PurposeThis paper aims to examine the professional learning of rural police officers.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative case study involved interviews and focus groups with 34 police officers in Northern Scotland. The interviews and focus groups were transcribed and analysed, drawing on practice‐based and sociomaterial learning theories, by members of the research team.FindingsThe two key skills for effective rural policing were mobilising available human and material resources in the moment, and learning how to police and live in a rural community. The professional learning of rural police is spatial, emergent, embodied and deeply enmeshed in specificities, and is developed through interactions between human and non‐human actors.Practical implicationsThis paper argues that, in order to understand professional learning, it is imperative to examine how work practices are fully entangled in social and material relations.Originality/valueApplying sociomaterial approaches to issues of professional learning can illuminate previously obscured actors and gives a fuller picture of how professional practice is developed, sustained and modified. Learning is conceived as attuning to available knowledge resources and drawing on the knowledge strategies that are the most productive in the moment. The issues raised in this paper pertain to other professionals working in rural areas, and more generally to the theoretical framing of professional practice.

This article is based on a research project on the lived experiences of precarious workers in Toronto, Canada. Using interviews with women in part-time, contract, and temporary jobs in three sectors (telemarketing, retail, and garment), the project explores the ways in which racial hierarchies structure jobs as well as forms of resistance that women exercise at work. The authors find that racialized processes stereotype workers and their skill sets, organize their work, determine their access to and exclusion from certain types of jobs, and impose cultural rules that classify and essentialize them in terms of race, language, and ethnicity. In this article, the authors use ethnodrama to represent their findings from this research project. Ethnodrama is a form that is well suited for this work because it allows us to bring the data to life through an embodied performance.

This paper reports on a case study of the impact of professional doctorate programmes on graduates and their work organisations. Telephone interviews were carried out with graduates and nominated peer and senior colleagues to elucidate the types of change apparent and the impact of those changes. We found that all interviewees reported development of the graduates' conceptual frameworks, increased personal and professional confidence, and enhanced engagement within and beyond their organisations. New capabilities and forms of interaction reported by colleagues appeared to facilitate the building of improved networks. Simple causal links were difficult to establish although the professional doctors themselves gave accounts of disruption, subversion and challenge that they attributed to their new knowledge and understandings. Such data draw attention to the complexity and messiness of the professional learning process, calling into question the simple input-output model of impact currently used. We suggest that further research is necessary to develop greater understanding of the organisational impact of the professional doctorate, and the ways in which that can be measured. This is especially important where there is increasing demand for a highly qualified workforce at the same time as decreasing professional development budgets

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Drawing on practice‐based learning theory, this chapter examines issues pertaining to the deskilling of immigrant professionals in Canada. It argues that adult educators need to have an awareness of transnational migration dynamics and work in meaningful ways to keep immigrant professionals connected to professional knowledge practices.