The problematic relationship between knowing how and knowing that in secondary art education

Abstract

This article explores and attempts to rectify current conceptual confusion found in secondary art education in the UK between procedural knowledge or ‘knowing how’ and declarative knowledge or ‘knowing that’. The paper argues that current 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 confusion is replicated in the national examination, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, taken by students at the age of 16. 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‐in‐brain hemisphere dualism. The article advocates a Wittgensteinian embodied, socio‐cultural view of mind as a way of solving the current conceptual confusion that prevails in art education in the UK.