Am Soc (2008) 39:86–93 DOI 10.1007/s12108-008-9033-2
Are Instructors Who Have “Practical Experience” Necessarily Superior to Those Who Don’t? Scott R. Harris
Published online: 7 February 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008
Abstract Personal or practical experience is often touted as a uniquely valuable source of knowledge in academia, as in everyday life. Assumptions about the necessity, superiority, or insightfulness of “first-hand familiarity” with a phenomenon (such as working as a police officer or suffering discrimination) can shape hiring decisions, influence how faculty members present themselves, and guide the developmental trajectory of departments. These assumptions can be superficial, however. This article questions the universal appeal of personal experience by arguing that it is not without limitations; not always possible, desirable, or relevant; sometimes not dramatically distinct from other ways of knowing; and sometimes inferior to other ways of knowing. Prior experience can have benefits, but is not an unassailable source of knowledge and should not be treated as an unqualified “good.” Is it important for a professor who teaches about policing to have personal experience working as a police officer? In a course on families, would a childfree, single-by-choice adult teach less insightfully than a married, divorced, or cohabitating parent would? When the course subject is racial discrimination, is it imperative that the instructor is not Caucasian? Would it be inappropriate for a professor to contribute to a teacher-training program in primary education if he or she has never taught at that level? Does one need to serve as a therapist, journalist, lawyer, or doctor before one can teach expertly about those professions? Many in the academy, including sociologists, might quickly answer “yes” to some or all of these questions when, in my view, the correct response would be “it depends” or “not necessarily”—and sometimes simply “no!” The above questions all stem from a basic and recurring issue: What is the value of “personal” or “practical” experience in the academy? Are “first-hand” experiences
S. R. Harris (*) Department of Sociology & Criminal Justice, Saint Louis University, 3500 Lindell Blvd., St. Louis, MO 63103-2010, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
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especially significant, or uniquely beneficial, in relation to other ways of knowing, such as reading and conducting research? The issue arises in many contexts, most dramatically in hiring. Colleagues debate whether and what kinds of practical experience should be listed as advantageous in the description of an open position. Then, as they discuss the credentials of competing candidates, the relative value of “practical” and “non-practical” experiences can potentially surface again. After being hired, a faculty member may advertise the benefit of his or her “real-world experience” in conversations with students and on their personal or departmental websites1. In all of these contexts, faculty members sometimes implicitly or explicitly argue that: & & & &
Professors know better what something (such as being a police officer) is really like if they have actually “been there and done that” for themselves. Learning about something in school or through research is often inferior to learning about it first-hand. Knowledge gained through research, reading, or classroom instruction can bear little resemblance to actual practice. Prior “practical experience” should be given a great deal of weight in faculty hiring decisions.
For example, a former chair of my department once distributed a “talking points” memo with instructions on how to promote our graduate program in the Administration of Justice. We were advised to state that our students would “learn from a criminal justice faculty who…have practical experience working and leading criminal justice organizations. The faculty has practical experience in policy development, correctional administration, law enforcement, and criminal prosecution. Students will benefit from the integration of theory with the practical realities facing current criminal justice agencies” (emphasis added). I have heard faculty members in my department express similar sentiments about our undergraduate Criminal Justice program as well, in contexts where high school and undergraduate students inquired about the majors offered in our department, in discussions concerning the recruitment of new faculty, and other situations. Clearly, first-hand experience can be very useful. And certainly there can be a chasm between the “realities” taught in the classroom what occurs outside of it. However, I think individuals could sometimes be a little more humble when they make claims about first-hand experiences. Proclamations of the superiority, necessity, or uniqueness of practical experience can be based on superficial assumptions. The potential benefits and drawbacks of prior or current “hands-on” experience are often not carefully considered, let alone systematically studied. In what follows, I will argue that although practical experience has value, it is (a) not without limitations; (b) not always possible, desirable, or relevant; (c) sometimes not completely distinct from other ways of knowing; and (d) sometimes inferior to other ways of knowing things. 1
Then, in course evaluations, students may echo this sentiment, claiming how valuable it has been to learn from a former or current practitioner. Alumni and administrators may also be receptive to such claims.
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Are There Limitations to First-Hand Experience? First-hand experience is often presented as an unqualified “good.” However, there are many possible limitations to this way of knowing. Basic concepts of research methods and epistemology—such as sampling, data collection, theory, and naïve realism—can be used to highlight some of the major limitations that will likely recur whenever someone seeks to ground their expertise in practical experience. Sampling It is fascinating to listen to professors who, on one occasion, complain about students’ misplaced respect for anecdotal evidence and then, on another occasion, tout the virtues of their own first-hand experiences. Why aren’t a professor’s prior experiences considered anecdotal evidence as well? When students or professors claim knowledge based on their personal experiences, they risk generalizing from an “N of 1,” as in “This is what happened in my case.” Or, if they include their personal knowledge of others (such as previous co-workers) that they encountered during their prior experiences, then what they have could be considered a convenience sample. Either way, there are often clear limits to the generalizability of this sort of knowledge. Suppose a professor has worked for five years as a police officer, a teacher, or a journalist. This individual may claim to bring extra insight into the classroom because of all these years of “practical experience.” However, what may be missing in such a claim is the idiosyncratic nature of that professional background. Police departments, schools, and newspapers can be located in urban, suburban, or rural communities. They may serve predominantly wealthy, middle-class, or poor clientele. The composition of these organizations, as well as the people they serve, may vary by race, culture, religion, and numerous other variables. It may be very different to police, teach, or report in a small town in Maine, in a middle-sized city in Missouri, or a large city in California. A single individual can only acquire so many experiences. It seems safe to say that any professor’s experiential “background” will be extremely limited, at least when compared to the diversity of the areas about which he or she will teach. Data Collection A second potential limitation to prior first-hand experiences involves how those experiences were recorded. How did the individual “collect data” while undergoing the experience? Did he/she take careful notes? Look for patterns as well as for disconfirming evidence? Or, did he/she merely let the experience wash over him or her, with experiences being remembered in a non-systematic way? Unless the professor was skilled at ethnography and autoethnography (see Anderson 2006), it is likely that the knowledge gained via practical experience was assembled in an unsystematic, haphazard way. Memory is not strictly a rational process—as scores of sociologists have argued (Berger 1963, ch. 3; Maines 1993; Zerubavel 1997)—and basing one’s knowledge claims on ad hoc memories is problematic. Thus, poor “data collection” is a potentially significant limitation that is not likely to be mentioned when an individual claims to have a wealth of practical experience to teach from.
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Theory The proponents of practical experience often trivialize theory: “Theory” is merely armchair speculation—only someone with first-hand experience can know the “practical realities” that exist “on the ground.” Practice is portrayed as occurring in a world of facts and actual happenings, while theory is the stuff of “ivory towers.” But there are more positive ways to view theory. Theory enables a person to think clearly and systematically, to organize and make sense of observations, to guide data collection and analysis. Good data are nearly useless without a theory to make sense of them, and an effective theory can assist in the accumulation of research efforts across many studies and years. Not all practitioners may be adept at, or even have respect for, thinking theoretically. In contrast, a theoretically informed social scientist may make better, more careful observations and find much more interesting patterns and exceptions—for example, by drawing on concepts from dramaturgy (Goffman 1959) or McDonaldization (Ritzger 2000). Thus, one can ask: At the time practitioners live their relevant experiences and later as they reflect upon them, how theoretically astute are their observations? A person can live through years of encounters without thinking deeply and systematically about them, especially via sociological concepts. Some practitioners may live through and/or recall their experiences in a common sense way rather than in a rigorously theoretically manner. This too is a limitation of practical experience, insofar as the goal of the social sciences is to develop, test, refine, and convey theoretical understandings. Assumptions of Naïve Realism A fourth limitation of “first-hand” claims involves a fundamental philosophical assumption. The statement that “I know best because I have ‘been there and done that’” assumes the perspective of realism. The speaker assumes that human beings can merely look and see what is “really” going on as they experience something. This assumption ignores the fact that different observers of the same situation may perceive things very differently, and that over time even the same person may develop contradictory perspectives on a single experience. Symbolic interactionists have argued for decades that perspectives are selective (because we can’t pay attention to everything) and transformative (because we give non-inherent meanings to that which we do notice). The same occupation or activity may be interpreted very differently depending on whether the person who experienced it was male or female, older or younger, Christian or Muslim, African American or Asian, and so on. If this argument holds any water, then the statement “I know about that because I was there” could more humbly be re-cast as “I have some personal interpretations and opinions about that because I was there.” Of course, the charge of naïve realism can be applied not only to practitioners; all social scientists and laypersons should be humble about the sources and substance of their beliefs. More instructors could be open, cautious, and reflexively critical about the diverse identities and understandings they bring to the classroom (Jacobs 1998).
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Is First-Hand Experience Always Possible, Desirable, and Relevant? Proponents of first-hand experience can sometimes overstate the seemingly omnipresent appeal of having a related, non-research background. Different teaching positions in a department may benefit less from practical experience than others. Even during a solitary college course, there may be some weeks when prior personal experience benefits the instructor, but many other weeks where their background has no direct relevance. The import is variable, not constant. Moreover, there are some topics about which personal experience is impossible. Personal experience of some phenomena is unattainable. For example, one cannot “be” a network, an organization, or an idea. A researcher may conduct a network analysis of bioterrorism preparedness by studying the connections between dozens of different disaster-response agencies. It might not help the researcher very much to have worked as an official in one or two of those organizations, because the unit of analysis is the connections between them. Are there also certain subjects where personal experience would likely be inappropriate? The answer is “yes,” potentially, in some cases. Extreme examples can make the point: one might legitimately ask, do we need to employ murderers and terrorists and embezzlers in order to have “knowledgeable” instructors in courses on homicide, terrorism, and white-collar crime? Even if their years of “practical experience” could shed provocative and illuminating light on “academic” theories, concepts, and statistics, many might reasonably argue against hiring such faculty members as instructors or tenure-track lines. Less extreme situations are probably more common. If a department decides that their collective mission is to critically examine (from various Marxist and feminist viewpoints) the functioning of hospitals or prisons, then it may not be appropriate to hire a conservative administrator from those institutions to teach courses on healthcare or corrections—even if he or she has decades of “practical experience.” Similarly, sometimes the educational goals of a department may make first-hand experience less relevant. How does a department view its relationship with its students? If a department seeks to produce students who are competent practitioners of a job—e.g., they know how to use handcuffs and firearms—then practical experience may be more useful than if a department principally seeks to produce students who are critical thinkers, well-informed on a wide range of issues, skilled at relating personal biographies to larger social forces, oriented towards social justice, and so on. Of course, in some departments, faculty members may disagree on their collective mission, and their disagreements may play out in how they present and assess the benefits of practical experience. These disagreements occur in larger political and economic contexts where departments encounter various degrees of pressure (from university presidents and deans, legislators, students, and parents) to become more applied or vocational (see McLaughlin 2005). In short, advocates of practical experience often fail to acknowledge that practical experience is not always or necessarily beneficial. The relevance and utility of a personal or professional background is contingent on a number of factors, and cannot be simply assumed.
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Is “Practical Experience” Actually Distinct from “Other” Ways of Knowing? “Practical” or “real-world” experience is often explicitly or implicitly contrasted with “other” ways of knowing things—primarily “academic” research. But this dichotomy is, like most dichotomies, not clear cut. “Research” is not necessarily distinct from “first-hand experience.” A qualitative researcher may be able to participate in an activity him or herself. For example, sociologist Jack Whalen worked for many months as a 911 call-taker before writing articles about that occupation (Whalen and Zimmerman 1998). Or, a researcher may closely observe “practitioners,” taking careful notes and conducting in-depth interviews; Mehan’s (1979) study of teachers and Pogrebin and Poole’s (2002) research on policing are two examples. Serious ethnography seems very close to “direct personal experience,” which indicates that the distinction between “first-hand experience” and “other forms of knowledge” may be a matter of degree rather than a strict dichotomy. Instruction that is based on “real world” familiarity may not be so different from instruction that is grounded in “academic research.” Are “Other” Ways of Knowing Necessarily Inferior? Reading about personal experience—using materials written by practitioners or by researchers who directly engaged in or observed an activity—is obviously not without value. A person can learn something from others, through their autobiographical stories or the scholarly books and articles they write. Arguably, then, a professor who reads more widely may be more knowledgeable than a professor who relies predominately on his or her own first-hand experiences— especially, as I argued in the “Are There Limitations to First-Hand Experience?” section, if those experiences were haphazardly accumulated, stored, and analyzed. More importantly, first-hand experience may in some instances be considerably less informative than reading or conducting research. A person may be a skilled practitioner without understanding or even having the occasion to learn important information pertaining to their experiences. One may claim to know “what it’s like” to work at a hospital, prison, school, or newspaper without necessarily knowing anything about the historical development of those institutions, their prevalence and operation in the U.S. compared to other countries, their dialectical relationship with economic inequalities, and other significant macro-sociological issues. In short, it is possible for those with first-hand experience to sometimes “not see the forest for the trees,” unlike those who view the experience from a distance. Similarly, as micro-sociologists have argued, sometimes practitioners don’t understand or appreciate interactional dynamics that surround them—like fish who don’t notice the water. Workers often have work-related goals, which are usually different than the descriptive and explanatory goals of social science. Consequently, it’s possible to be oblivious to matters of sociological importance even though they are right in front of your face: the intricacies of conversational turn-taking, the management of emotions via surface and deep acting, the indexicality of descriptions, the collaborative production of narratives, and so on. Berger (1963, p. 21) once described the allure of Sociology as seeing “the familiar becoming
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transformed in its meaning.” This suggests that learning and doing sociology requires something more than simply direct exposure to the phenomenon in question. In short, a “hands-on” worker may have no reason to inquire about macro- or micro-sociological issues and may have virtually no basis for learning about them on the job. Many kinds of knowledge can be better gained by reading and conducting research than via simple “hands-on” experience2.
Conclusion: Practice Does Not Make Perfect First-hand experience can be valuable in the classroom. Among other potential benefits, it can give an instructor a wealth of colorful stories that can captivate students and provide illuminating “real-life” examples to juxtapose with “academic” theories, concepts, and statistics3. However, practical experience is (a) not without limitations; (b) not always possible, desirable, or relevant; (c) sometimes not dramatically different from other ways of knowing, especially participant-observation; and (d) sometimes inferior to other ways of knowing things. Practical experience is not an unassailable source of knowledge, and should not be treated as an unqualified “good.” While this argument may create some hurt feelings, that is not my intent. I am not saying that first-hand experience is worthless, only that it is not perfect and it does not necessarily make someone a better instructor—an argument that should not be, I hope, extraordinarily controversial. And, it is certainly possible for someone to be both an experienced practitioner and a highly accomplished scholar, at the same time. I am merely suggesting that advocates of “the need for first-hand experience” could be more careful about acknowledging the limitations and alternatives to prior lived experience. This could be especially important during discussions of departmental hiring decisions, which may be guided by superficial assumptions about the value of practical experience. Interestingly, there is a subtle contradiction in the explicit or implicit argument that “Professors who have practical experience in their areas of expertise are superior to those who don’t.” The statement suggests that professors can transmit their personal experiences to their students even as it simultaneously implies that such transmission is inferior to actual experience. The statement at once demeans and extols the value of instructors’ personal experience. If a “second-hand”
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With respect to the sociology of journalism, Cottle (2008, p. 5) argues rather strongly for the utility of qualitative research over practical experience and even published autobiographical accounts: “Participant observation is the only method by which the normally invisible realm of media production can be recorded and made available for wider consideration. Published insider accounts and interview testimonies, for example, are often a poor substitute for in-depth and critically informed academic studies, which can go beyond the taken-for-granted assumptions or established professional norms of news producers.”
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It must be said, though, that many interesting stories of practice are also readily available in autobiographical and ethnographic publications that any professor can read and discuss in class. In addition, fascinating stories can be shared about research experiences, about local and current events, and about historical events—among other effective teaching strategies that engage students (Gallmeier 2005).
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education is of lesser value because one must experience something for him/herself in order to really learn about it, then why should anyone attend their classes at all4? This contradiction can be somewhat resolved. The argument could be that a student, by attending classes taught by professors with personal experience, can become a small “chip off the block”—that is, a little bit of the instructors’ personal experience may be transmitted, inferior though that transmission process is. However, this argument is much muddier and more complex than what is usually conveyed in the brief statements that proclaim the value of first-hand familiarity to a professor’s credentials. My point again is that the reverence for practical experience could often be tempered with some humility and cautiousness. Acknowledgments Thanks to Jenine Harris, Jim Holstein, Kathryn Kuhn, and Larry Nichols for providing helpful comments on earlier drafts.
References Anderson, L. (2006). “Analytic autoethnography”. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 35, 373–395. Berger, P. (1963). Invitation to Sociology. Garden City, NY: Anchor. Cottle, S. (2008). “Ethnography and news production: New(s) developments in the field”. Sociology Compass, 1, 1–16. Gallmeier, C. P. (2005). “Reflections on teaching: Introducing sociological virgins to the sociological imagination”. Sociological Focus, 38, 3–91. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. Jacobs, W. R. (1998). “The teacher as text: Using personal experience to stimulate the sociological imagination”. Teaching Sociology, 26, 222–228. Maines, D. R. (1993). “Narrative’s moment and sociology’s phenomena: Toward a narrative sociology”. Sociological Quarterly, 34, 17–38. McLaughlin, N. (2005). “Canada’s impossible science: Historical and institutional origins of the coming crisis in Anglo-Canadian sociology”. Canadian Journal of Sociology, 30, 1–40. Mehan, H. (1979). Learning Lessons: Social Organization in the Classroom. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pogrebin, M. R., & Poole, E. D. (2002). “Humor in the briefing room: A study of the strategic uses of humor among police”. In M. R. Pogrebin (Ed.) Qualitative Approaches to Criminal Justice (pp. 80–93). Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Ritzger, G. (2000). The McDonaldization of Society (New Century Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Whalen, J., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1998). “Observations on the display and management of emotion in naturally occurring activities: The case of ‘hysteria’ in calls to 9-1-1”. Social Psychology Quarterly, 61, 141–159. Zerubavel, E. (1997). Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Scott R. Harris is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University. His interests include constructionist theory, interpretive approaches to inequality, family, and emotions. He is currently writing a book on competing uses of social constructionism.
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This paragraph assumes a traditional lecture-based classroom format. It is possible that professors with prior practical experience could arrange to give their students “hands-on” experience in a course—but so could professors without that background. E.g., a professor of education who has never formally taught middle-school could arrange for her students to visit or even guest-teach in a classroom.
