Professional Learning in Changing Contexts

Tara Fenwick, Monika Nerland, Karen Jensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134914012
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Professional Development

The knowledge and decisions of professionals influence all facets of modern life, a fact reflected by the increasing and distinct emphasis on public accountability for what professionals know and do. The nature of this accountability has been fundamentally transformed in response to a changing context of market pressures, network arrangements, declining discretion and public trust, and public managerialism. To tackle these challenges, an important body of research has emerged which concentrates on the material elements and processes of professional learning, and considers how these affect wider society.

This volume presents specific pressures on professionals' learning in different occupational contexts ranging from public school teaching to medicine and creative industry. These pressures are wrought by changing regulatory frameworks, changing modes of organising, changing demands and changing knowledge authorities in professional practice. The authors stress the importance of understanding these relations as sociomaterial webs through which the important moments of professional action and decisions emerge. This approach moves us beyond accepting 'learning' as an identifiable, individualist phenomenon by emphasising the multiplicities around professional practice 'standards' and 'quality', workarounds, responsibility, agency, and knowledge practices. As the chapters here demonstrate, sociomaterial perspectives raise new questions and methodologies that can highlight what is often invisible in the sometimes messy dynamics of professional learning, and point to new ways of promoting and supporting professional education.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Education and Work.

Docta ignorantia: professional knowing at the core and at the margins of a practice

Silvia Gherardi

Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale, University of Trento, Trento, Italy

The expression ‘knowing-in-practice’ focuses on practical reasoning and organising that takes place is working practices. An empirical analysis of the practice of cardiological teleconsultation allows to illustrate the characteristics of knowing-in-practice and how organising is discursively accomplished. The article illustrates how professional knowing-in-practice has an opaque dimension which is explored in terms of docta ignorantia, that is, a mode of practical knowledge unaware of its own principles that accommodates a full range of sociomaterial resources and interactional forms according to the logic of the practice at hand. The concepts of ‘generative model’ and ‘economy of logic’ are employed in order to analyse how professionals rely on docta ignorantia to accomplish the practice in which they are involved. The generative model of the practice of teleconsultation distinguishes between activities at the core of the practice (mobilising professional authority and jurisdiction; performing accountability on professional, legal and bureaucratic bases; enacting a diagnostic community) and activities at the margins of the same practice (learning, theorising in practice, performing of a professional self and of a community of professionals). While the former activities are oriented towards the formation of the object of practice, the latter are oriented to the reproduction of the practice itself.

Introduction

Contemporary organisational and educational literature displays growing interest in the intersection of knowledge, work and professional practices. One reason for this interest is the potential of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their impact on the traditional way of working, and on the competences of professional groups.

The globalisation of the economy has induced organisations to use various forms of work organisation which presuppose groups of professionals who collaborate at a distance, creating a shared workspace. For such work at a distance, the most critical resource is knowledge and the professionals’ ability to manage their knowledge interdependencies efficiently and effectively trough expertise coordination (Faraj and Sproull 2000; Faraj and Xiao 2006). Whence derives the renewed interest among organisation and management scholars in how organisation create, transfer and apply knowledge (Argote 1999); how the design of the information and telecommunication technologies supports practical knowledge (Orlikowski 2002); how knowing is enacted and is embedded in the material and discursive context of work (Sole and Emodson 2002; Weick, Sutcliffe, and Obstfeld 2005) and how professionals’ learning and knowing change in such a context (see Fenwick, Jensen, and Nerland 2012).

This field of studies raises a number of theoretical and methodological problems which I intend to discuss and illustrate here by means of an empirical study on telemedicine, my purpose being to show how collective (professional and non-professional) knowledge is performed in distance work. To this end, I shall introduce the concept of knowing-in-practice, since this will enable me to interpret knowledge as a situated, sociomaterial activity and as a collective practical accomplishment. By examining a single practice – cardiological teleconsultation – performed by two communities of professionals – general practitioners (GPs) and cardiologists (C) – supported by a group of operators in charge of the technological infrastructure, I shall illustrate the generative model that supports knowing-in-practice. Considering two interactional patterns – at the core of the practice and at its margins – I shall illustrate how professionals’ competence is enacted, how learning and working are entangled and how technological settings shape professional knowing.

Knowing-in-practice and the practice literature

Study of the practical organisation of knowledge, in the form of methods of talking, reasoning and acting, and the association of human and non-human elements, is one of the most important directions taken by empirical studies using the practice-based approach (Gherardi 2011). Of central importance in this regard is practical knowledge, which is analysed from a sociomaterial and organisational perspective, the unit of analysis has been situated activity, and the material and discursive practices that put competences to use.

This perspective draws mainly on sociology, anthropology and ethno-methodology, and focuses its analysis around the concept of ‘situatedness’. Rather than asking what kinds of cognitive processes and conceptual structures are involved, researchers ask what kind of social engagements and material settings provide the proper context for knowing, working, learning and innovating (Brown and Duguid 1991, 2001). For example, Jean Lave, and situated learning theory, puts forward a theory of knowledge acquisition in which ‘knowing is inherent in the growth and transformation of identities and it is located in relations among practitioners, their practice, the artefacts of that practice, and the social and political economy of communities of practice’ (Lave and Wenger 1991, 122).

This study adheres to a sociomaterial perspective and it assumes that ‘the starting premise is that work activities and workspaces are mutually constituted, in ways that are structured and available for detailed understanding’ (Suchman 1996, 35). This assumption prompts the question: is it possible to observe knowledge as it unfolds and describe it empirically without resorting to concepts such as the intentionality of actors, with their mental and/or linguistic representations, and without having to rely on what actors say that they think? In other words, can practical knowledge be described as a situated activity, and as an activity of joint and collaborative production between humans and non-humans, without having to attribute priority to the former, and without assuming that knowledge precedes action?

The contribution of the concept of ‘knowing-in-practice’ in answering these questions is that not only is it possible, it is also useful to describe knowledge as a practical accomplishment which does not require investigation of what goes on in people’s minds and of what they say that they think.

At the theoretical level, the entry of the concept of knowing-in-practice into the literature on practices has helped displace the mind (meanings, values or truth) as the central phenomenon in human life and to prioritise practices over individual subjects.

Indeed, the concept of practice, and the literature on working practices, has recently acquired new vigour. Yet, despite the title of the book by Schatzki, Knorr Cetina, and von Savigny (2001), The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory, which baptises yet another ‘turn’ after the cultural, linguistic and narrative ones, a radical break with traditional programmes is not yet forthcoming, and a unified field of practice or a unified ‘social theory of practice’ does not exist. The sociological roots of the concept of ‘practice’ can be traced back to the work by Garfinkel (1967), Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1990), while its philosophical roots go back to Greek philosophy, and to Aristotle in particular, whose concept of phronesis recently received a particular attention within practice theories (Eikeland 2008).

Nevertheless the return to the study of practice has common goals that, according to Schatzki (2001, 2-14), can be summarised as follows:

• to go beyond problematic dualisms (action/structure, human/non-human, mind/body);

• to see reason not as an innate mental faculty, but as a practice phenomenon;

• to question individual actions and their status as building blocks of the social and

• against idealism.

The literature on practice is rather extensive. But it is not yet widely known and a commonsense understanding of practice – as opposed to theory, or as activity or routine – is prevalent. This confusion is due to two ways of understanding practice.

With reference to scientific practices Rouse (2002, 161) argues that there are at present two fundamentally different conceptions of practices:

(1) practices identified with regularities or commonalities among the activities of social groups and

(2) practices characterised in terms of normative accountability of various performances.

According to the first conception, practices are commonly defined in terms of ‘arrays of activities’ which form patterns, nexuses or bundles. For example Schatzki’s (2005, 471), definition is couched in terms of: ‘the set of actions that compose a practice is organised by three phenomena: understanding how to do things, rules, and a teleoaffective structure’. I disagree with this definition because the principles that organise a practice are outside the action of ‘practising’, and they precede it. Does understanding come before doing? And do the rules that seemingly govern action, and which are used to explain and justify action, precede the act of ‘following the rule?’ And does teleoaffective structure drive action? In my view, more promising in practice-based studies are the patterns apparent in the activities that enable practitioners to recognise a practice amid many different and contextually variable ways of undertaking the ‘same practice’. That is to say, practitioners adapt their activities to changing contexts, and it is this situated rationality that constitutes their logic of practice.

While it certainly makes sense to analyse practices in terms of patterns in the activities that constitute them, if we restrict the analysis to this level, we lose sight of what makes a practice recognisable to its practitioners, and of why practices continue to be repeated, that is, practised.

The second definition has an edge on the former because it directs attention to practices defined as ‘ways of doing things together’, and therefore to the social processes that support practices ethically, aesthetically and emotionally. For example, Rouse (2001, 190) writes: ‘actors share a practice if their actions are appropriately regarded as answerable to norms of correct or incorrect practice’. This signifies, according to my interpretation of Rouse’s definition, that within every community of practitioners, discussing and disputing practice, developing different cultures of practice yet identifying with a shared practice and making practice into terrain legitimately contestable by its practitioners are dynamics that socially sustain a practice. These dynamics construct the conditions in which the practice is reproduced. They can be conceived as the everyday work of practice reproduction, and as the dynamic work which adapts the practice to changed circumstances, so that it is once again performed ‘for another first time’ (Garfinkel 1967, 9).¹

We may therefore speak of the ‘practical knowledge of a practice’ to refer to the reproduction of practices within a community of professionals. For example, when one speaks of ‘medical practice’, the intention is to denote a body of knowledge and competences over which the community of doctors has jurisdiction and which is reproduced through institutional mechanisms like a dedicated educational system, through control over access to the profession and its exercise, and through an array of working practices situated in specific organisations, forms of work and medical technologies. Duguid (2005, 113) accordingly talks of a network of practice to denote ‘the collective of all practitioners of a particular practice’, while reserving the term community of practice for a specific community ‘local’ in the sense that it is held together by practices routinely reproduced within hospital X or Y. Finally, we may use the term knowing-in-practice to denote the situated activity of the community of medical and non-medical professionals which, through mediation with a material and discursive world, performs a p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Sociomaterial approaches to conceptualising professional learning and practice
• 1. Docta ignorantia: professional knowing at the core and at the margins of a practice
• 2. The knowledge that matters in professional practices
• 3. Professional learning and the materiality of social practice
• 4. Inter-professional working and learning: ‘recontextualising’ lessons from ‘project work’ for programmes of initial professional formation
• 5. Epistemic practices and object relations in professional work
• 6. Thinking teacher professional learning performatively: a socio-material account
• 7. Complexity science and professional learning for collaboration: a critical reconsideration of possibilities and limitations
• Index