Problematising practice, learning and change: practice-theory perspectives on professional learning

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to problematise practice and contribute to new understandings of professional and workplace learning. Practice is a concept which has been largely taken for granted and under-theorised in workplace learning and education research. Practice has usually been co-located with classifiers, such as legal practice, vocational practice, teaching practice and yoga practice, with the theoretical emphasis on the domain – legal, teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach – This is a theory-driven paper which posits a framework of six prominent threads for theorizing practice. It uses examples of empirical research to illustrate each thread. Findings – A framework of six prominent threads for theorising practice in professional learning is suggested. It understands practices as patterned, embodied, networked and emergent and learning entwined with working, knowing, organizing and innovating. By conceptualising learning as occurring via and in practices, prominent understanding of learning are challenged. The paper discusses each thread with reference to empirical research that illuminates it and indicates the contributions of practice theory perspectives in richer understandings of professional learning and change. Originality/value – This paper engages with the practice turn in social sciences to reconceptualise professional and workplace learning. It contributes to research on learning at work by supplementing current thinking about learning, particularly the socio-cultural conceptions of learning, with the resources of practice theories that attend to the regularities of practice.

Liminal practice and reflection in professional education: police education and medical education

“…The practice theory framework enables the linkage of social and material spaces with enacting subjects and the activities that are performed in practice. Using a practice-based perspective on learning, we conceptualise professional learning as relational, situated and embodied (Hopwood 2014;Reich and Hager 2014). We view learning as participation in practice.…”

Change and obduracy in university teaching practices: tracing agency in professional development

“…This may mean, for example, recognising that professional development tends to a deficit model if it is centralised rather than situated in locations of academic work in all its aspects (Boud and Brew, 2013). An emerging family of perspectives that focuses on the circulation of activities in professional settings are practice-based approaches (Reich and Hager, 2014). In broad terms, practices are a set of organised and shared activity, 'an open-ended dispersed nexus of doings and sayings' (Schatzki, 2012: 15), that are also 'inevitably, and often essentially, bound up with material entities ' (2012: 16).…”

Transferring project management knowledge: lessons learned in open standards projects

“…Discussions in the literature, from a number of disciplines contributing to project management research, are based on the learning curve (Lu et al 2013), learning styles (Harfield et al 2007), practice theory (Reich & Hager 2014) and communities of practice (Garrety, Robertson & Badham 2004).…”