What does research say about teacher learning and teacher knowledge?: Implications for professional development in South Africa

There have been a huge number of professional development initiatives for teachers in South Africa over the past two decades, and yet we have seen little change in the quality of education in the country. The reasons for this are very complex, encompassing the social and material conditions in which teachers work, the ongoing legacy of apartheid in the form of disorganised and dysfunctional schools and the radical nature of the recent curriculum reforms. This paper aims to add to these explanations, by arguing that in order to be more effective, professional development initiatives need to take much greater cognisance of the kinds of teacher knowledge that teachers need to acquire and the various ways in which they acquire these different types of knowledge. My starting point is that teachers' core instructional work is the practice of organising systematic learning ( Morrow, 2007), and thus developing this practice this should be one of the goals of professional development initiatives. My aim is to bring together some key literature and research on teacher learning and teacher knowledge to engage with the question: In what ways and in what spaces do teachers learn and acquire different kinds of knowledge that are necessary in order to organise systematic learning? What is the implication of this for the practice of professional teacher development in the context of South Africa? The purpose is to develop more nuanced and complex understandings of teacher learning and teacher knowledge, which will then impact on the ways in which we design and deliver teacher development programmes.