Learning Expertise in
Practice:
Implications for Learning
Theory
by
Peter Jarvis
Abstract
Building on Polanyi’s insight in The Tacit
Dimension that we know more than we
can tell, this paper argues that we need
to extend our understanding of learning
to incorporate implicit learning, which is
necessary in order to understand the
process of becoming an expert and in
so doing it points to the need to expand
the theories of learning to include the
philosophical dimension.
Introduction
‘I live in my acts’ (Husserl)
Structure of Presentation (1)

I want to start this presentation by
rehearsing with you three different
learning experiences - all from my own
career. The first two are selected to
illustrate similar things whereas the
third is selected to show something
entirely different but they are all about
the interplay between learning and
conscious awareness.
Structure of Presentation (2)
Three Experiences
Conscious Learning
Learning in Practice
Learning Expertise
Problems for Learning Theory
Concluding Discussion
Three Experiences
Hotel in Fukuoka
Nurses Learning
Weavers in Kyoto
Part 1

Conscious Learning from
Experience.
Taking the World for Granted

Schutz and Luckmann (1974, p.7) write about it in
the following way:
I trust that the world as it has been known by me up
until now will continue further and that consequently
the stock of knowledge obtained from my fellow-men
and formed from my own experiences will continue
to preserve its fundamental validity... From this
assumption follows the further one: that I can repeat
my past successful acts. So long as the structure of
the world can be taken as constant, as long as my
previous experience is valid, my ability to act upon
the world in this and that manner remains in principle
preserved.
Time does not stand still

However, time does not stand still and
our own experiences are only valid for a
while and then I am confronted with a
problem because my previous
experiences do not help me a great
deal with a new situation. I have to ask
questions: How? Why? What for? and
so on. I called this point disjuncture
Disjuncture





Disjuncture can occur and cause dissonance in any aspect of life –
knowledge, skills, sense, emotions, beliefs, and so on.
It can occur as a slight gap between our biography and our perception
of the situation to which we can respond by slight adjustments in our
daily living which we hardly notice since it occurs within the flow of
time;
It can also occur with larger gaps that demand considerable learning;
In the meeting of the stranger, the disjuncture might not only occur in
the discourse between them, it might actually occur between them as
persons and their cultures and it takes time for the stranger to be
received and a relationship, or harmony, to be established;
In addition, some disjunctural situations – often emotive in category just cause us to wonder at the beauty, pleasure and so forth that we
are experiencing. In these situations, it is sometimes impossible to
incorporate our learning from them into our biography and our takenfor-granted. These are what we might call ‘magic moments’ for which
we look forward in hope to repeat in some way or other but upon
which we might often reflect.
Learning from experience

We learn from this experience usually
through reflection upon the experience
in whatever domain it occurs and we
incorporate the outcomes in our
thoughts and our actions and, to a
lesser degree, in our emotions into
ourselves. In so doing we transform
that experience and learn from it.
Cognitive Learning
Cognitive learning, then, begins with
the conscious experience of not
knowing
Definition of Conscious Learning



The combination of processes throughout a lifetime
whereby the whole person – body (genetic, physical
and biological) and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes,
values, emotions, meaning, beliefs and senses) –
experiences natural and social situations, the content
of which is then transformed cognitively, emotively or
practically (or through any combination) and
integrated into the individual person’s biography
resulting in a continually changing (or more
experienced) person.
(Jarvis, 2009, p.35)[1]
[1] I
have amended the definition just slightly by inserting the
natural, as well as the social, as being part of our experience.
Figure 2 The Transformation of the Person through Learning
-
The Whole
Person–
Body/Mind/Self
Life History (11)
Life world
Time
Experiences
occurring as a
result of disjuncture
(2)
Thought/
Reflection
(3)
Emotion
(4)
Action (5)
Learning occurs since
disjuncture resolved/
gives meaning/new
meaning to experience/
new skills/practices them
(6)
The Person in the world
The Changed
Body/Mind/Self) changed
Whole Person
Changes memorised and
Body/Mind/Self
some new practices
Person more experienced
Life History (12)
(7)
(Next learning cycle )
The life-world
Explaining the Diagram






Box 1 depicts the situation of people in their life-world but this diagram only reflects a single period of time
and the arrow (from box 1) depicts the movement through time throughout life when we journey from one
life-world to another. However, for much of our time we live in taken-for-granted situations in which we
perform almost unthinkingly similar and repetitive actions, It is in both the social and natural changed and
changing situations that people experience disjuncture (box 1).
The state of disjuncture occurs when we can no longer presume upon our world and act upon it in an
almost unthinking manner; it is at this point that we have an experience (Box 2,) However, there has been
a tendency in my work - and also I believe in other scholars - to restrict experience to conscious
experience, or to the part of the phenomenon about which we are playing attention, rather than
recognising that we actually perceive the whole situation, some of it less consciously than others.
Our experience can be transformed by thought, emotion or action (Boxes 3-5), or any combination of
them.
Box 6 underlines the fact that the outcome of the transformation is that we actually learn or fail to resolve
their disjuncture, but this process itself always results in a changed person,
Even when there is apparently no learning since the experience still affects the self of the learner (Box 7).
When people fail to resolve their disjuncture they can either learn to live in ignorance or with an
awareness that they need to learn in order to resolve their disjuncture or they can start the whole process
off again.
However, I have to confess that this diagram is only partly true since it bears little or no relation to the
learning experiences portrayed at the start of this paper! When, we compare these latter types of
learning, we note that there is no awareness of learning, there is no disjuncture or cognitive experience
and it can happen when I am doing something, practising and also when I am thinking.
How do we learn in Practice?


The above experiences so totally different to the conscious learning
depicted in the above diagram and recorded in the definition. In fact
the differences appear very similar to, but not the same as, those
discovered by Argyris and Schon in their work on espoused theory and
theory-in-use in professional practice. They suggested that there are
two totally different approaches to learning:
Professionals and professional educators - indeed, practitioners of all
sorts - often speak of practicing and learning skills as though those
activities were an entirely different sort than learning a theory and
learning to apply a theory. This viewpoint suggests that skill learning
and theory learning are different kinds of activities; it suggests further
that theory learning may be appropriately undertaken in one kind of
place (school) and skill learning in another (work). Argyris and Schon
(1974, p.12)

Espoused theory is explicit knowledge whereas theory-in-use is implicit:
that is that the knowledge involved in performing the action is tacit.
But significantly they suggested that learning tacit knowledge may be a
different process from learning espoused or explicit knowledge and
that this may be learned anywhere.
Part 2 The Nature of Learning in
Practice
The Nature of Learning in Practice
Learning in Practice

Over the years there have been a
number of suggestions about learning
in practice which arise from all types of
situations. Amongst the early scholars
who discussed this problem was Polanyi
(1958; 1967) who started from a
Gestalt position, although the problem
was addressed by Plato (1956) in The
Meno, amongst the early thinkers.
Two Types of Awareness

However, in one place Polanyi (1958, pp.55-58) focused on two
types of awareness. Using the example of knocking a nail into a
piece of wood, he notes that we attend to the nail and the
hammer in different ways: we hold the hammer and are aware
both of the feeling as we watch the nail being driven in and this
he calls a focal awareness. But we have a subsidiary awareness
which is the feeling in the palm of our hand of the hammer as
we perform the action. However, this subsidiary awareness is
merged into our focal awareness of performing the act. In other
words, we concentrate on the action which we are very aware
of, but the subsidiary awareness is almost unattended to and
becomes part of our experience of the overall action. Two
things are occurring but we are actually only aware of the
action upon which our minds are focused - and we are almost
totally unaware of the subsidiary one but the secondary one has
occurred and does leave its mark on the person using the
hammer. Sennett (2008) also explored this process in a similar
manner.
Metis (1)




In a more recent study Baumard (1996, English trans 1999), who also
returns to Gestalt psychology, introduces a different approach to
knowing starting with the Greek concept metis:
Metis was practised by the Greeks in various areas of life; ‘it is found in
the skill of the sophist, in the know-how of the artisan, in the prudence
of the politician and the art of the ship’s captain navigating dangerous
seas’ Multiple and polymorphous, metis is applied to situations which
are ‘transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous, situations that do
not lend themselves to exact measurement, exact calculation or
rigorous logic’. Committed to action and its consequences, this form of
intelligence has since the fifth century AD been relegated to the
shadows by philosophers. In the name of a metaphysic based on Being
and immutability, the conjectural knowledge of the clever and the
prudent was rejected as non-knowledge. [1]
(Baumard 1999,p.69)
[1] All the citations in this quote come from Detienne and Vernant
(1978, p. 9)
Metis (2)

1.
2.
3.
4.

1.
2.
3.
4.
Baumard suggests that the metis way of knowing has four dimensions:
the rules of wisdom
gained through social practice,
which are both collective
and individual since the individual exercises expertise and intuitiveness.
He discusses how this operates and how we learn to act intuitively as
we go through four stages –
Appropriation - the rules are appropriated into expertise and social
practice
Assimilation- intuitiveness is implicitly transformed into individual
expertise which is socially, explicitly turned into practice
Extension - the expertise is manifest explicitly in the rules of social
practice
Implementation - the practitioner with flair finds ways to outsmart the
rules of social practice
Metis (3)
… knowledge in the invisible, as it acts in
the unseen, ‘arriving at the most correct
idea concerning the future, taking the
widest point of view and foreseeing, as
far as possible, the hidden advantages
and disadvantages in what cannot be
seen.[1]

[1] All the citations in this quote come from Detienne and
Vernant (1978, p. 9)
Learning Metis




The point is that we are not explicitly aware of how
we learn metis – that is the way that we learn
intuitiveness from social practice,
neither are we aware of when our intuitiveness is so
thoroughly learned that it becomes a basis of our
social practice
nor, are we aware of when we gain the ability to
outsmart the rules of social practice because of our
expertise.
In becoming the foundation of our practice we
implicitly develop a sense of confidence that we are
able to perform these actions - we learn confidence
without being aware that we are doing so and we
never set out to learn to be confident.
Tacit knolwledge

This mode of knowing is always present
within us - both in our thoughts and our
actions - it is always tacit but as we
utilise it we transform it into a form of
instrumentalism in which the tacit
becomes more explicit.
Expert Knowledge



This is very similar to the work by Nyiri (1988, p.20-21)
One becomes an expert not simply by absorbing explicit
knowledge of the type found in text-books, but through
experience, that is, through repeated trials, ‘failing, succeeding,
wasting time and effort…getting a feel for the problem, learning
when to go by the book and when to break the rules’. Human
experts gradually absorb ‘a repertory of working rules of thumb,
or “heuristics”, that combined with book knowledge, make them
expert practitioners. This practical, heuristic knowledge, as
attempts to simulate it on the machine have shown, is ‘hardest
to get at because experts – or anyone else – rarely have the
self-awareness to recognize what it is. So it must be mined out
of their heads painstakingly, one jewel at a time. [1]
[1]
All citations in this quote come from Feigenbaum E and McCorduck
(1984)
Expertise and Language

Indeed, language is not adequate to
capture the tacit knowledge of the
expert (Sennett, 2008, pp.94-95) but
not being able to capture in words this
knowledge signifies that the expert has
abilities that are beyond language.
Two Minds

While Baumard included intuition within his individual
action in metis, Sadler-Smith (2010) focused entirely
on it in his analysis of intuition and the intuitive
mind: he suggested that ‘tacit knowledge is the
engine room of intuition’ (Sadler-Smith 2010, p 270).
Sadler-Smith (pp.15-18) suggests that we have two
minds - an analytical one and an intuitive one - or
‘book smarts’ and ‘street smarts’, as he calls them.
The former has the evolved recently; it is powerful
and can over-rule the intuitive mind which is both an
earlier one and it functions more quickly. For him
(p.18), the intuitive mind speaks the language of
feelings
In Two Minds


This was discussed by Goleman (1996, p.17) who
suggested that those emotional sensations that are
transmitted to the amygdala which can, on
occasions, dictate to the neocortex and the
responsive behaviour but this is not always the case,
as Sadler-Smith suggests that on other occasions the
neocortex (mind) can over-rule the emotions.
We can thus see that there is a significant interplay
between conscious and unconscious, or emotions and
other aspects of perception and they can either
control of be subservient to our consciousness in
both action and learning.
Emotions and Learning

Emotions cannot be divorced from living nor
from learning. But they are problematic
phenomena - some appear to be primary and
universal - fear, anger, happiness and
sadness (Turner and Stets 2005, pp.11-21):
other scholars suggest a few others but
almost all are agreed on these four. Other
emotions are secondary. The primary ones
are hard-wired and universal whereas the
secondary emotions appear to be socially
constructed
Flow

Significantly, Csikszentmihali M (1990) recognised a
primary emotion, happiness, as the basis of flow and,
what he called optimal experience. This occurs when
the information that flows effortlessly into our
conscious awareness is congruent with our needs at
that time (p.39). We gain satisfaction when we can
focus our attention and concentrate on what we are
doing for as long as is necessary. The point is that
we are focusing our attention on one aspect of our
situation - our focal awareness as Polanyi specified it
above, but we also have a subsidiary awareness that
gets merged with the focal ones.
Flow


The point is that within this flow situation we
are also embodying sensations about which
we are not aware while we gain happiness
from our conscious experiences. Our body
continues to learn within the flow of
satisfying experience which ensures that we
are not always conscious of what we are
embodying.
It reflects the first of my Japanese
experiences
The Sage – Expert Knower

It is not just skills that are acquired tacitly; the sage
may undergo a similar process. Marton et al (1996,
p.81), studying the frequent repetition by Chinese
learners which is frequently described as learning by
rote since there is constant repetition of the texts
that they are learning. But Marton et al record how
the learners do not view this as mechanical repetition
since they discover new meaning in the text in their
repetition. This is a process of becoming a sage - or
an ‘expert knower’- one who internalises the meaning
and makes it part of the self - rather like the
weavers.
Learning – Conscious and
Unconscious


Learning is, therefore, always a combination
of both conscious and unconscious
experiences - it is always a combination of
body and mind (Jarvis, 2012), although the
cognitive dimension is less prominent than it
has appeared in most theorists of learning,
including me. But the nature of the person is
a contested subject although for person is
regarded as a combination of body (brain)
and mind in this paper.
How, then do we gain expertise in practice?
Part 3
Learning Expertise.
Becoming and Expert







While Baumard plotted the changes from assimilation to
implementation, he does not highlight the process, whereas
Dreyfus and Dreyfus, (1977; 1980) postulated a five stage
process in becoming an expert pilot:
novice,
advanced beginner,
competent,
proficient d
expert.
The novice had to concentrate on the rules of practice but with
the passing of time assimilation turns to appropriation and then
to extension, as the practice changes from novice to
competency to proficiency and finally to expert when the
performance is intuitive

Over time, practitioners ‘lose track of
what they have learned’ (Benner 1984,
p.41) and then as Nyiri (1988) pointed
out above ‘the jewels have to be mined
from their heads one jewel at a time’
although full description of the process
is beyond language. This process of
learning is hardly an explicit one - it is
the way that tacit knowledge is
acquired - learned.
Learning and Time

This five stage process is not a rapid one as
Benner and my questions to the Japanese
weavers in the third example showed - they
said it had taken them about ten years and
Benner also suggests that it takes a long
time, and so the figure of 10,000 hours has
been mooted in a variety of places: ‘ten
thousand hours is a common touchstone for
how long it takes to become an expert’
(Sennett, 2008, p.172).
The Expert



This constant repetition in which experts make minor
adaptations to their practice, or in the case of the sage - their
understanding, in order for it to satisfy their ideal for practice or
understanding.
The acquisition of this knowledge comes through a variety of
situations - supervision by an expert, observation of experts
performing their practice, sharing ideas with fellow practitioners,
in the life of normal practice, by continuing practice itself
repeating the procedures and so on, in all aspects of daily living.
An expert is one who has transferred explicit knowledge to the
sub-conscious - tacit knowledge - which then becomes the basis
of the expert’s taken-for-grantedness of practice. This becomes
one of the foundations upon which the expert’s intuitions and
hunches are grounded, as Sadler-Smith suggests.
Part 4
Problems for Learning Theory
The Problems

Having highlighted a number of ways of
learning to become an expert, in
contrast to the experiential theory of
cognitive learning noted in the opening
section of this paper, it is now
necessary to explore some of the
problems to which this analysis gives
rise.
The Problems




What precisely is learning? Is it always
cognitive and explicit?
Does learning always begin with experience can we have unaware experiences?
Do we always know when we are learning - is
it always a conscious or an aware
experience?
What is the nature of the person who learns?
Learning and cognition



Learning occurs very widely from situations that we experience
- from sensations that come from all the senses and not only
from the realm of cognition. But we learn cognitively in all
three domains of the mental, the emotional and the
behavioural, as we have discussed above. In all of these cases
we learn from both conscious and aware experiences.
But we also learn from our unaware experiences
Our commonplace definition of learning as an experiential
cognitive phenomenon needs to be reconceptualised within the
framework of consciousness and awareness. But we are
unaware of implicit learning : that is ‘learning that takes place
largely independent of awareness of both the process and
acquisition and the content of the knowledge so acquired’ Reber
(1985,p.392), and so we need to re-conceptualise learning.
A Tentative Amended
Definition

The combination of processes throughout a
lifetime whereby the whole person – body
(genetic, physical, emotional and biological)
and mind (knowledge, skills, attitudes, values,
emotions, meaning, beliefs and senses) –
living in natural and social situations
internalises their content and transforms those
sensations consciously or unconsciously, or
both, and integrates the outcomes into the
person’s biography resulting in a continually
changing (or more experienced) person.
Learning and Experience:

Ever since the work of Dewey (1916; 1938) we have
taken for granted that learning starts with experience
which is conscious and cognitive - and we would still
maintain this for explicit learning, but in implicit
learning we may be having an experience but it is not
of the phenomenon about which we are learning the subsidiary focus is not one about which we have
conscious experience unless at some later time we
made it explicit - like I did in recognising the road in
which my hotel was situated. Hence we need to
recognise that we may be learning and not be aware
of it. Is it still learning?
Making Tacit Knowledge
Explicit



Baumard (1996, p.23) records how a Japanese corporation sought to
discover the art of bread-making from a master baker at the Osaka
International Hotel where the baker had a really good reputation, but it
realised that it might not be possible to mine the jewels one at a time
because the master bread maker was not be able to articulate his
knowledge of his skill. Consequently, one of a development team
involved in making the bread-making machines apprenticed herself to
work along side the master baker and learn both by doing and by
careful observation[1]. The researcher was having conscious learning
experiences but the baker’s knowledge, if it may be described as that
was procedural knowledge - tacit knowledge - learned perhaps in a
different manner to the conscious knowledge gained by the researcher
who has explicit experiences about the same process.
But not all occupations or crafts demand an expertise that can be
encapsulated in a machine, but the crafts and the people professions,
amongst others, still need to focus on expertise rather than
competence –
[1] There are major ethical discussions that underlay this research
procedure, but now is not the time to pursue them.
Making Tacit Knowledge
Explicit





But during the process of becoming an expert we also learn two other
things which are crucial to our selves –
We earn to own the role and gain an identity, and
We learn the confidence that we can perform the required acts
learning, or acquiring, identity and confidence are part of the
process of becoming and expert.
The concept of experience is, as Oakeshott (1933) claimed one of the
most difficult words in the philosophical vocabulary and one which we
in education have not explored sufficiently fully and our work on
experiential learning is most frequently based upon a partial
understanding of the concept of experience.
Learning, Consciousness and
Awareness

Consciousness is often defined by awareness but we have seen
in these learning experiences that while the learners are
conscious, they are not always aware of certain phenomena
within the purview of their experience. Indeed, we have always
tended to focus on learning skills etc. rather than the more
generic ‘doing’ - but once we enter this latter arena a much
more complex picture emerges
it also demands an understanding of the nature of the agent
it demands an understanding of intentionality and motivation
This raises profound philosophical questions about issues like
consciousness, which is related closely to experience.
Consciousness and Mental Life



Hodgkiss (2001, p.10), reminds us ‘that
consciousness constitutes only a
comparatively small part of mental life’. He
goes on further to suggest that
‘consciousness is not necessarily the medium
for thinking or learning’
This is misleading since consciousness is
fundamental to some forms of learning those which I want to call conscious learning,
or explicit learning
but implicit learning or embodied learning
constitutes our more frequent form of
learning in everyday life.
The Nature of the Learner:


The nature of the person is a very contentious
subject in philosophy as I began to explore in a
philosophical paper (Jarvis 2012) just recently.
Whether the person is body (brain) and mind is itself
fundamental to this issue and while my definition of
learning assumes that there is both body and mind, it
does not adopt a Cartesian dualist position but one
which is known as ‘non-reductionist monist’ (Maslin,
2001). Other approaches to the nature of the person
will, of necessity, reach a different conclusion to the
one arrived at in this paper –
But this conclusion calls for more studies in the
philosophy of learning.
Concluding Discussion

From the above analysis we can see that
conscious, explicit learning constitutes a
much smaller part of learning than many
learning theorists, including myself, have
suggested and consequently we need to
incorporate implicit learning into learning
theory. In finishing this paper I want to
return to my original theory and revise it
appropriately, as the following diagram
suggests:
Figure 3 The Transformation of the Person through Learning
(Revised)
The Diagram

In the above diagram unconscious life
experiences are transformed and this is the
basis of implicit learning and their route need
not go through box 3 - but only through
boxes 4 and 5, that is through the emotions
or the actions, whereas the transforming of
conscious life experiences is the basis of
explicit learning and this can be depicted as
going through any route (boxes 3-5), but
especially box 3. These are often
simultaneous processes but we can never be
aware of the extent of the former one.
Learning then is fundamental to
life itself

We probably internalise from every life
experience although we are not conscious of
many of them. We would agree with Argyris
and Schon that there are at least two types of
learning but that it is not just a matter of skill
learning and theory learning for these are
about primary and secondary experiences
whereas the focus of this paper has been
about conscious and unconscious learning or explicit and implicit learning - simultaneous
processes that occur throughout our every
conscious moment.