Exploring Education And Professional Practice

This book was written to help people understand and transform education and professional practice. It presents and extends the theory of practice architectures, and offers a contemporary account of what practices are composed of and how practices shape and are shaped by the arrangements with which they are enmeshed in sites of practice. Through its empirically-based case chapters, the book demonstrates how the theory of practice architectures can be used as a theoretical, analytical, and transformational resource to generate insights that have important implications for practice, theory, policy, and research in education and professional practice. These insights relate to how practices are shaped by arrangements (and other practices) present in specific sites of practice, including early childhood education settings, schools, adult education, and workplaces. They also relate to how practices create distinctive intersubjective spaces, so that people encounter one another in particular ways (a) in particular semantic spaces, (b) that are realised in particular locations and durations in physical space-time, and (c) in particular social spaces. By applying such insights, readers can work towards changing practices by transforming the practice architectures that make them possible.

The body matters, in practice. How then might we think about the body in our work in and on professional practice, learning and education? What value is there in realising and articulating the notion of the professional practitioner as crucially embodied? Beyond that, what of conceiving of the professional practice field itself as a living corporate body? How is the body implicated in understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education? Body/Practice is an extensive volume dedicated to exploring these and related questions, philosophically and empirically. It constitutes a rare but much needed reframing of scholarship relating to professional practice and its relation with professional learning and professional education more generally. It takes bodies seriously, developing theoretical frameworks, offering detailed analyses from empirical studies, and opening up questions of representation. The book is organized into four parts: I. ‘Introducing the Body in Professional Practice, Learning and Education’; II. ‘Thinking with the Body in Professional Practice’; III. ‘The Body in Question in Health Professional Education and Practice’; IV. ‘Concluding Reflections’. It brings together researchers from a range of disciplinary and professional practice fields, including particular reference to Health and Education. Across fifteen chapters, the authors explore a broad range of issues and challenges with regard to corporeality, practice theory and philosophy, and professional education, providing an innovative, coherent and richly informed account of what it means to bring the body back in, with regard to professional education and beyond.

This book is about teaching for professional practice and explores ways to engage students in the classroom. It draws on the principles of rigorous scholarship and focuses on interactive learning between the class and the professor and among the students. Each contributor addresses the need to connect theory with community practice, deploying different methods in different contexts, and sharing scholarly reflections about how to improve the craft of teaching. The essays offer practical suggestions that allow readers to adapt and apply these ideas in their own classrooms to suit their particular contexts and share the outcomes of that process.

This book draws together a variety of detailed case studies to demonstrate the unique interaction between the past and the present which occurs within the professional education context. Using a psychosocial approach, Alan Bainbridge suggests that this process of identity or role formation requires the expectations and fantasies of the past to be negotiated at the unconscious, individual and social level. A focus on personal agency and dealing with the complexity inherent in education settings highlights the macro and micro negotiations new education professionals are required to undertake between the margins of the personal and professional to provide a more nuanced model for early professional development.

This book explores important questions about the relationship between professional practice and learning, and implications of this for how we understand professional expertise. Focusing on work accomplished through partnerships between practitioners and parents with young children, the book explores how connectedness in action is a fluid, evolving accomplishment, with four essential dimensions: times, spaces, bodies, and things. Within a broader sociomaterial perspective, the analysis draws on practice theory and philosophy, bringing different schools of thought into productive contact, including the work of Schatzki, Gherardi, and recent developments in cultural historical activity theory. The book takes a bold view, suggesting practices and learning are entwined but distinctive phenomena. A clear and novel framework is developed, based on this idea. The argument goes further by demonstrating how new, coproductive relationships between professionals and clients can intensify the pedagogic nature of professional work, and showing how professionals can support others’ learning when the knowledge they are working with, and sense of what is to be learned, are uncertain, incomplete, and fragile.

Understanding and researching professional practice is crucial both to enhancing the quality of professional learning and to improving professional education more generally. Yet professional practice remains something that is little known, theoretically and philosophically, despite a longstanding interest in what might be called the meta-field of professional practice, learning and education. The contributors to this book, drawn from fields such as education, allied health, psychology and business, explore different aspects of practice in the professions, professionalism, and research. This includes engaging with the burgeoning literature on practice theory and philosophy, including the increasingly influential neo-Aristotelian tradition, and taking account of growing interest in practice thinking across contemporary scholarship. It considers issues such as the primacy of practice, the nature of professional judgement, the role of 'experience', ethics, context, and the practitioner standpoint. As such, it raises important and timely questions about practice ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies, and also praxis and politics. This is especially needed in a context otherwise increasingly organised by neoliberalism, economic rationality, anxious managerialism, and what some see as a general drive towards de-professionalisation and new nuances and intensities of regulation.

Society is rapidly changing its expectations of professionals in all arenas. In this book we focus on changing patterns of professional practice in health, education and the creative arts. In each of these areas professional practice care is undergoing major reform in a complex and rapidly changing environment. This multi-authored text explores professional practice in four key dimensions: doing, knowing, being and becoming. These concepts have been chosen to represent professional practice as much more than applying learned knowledge in practice situations. The authors present professional practice as a lived and dynamic experience as well as a process, a service for (and with) others, and a way of being and behaving. The text explores the essential unity of knowledge and practice, through discourse, narrative, imagery and critical debate. This is a book for all those seeking to learn and to improve practice.

This book takes a fresh look at professional practice and professional education. In times of increased managerialism of academic teaching and a focus on graduate learning outcomes, it discusses possibilities to teach and learn otherwise. A deliberate professional is someone who consciously, thoughtfully and courageously makes choices about how to act and be in the practice world. A pedagogy of deliberateness is introduced that focuses on developing the following four characteristics of professionals: (1) deliberating on the complexity of practice and workplace cultures and environments; (2) understanding what is probable, possible and impossible in relation to existing and changing practices; (3) taking a deliberate stance in positioning oneself in practice as well as in making technical decisions; and (4) being aware of and responsible for the consequences of actions taken or actions not taken in relation to the ‘doing’, ‘saying’, ‘knowing’ and ‘relating’ in practice. Educating the deliberate professional is a comprehensive volume that carves out and explores a framework for a pedagogy of deliberateness that goes beyond educating reflective and deliberative practitioners. As a whole, this book argues for the importance of educating deliberate professionals, because, in the current higher education climate, there is a need to reconcile critique (thinking), participation (doing) and moral responsibility (relating to others) in professional practice and professional education.