from past (or future) campaigns and produce written plans, recommendations or battlefield orders, which would then undergo Kritik from a senior officer or peers. ↩︎
6. I use this as a terminological shorthand to describe the wide family of research formats, such as Action Research, Exploratory Practice, Practitioner Research, Lesson Study, and more, in which teachers research their own practice. In a strict definition of the term, this would exclude research done as part of coursework. For the purposes of this post, I will not pretend that classroom-based inquiry is widespread outside structured assignments, and I will therefore include the latter in the discussion. ↩︎
7. In post-midnight, caffeine-fuelled writing frenzy ↩︎

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