Leslie Cunliffe is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Education and Lifelong Learning, University of Exeter, where he has experience of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and higher degree supervision. He has taught undergraduate students studio-based practice, art history and critical theory. He runs the secondary PGCE course, which has a national reputation for excellence. His research embraces a range of subjects to include empirical aesthetics, cognitive processes and art education, assessment and learning in art education, the relationship between sociocultural processes and psychological processes and art education, the relationship between declarative and procedural knowledge in art and art education, through to his more recent work on reconstructive aesthetics and art education that draws on Wittgenstein's work and other ideas related to aesthetic and ethical value. He has also published papers on Ernst Gombrich and Peter Fuller. His most recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, the Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology, the Journal of Empirical Aesthetics, and the International Journal of Art and Design Education.
AbstractThis article explores and attempts to rectify the current conceptual confusion found in secondary art education in the UK, including the national examination known as the General Certificate of Secondary Education taken by students at the age of 16, between procedural knowledge or "knowing how" and declarative knowledge or "knowing that". The paper argues that current classroom practice confuses procedural knowledge with declarative knowledge. A corollary is that assessment evidence for "knowing how" which is shown or demonstrated is confused with assessment evidence for "knowing that" which requires spoken or written forms of reporting. The article traces this confusion to three dualisms: the Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, an individual mind and the distributed mind of culture, and the more recent mind-inbrain hemisphere dualism. The article advocates a Wittgensteinian solution to the current conceptual confusion in art education in the UK, so that mind is understood as embodied and relational.The Problematic Relationship between Knowing How and Knowing That in Secondary Art Education.
2The idea of thinking as an occurrence in the head, in a completely enclosed space, makes thinking something occult. (Wittgenstein, 1970, # 606) 'Thinking', a widely ramified concept. A concept that comprises many manifestations of life. The phenomena of thinking are widely scattered.………..It is not to be expected of this word that it should have a unified employment; we should rather expect the opposite. (Wittgenstein, 1970, #110-112) This article analyses the current malaise in the respective treatment and teaching of declarative knowledge in relationship to procedural knowledge in art education in England. The current confusion between "knowing how" and "knowing that" which this article will attempt to rectify is symptomatic of much deeper and w...