1 PESA Conference: Hawai’i Dec 3-7 2009 SUBMITTED FULL PAPER (for review) Title: Reclaiming the Tacit: ‘Understanding’ by Doing David Beckett Postal Address: Associate Professor David Beckett Melbourne Graduate School of Education The University of Melbourne AUSTRALIA 3010 Email: d.beckett@unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 3 8344 8516 ABSTRACT In this paper, I am reclaiming the tacit to show what it is to come to understand something, at a fundamental level: at coming to understand the achievement of 'understanding' itself, through the work experiences of adults: how do adult workers – such as professionals - learn to ‘understand’, by doing, where what they are doing is tacit? Burbules (2008) sets out a useful continuum of ‘tacit’ experiences, and I build on this to show how socially-relational work and learning, such as mentoring, can give important new understandings of ‘understandings’ – as shown in ‘doing’. Taking a Wittgensteinian approach (assisted by Luntley 2008), I argue that the tacit, broadly understood to include richly ostensive experiences (e.g. ‘pointing’ and ‘pointing out’) can generate educative opportunities which are Aristotelian. These focus upon the socially-reflexive, intentional re-conceptualisation of training for, and immersion in, workplace experiences. Thus, given this reclamation and reconceptualisation, the quite modest and hitherto under-recognised epistemological characteristics of the tacit can feed productively into contemporary research interests in professional and other workplaces’ practices (e.g. How Doctors Think, Montgomery 2006), and into ‘interprofessionality’. (180 wds)