Full Description
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 thepedagogic 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.
Contents
Part I Professional, Theoretical, and Empirical Foundations.- 1. Introduction.- 2 Professional Practice Context, Research Site and Partnership.- 3 Sociomaterialism, practice theory, and workplace learning.- 4 Ethnographic Underpinnings.- Part II Four Dimensions of Professional Practices and Learning.- 5. Times and Professional Practices.- 6 Spaces and Professional Practices.- 7 Bodies and Professional Practices.- 8 Things and Professional Practices.- Part III Professional Learning, Partnership and Practice.- 9 Professional Learning as Attuning, Connecting and Sensitising.- 10 Professional Learning in Pedagogic Practices.- 11 Conclusions.- Index.
