Skip to main content
  • Book
  • © 2012

Practice, Learning and Change

Practice-Theory Perspectives on Professional Learning

  • Provides a rigorous and detailed discussion of practice, a concept that is typically taken-for-granted in educational literature
  • The detailed, broadly socio-material, account of practice provides novel insights about learning and change and about the various relationships between these three concepts
  • Brings together contributions by key international figures from the different theoretical frames and perspectives on practice and learning
  • Diverse sites of professional and workplace learning are deployed to illustrate the practice-learning-change nexus

Part of the book series: Professional and Practice-based Learning (PPBL, volume 8)

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check for access.

Table of contents (17 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xvi
  2. Theorising Practice; Rethinking Professional Learning

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 15-15
  3. Theorising practice; rethinking professional learning

    1. Ecologies of Practices

      • Stephen Kemmis, Christine Edwards-Groves, Jane Wilkinson, Ian Hardy
      Pages 33-49
  4. Investigating Learning Practices

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 101-101
  5. Investigating learning practices

    1. The Complex Systems of Practice

      • Jeanette Lancaster
      Pages 119-131
    2. Governing Learning Practices: Governmentality and Practices

      • Ann Reich, John Girdwood
      Pages 151-165
    3. Rhetorical Activation of Workers: A Case Study in Neo-liberal Governance

      • Andreas Fejes, Katherine Nicoll
      Pages 167-181
    4. Learning Professional Practice Through Education

      • Madeleine Abrandt Dahlgren, Lars Owe Dahlgren, Johanna Dahlberg
      Pages 183-197
  6. Practice, Learning and Change

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 215-215
  7. Practice, learning and change

    1. Learning Organizational Practices That Persist, Perpetuate and Change: A Schatzkian View

      • Oriana M. Price, Mary C. Johnsson, Hermine Scheeres, David Boud, Nicky Solomon
      Pages 233-247
    2. Collective Learning Practice

      • Paul Hager, Mary C. Johnsson
      Pages 249-265

About this book

The three concepts central to this volume—practice, learning and change—have received very different treatments in the educational literature, an oversight directly confronted here. While learning and change have been extensively theorised, their various contexts articulated and analysed, practice is notably underrepresented. Where much of the literature on learning and change takes the notion of ‘practice’ as an unexamined given, its co-location as a term with various classifiers, as in ‘legal practice’ and ‘teaching practice’, render it curiously devoid of semantic force.

In this book, ‘practice’ is the super-ordinate organising idea. Drawing on what has been termed the ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’, the work develops a conceptual framework for researching learning in, and on, practice. It challenges received notions of practice, questioning the assumptions, elisions, conflations and silences on the subject. In so doing, it offers fresh insights into learning and change, and how they relate to practice. In tandem with this conceptual work, the book details site-ontological studies of practice and learning in diverse professional and workplace contexts, examining the work of occupations as various as doctors, chefs and orchestral musicians. It demonstrates the value of theorising practice, learning and change, as well as exploring the connections between them amid our evolving social and institutional structures.

Editors and Affiliations

  • , Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology, Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

    Paul Hager, Alison Lee, Ann Reich

Bibliographic Information

Buy it now

Buying options

eBook USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Other ways to access