How Teachers Know: A Case of Epistemological Conflict

This paper examines the epistemological assumptions underlying the classroom activities df teaching and of objective evaluation. Activities of teaching and learning are shown to be contingent and ongoing and as such are seen as organizable around a coherence epistemology. Objective evaluation, on the other hand, assumes knowing conforms to principles of correspondence between a fixed language and stable objects. These epistemologies are conflicting and the teacher is thus often caught between the bureaucratic demand for standardized evaluation of learning and the ongoing contingencies of teaching and learning in the classroom.