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.

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.

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.

Those responsible for professional development in public and private-sector organizations have long had to deal with an uncomfortable reality. Billions of dollars are spent on formal education and training directed toward the development of job incumbents, yet the recipients of this training spend all but a fraction of their working life outside the training room--in meetings, on the shop floor, on the road, or in their offices. Faced with the need to promote "continuous learning" in a cost-effective manner, trainers, consultants, and educators have sought to develop ways to enrich the instructional and developmental potential of job assignments--to understand and facilitate the "lessons of experience." Not surprisingly, social and behavioral scientists have weighed in on the subject of on-the-job learning, and one message of their research is quite clear. This message is that much of the knowledge people use to succeed on the job is acquired implicitly--without intention to learn or awareness of having learned. The common language of the workplace reflects an awareness of this fact as people speak of learning "by doing" or "by osmosis" and of professional "instinct" or "intuition." Psychologists, more careful if not clearer in their choice of words, refer to learning without intention or awareness as "implicit learning" and refer to the knowledge that results from this learning as "tacit knowledge." Tacit Knowledge in Professional Practice explores implicit learning and tacit knowledge as they manifest themselves in the practice of six knowledge-intensive professions, and considers the implications of a tacit-knowledge approach for increasing the instructional and developmental impact of work experiences. This volume brings together distinguished practitioners and researchers in each of the six disciplines to discuss their own research and/or professional experience and to engage each other's views. It addresses professional practice in its totality -- from the technical to the interpersonal to the crassly commercial -- not simply a few aspects of practice that lend themselves to controlled study. Finally, this edited volume seeks to go beyond the enumeration of critical experiences to an understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie learning from experience in professional disciplines and, in so doing, to lay a foundation for innovations in professional education and training.

What are the future possibilities for the standing of professional practice as it faces growingly problematic markets for services, complex demands for managerial accountability and control, and problematic circumstances and expectations in its ethical and self-regulative governance? New sources of inspiration may be needed if professionalism is to be either a viable or desirable form for the social organisation of work in the coming years of potentially deep economic and social change. Set in the UK, South Africa, Australia and the USA, the empirical studies included elaborate problematic situations of professional practice concerning issues of identity and knowledge. The theoretical studies explore the notion of generic processes; elaborate the plurality of notions of professional practice; theorise the hybridisation witnessed in inter-professional and cross-disciplinary team work; and outline new theoretical departures relating to these. Elaborating professionalism also raises important methodological issues relating to professionalism as ethical practice. The book offers valuable resources to enrich practice, and provokes thought and new ideas about professionalism.

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.

Offer novice and experienced teachers guidelines for the "how" and "why" to do self-study teacher research Designed to help teachers plan, implement, and assess a manageable self-study research project, this unique textbook covers the foundation, history, theoretical underpinnings, and methods of self-study research. Written in a reader-friendly style and filled with interactive activities and examples, this book helps teachers every step of the way as they plan and conduct their studies. Author Anastasia Samaras encourages readers to think deeply about both the "how" and the "why" of this essential professional development tool as they pose questions and formulate personal theories to improve professional practice. Key Features A Self-Study Project Planner assists teachers in understanding both the details and process of conducting self-study research. A Critical Friends Portfolio includes innovative critical collaborative inquiries to support the completion of a high quality final research project. Advice from the most senior self-study academics working in the U.S. and internationally is included, along with descriptions of the self-study methodology that has been refined over time. Examples demonstrate the connections between self-study research, teachers′ professional growth, and their students′ learning. Tables, charts, and visuals help readers see the big picture and stay organized. Accompanied by High-Quality Ancillaries! A Student Study Site offers a wealth of resources, including additional examples and activities, web-based resources, study questions, and key terms. Intended Audience Self-Study Teacher Research: Improving Your Practice Through Collaborative Inquiry is intended as a core textbook for a wide variety of courses in the education curriculum, including Action Research, Qualitative Research Methods, Research Methods in Education, and the capstone/teacher researcher course required of all early childhood, elementary, and secondary education majors.