Professionals deal with complex problems which require working with the expertise of others, but being able to collaborate resourcefully with others is an additional form of expertise. This book draws on a series of research studies to explain what is involved in the new concept of working relationally across practices. It demonstrates how spending time building common knowledge between different professions aids collaboration. The core concept is relational agency, which can arise between practitioners who work together on a complex task: whether reconfiguring the trajectory of a vulnerable child or developing a piece of computer software. Common knowledge, which captures the motives and values of each profession, is essential for the exercise of relational agency and contributing to and working with the common knowledge of what matters for each profession is a new form of relational expertise. The book is based on a wide body of field research including the author’s own. It tackles how to research expert practices using Vygotskian perspectives, and demonstrates how Cultural Historical and Activity Theory approaches contribute to how we understand learning, practices and organisations.

This timely book provides a focused approach for developing a challenging yet vital and necessary area for professional success in health care practitioners -- the development of professional behaviors. It addresses the essential elements that are necessary to perform professionally in society, such as dependability, professional presentation, initiative, empathy, and cooperation. These behaviors are developed through the recognition of skills, practice, experience, role mentorship, and evaluative feedback. The issues of professional behavior are directed specifically toward the health care professional. Emphasizing the importance of these behaviors in students can only help to strengthen them for professional roles. This book utilizes case vignettes, structured learning activities and exercises, and self-reflection and evaluation techniques. It helps to define what professionalism means, and presents strategies to enhance its development. Features Professional Development Assessment. Case Vignettes, Activities, and Exercises. Structured Activities for Professional Behaviors.

This book, by combining sociocultural, material, cognitive and embodied perspectives on human knowing, offers a new and powerful conceptualisation of epistemic fluency – a capacity that underpins knowledgeable professional action and innovation. Using results from empirical studies of professional education programs, the book sheds light on practical ways in which the development of epistemic fluency can be recognised and supported - in higher education and in the transition to work. The book provides a broader and deeper conception of epistemic fluency than previously available in the literature. Epistemic fluency involves a set of capabilities that allow people to recognize and participate in different ways of knowing. Such people are adept at combining different kinds of specialised and context-dependent knowledge and at reconfiguring their work environment to see problems and solutions anew. In practical terms, the book addresses the following kinds of questions. What does it take to be a productive member of a multidisciplinary team working on a complex problem? What enables a person to integrate different types and fields of knowledge, indeed different ways of knowing, in order to make some well-founded decisions and take actions in the world? What personal knowledge resources are entailed in analysing a problem and describing an innovative solution, such that the innovation can be shared in an organization or professional community? How do people get better at these things; and how can teachers in higher education help students develop these valued capacities? The answers to these questions are central to a thorough understanding of what it means to become an effective knowledge worker and resourceful professional.

In Collaborative Practical Theology, Henk de Roest documents and analyses research on Christian practices as it can be conducted by academic practical theologians in collaboration with practitioners of different kinds in Christian practices all around the world.

This book presents a mobile technology capacity building framework that offers academics, students, and practitioners involved in workplace education a deeper understanding of, and practical guidance on, how mobile technology can enhance professional learning. Approaching professional and workplace learning as a hybrid space in which work, learning and technology meet, the book discusses the value of mobile technology in shaping professional education, particularly during student placements. The framework focuses on staying professional and safe, considering issues of time and place, planning learning activities, initiating dialogue, networking, creating learning opportunities on-the-go, and deepening reflection. It is designed to assist students and their educators to use mobile technology knowledgeably and responsibly, and to help bridge the gap between university learning and workplace practice. This book also contributes to a better understanding of the interconnectedness between learning, practice and technology. It demonstrates how to enhance learning and working with mobile technology by drawing on two perspectives: the ‘professional-plus’ and the ‘deliberate professional’.

This book uses Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory to provide a unique theorisation of teachers’ professional development as a practice. A practice can be described as the socially structured actions set up to produce a product or service aimed at meeting a collective human need. In this case, collaborative, interventionist work with teachers in two different Australian primary schools sought to simultaneously identify, understand and develop the necessary conditions for supporting the teachers’ development as professionals. The in-depth analysis of this practice provides interesting insight into professional development for teachers at all levels of schooling, and provides strong support for educational researchers, administrators and consultants to reconsider many existing forms of professional learning/development programs. This book supports the contemporary view that professional learning must take place with teachers, rather than be delivered to teachers, but provides an important expansion to current work in this area by arguing that a focus on teachers’ learning of new strategies and principles may still fall short of creating long term change in teachers’ professional practice. By taking a cultural-historical approach, the focus moves to supporting teachers’ development of unified concepts (the intertwining of theoretical and practical aspects) and motives to continue their ongoing development as professionals. This emphasis builds teachers’ capacity to examine and disrupt habitual practices and understand, create and implement thoughtful and sustainable transformations in all areas of their professional life. This book therefore builds upon the ongoing conversation about professional learning and development, offering a new framework for researching, understanding and developing this critical practice.