An overview of teacher knowledge types from the viewpoint of connoisseurship theory and its relation with educational technology: A descriptive-analytic study

Professional competencies of teachers in the third millennium are those skills and knowledge that help teachers achieve certain results during teaching process, having certain inputs. In fact, addressing these competencies guarantees the expected outputs of the teaching process (Quality of Teaching) on the one hand and the accuracy of the process (good teaching) on the other hand. So, here classifying and dealing with all aspects of teaching is necessary, but it seems that exaggeration in adding new branches of skills in addition to creating an atmosphere of uncertainty, changes teaching into an unattainable profession. In this article, using descriptive-analytical method, the authors investigated the Shulman’s theory of teacher knowledge types which is the most important element of professional competencies of teachers and Eisner’s connoisseurship theory of teaching. In particular, they address the issue as to what extent existing categories are reliable and accurate. It seems that what has been considered by scholars in this field is achieving some kind of connoisseurship in teaching; however, without the appropriate basis for all kinds of knowledge division, that would be unlikely to happen. At the end, while comparing this knowledge domain with the concept of connoisseurship on the one hand and teaching process competencies and an expert system on the other hand, we tried to achieve a more accurate classification of teacher knowledge, so that we could specify an appropriate basis for classification of teacher knowledge types and also more accurate definition of concepts such as educational technology and connoisseurship could be obtained.