expertise

Knowledge representation, defined as the way individuals structure their knowledge and cognitive processing of events and the associated sense-making processes, is believed to influence teachers’ reasoning/thinking skills. While extensively researched in mainstream teacher education, this line of inquiry is essentially lacking in the L2 teacher education literature. To fill some of the void, the present study explored 36 – 18 novice and 18 experienced – EFL teachers’ representations of classroom management events. The teachers were presented with 8 fragments involving management problems in a novice teacher’s performance and were asked to provide their representations of the scenes. To explore likely differences between the two groups’ representations, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. Data analyses indicated that experienced teachers provided a significantly higher number of representations across majority of the categories of the coding scheme, except for disciplinary issues which were of prime concern to novice teachers. The implications of the study for pre-service and in-service teacher education are discussed.

The paper offers a distinctive reading of Popper’s work, suggesting that his Logic of Scientific Discovery (LScD) might be re-interpreted in the light of his Open Society. Indeed, Popper can be interpreted as criticising certain aspects of his first book, and as a result improving upon them, in his second. It suggests translating what Popper says about ‘conventions’ into his later vocabulary of ‘social institutions’. Looking back, I believe that Popper never intended the language of conventions and decisions to be read individualistically. I remain unsure whether Popper was himself quite as clear about this as he could have been.  My reading makes Popper a pioneer in the sociology of science. Scientific institutions are arenas of political power; but Popper did not discuss the structure and inter-relations of the social institutions of science, or offer a politics of science in the context of his methodology. What is missing from the skeletal sociology of LScD is the politics. We could put it in Popperian terms this way: scientific institutions are both open and closed. They are closed, firmly, to the inexpert, to the non-members; supposedly they are open to the qualified, provided the prerogatives of seniority and leadership are acknowledged. Despite these shortcomings, Popper’s critical and rational approach and his insistence on openness and intellectual honesty are still important today.