Professional Practice and Learning

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. "Meticulously researched and at once measured and authoritative, this constitutes an important and innovative contribution to the field. Based on an in-depth ethnographic study, it develops a rich account of practice in action and context, and provides new insight into professional learning and its associated pedagogies. Highly recommended."

Professor Bill Green, Charles Sturt University (Australia)

"This book forms a significant contribution to our understanding of professional practice and learning. It brings together recent sociomaterial approaches, and adds to these in important ways. I strongly recommend this book for scholars and practitioners who take interest in professional work and learning, and in sociomaterial approaches to practice more generally." Professor Monika Nerland, University of Oslo (Norway)

"This book contributes a distinctive approach to researching workplace learning, specifically learning in professional practice. The ethnographic research that is presented imbues practices, knowledge work and pedagogy with suspense and uncertainty. Hopwood's style of presentation is both rich and rewarding. This is a book to surprise you and it will." Professor Silvia Gherardi, University of Trento (Italy)

"This splendid book offers many insights that will be appreciated by a wide range of readers. Hopwood proposes his own thought-provoking framework for understanding the relationships between professional practice and learning. The fruitfulness of Hopwood's framework is demonstrated in analysis of empirical material derived from a major ethnographic study. Overall, this book is an impressive achievement." Emeritus Professor Paul Hager, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)

Auteur
Nick Hopwood is a Chancellor's Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a member of the Centre for Research in Learning and Change. He has a strong track record of published work and relevant experience of book authorship. From 2004 to the present, he has published 17 journal articles, 5 book chapters, a joint-authored book (Rickinson, Lundholm & Hopwood, Environmental Learning: Insights from Research into the Student Experience, Springer, 2009), and a monograph (Geography in Secondary Schools: Researching Pupils' Classroom Experiences, Continuum, 2012). He has edited two special issues of international journals, and has served as a book-review editor. His publications trace a long interest in framing empirical problems in relation to learning, practice and work in different contexts.

Contenu

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.