When Practitioners Get It "Wrong": The Largely Underanalyzed Failures of Professional Tacit Knowledge

Abstract

This essay describes how valuable tacit knowledge (personal knowledge) becomes explicit knowledge (recorded knowledge) and vice versa. It ascribes considerable responsibility for practitioner ignorance of community and organizational realities to American Library Association programs that lack required courses in marketing and advocacy, Finally, it describes how tacit knowledge becomes a basis for determining stakeholder needs and establishing the relationships necessary to develop relevant service programs and funding.

The G20 and the Think 20 as new global education policy actors? Discursive analysis of roles and policy ideas

“…In the course of collaborative professional work over three years, Srivastava engaged in a number of informal dialogues on the evolution of education engagement and the T20. During the formal analytic phases for this paper, insights were interrogated, tested, challenged and refined against published academic literature on the G20 and T20 and organisational websites to guard against potential threats of inaccuracy or bias of professional tacit knowledge (Crowley, 2017). Given that the G20 and T20 are new under-researched actors in global education policy, our involvement enabled us to apply insider insights to deepen the analysis.…”

Theory into practice:: Challenges and implications for information literacy teaching

“…In other words, they demonstrated procedural (implicit) rather than declarative (explicit) knowledge; their inability to define and explain their library pedagogies, drawing on theoretical concepts, is problematic, and reveals these practitioners’ knowledge is exhibited as procedural knowledge. Librarians’ knowledge, resting in the procedural rather than based on a deep understanding of theoretical underpinnings, should be a concern to the profession (Crowley, 2017; Dienes and Perner, 1999) as “[d]ependency on context and embodiment makes implicit knowledge almost impossible to convey to others…and renders explicit knowledge superior with respect to…teaching” (Schilhab, 2007: 236). In addition, understanding tacit knowledge is important for critiquing practices: “tacit practices and assumptions in order to position disciplinary norms and structures, which can potentially contribute to oppression or exclusion, as sites for critical examination” (Miller, 2018: 412).…”

“…Within the higher education context and IL teaching, for example, without librarians’ ability to define the “why” of our practices – from collection development to information literacy teaching – convincing the teaching faculty to allow librarians to teach in new ways within their courses will continue to be a challenge. As long as librarians are unable to define the how and why of practices it will be difficult to convince other professions of the need for the expertise of librarianship, as a distinct LIS discipline (Bombaro, 2014; Church, 2003; Crowley, 2017; Manuel et al, 2005; Nalani Meulemans and Carr, 2013).…”