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This book presents leading-edge perspectives and methodologies to address emerging issues of concern for professional learning in contemporary society. The conditions for professional practice and learning are changing dramatically in the wake of globalization, new modes of knowledge production, new regulatory regimes, and increased economic-political pressures. In the wake of this, a number of challenges for learning emerge: more practitioners become involved in interprofessional collaboration developments in new technologies and virtual workworlds emergence of transnational knowledge cultures and interrelated circuits of knowledge. The space and time relations in which professional practice and learning are embedded are becoming more complex, as are the epistemic underpinnings of professional work. Together these shifts bring about intersections of professional knowledge and responsibilities that call for new conceptions of professional knowing. Exploring what the authors call sociomaterial perspectives on professional learning they argue that theories that trace not just the social but also the material aspects of practice – such as tools, technologies, texts but also bodies and actions - are useful for coming to terms with the challenges described above. Reconceptualising Professional Learning develops these issues through specific contemporary cases focused on one of the book’s three main themes: (1) professionals’ knowing in practice, (2) professionals’ work arrangements and technologies, or (3) professional responsibility. Each chapter draws upon innovative theory to highlight the sociomaterial webs through which professional learning may be reconceptualised. Authors are based in Australia, Canada, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and the USA as well as the UK and their cases are based in a range of professional settings including medicine, teaching, nursing, engineering, social services, the creative industries, and more. By presenting detailed accounts of these themes from a sociomaterial perspective, the book opens new questions and methodological approaches. These can help make more visible what is often invisible in today’s messy dynamics of professional learning, and point to new ways of configuring educational support and policy for professionals.
Feedback is a crucial element of teaching, learning and assessment. There is, however, substantial evidence that staff and students are dissatisfied with it, and there is growing impetus for change. Student Surveys have indicated that feedback is one of the most problematic aspects of the student experience, and so particularly in need of further scrutiny. Current practices waste both student learning potential and staff resources. Up until now the ways of addressing these problems has been through relatively minor interventions based on the established model of feedback providing information, but the change that is required is more fundamental and far reaching. Reconceptualising Feedback in Higher Education, coming from a think-tank composed of specialist expertise in assessment feedback, is a direct and more fundamental response to the impetus for change. Its purpose is to challenge established beliefs and practices through critical evaluation of evidence and discussion of the renewal of current feedback practices. In promoting a new conceptualisation and a repositioning of assessment feedback within an enhanced and more coherent paradigm of student learning, this book: • analyses the current issues in feedback practice and their implications for student learning. • identifies the key characteristics of effective feedback practices • explores the changes needed to feedback practice and how they can be brought about • illustrates through examples how processes to promote and sustain effective feedback practices can be embedded in modern mass higher education. Provoking academics to think afresh about the way they conceptualise and utilise feedback, this book will help those with responsibility for strategic development of assessment at an institutional level, educational developers, course management teams, researchers, tutors and student representatives.
Prompted by the ongoing debate among science educators over ‘nature of science’, and its importance in school and university curricula, this book is a clarion call for a broad re-conceptualizing of nature of science in science education. The authors draw on the ‘family resemblance’ approach popularized by Wittgenstein, defining science as a cognitive-epistemic and social-institutional system whose heterogeneous characteristics and influences should be more thoroughly reflected in science education. They seek wherever possible to clarify their developing thesis with visual tools that illustrate how their ideas can be practically applied in science education. The volume’s holistic representation of science, which includes the aims and values, knowledge, practices, techniques, and methodological rules (as well as science’s social and institutional contexts), mirrors its core aim to synthesize perspectives from the fields of philosophy of science and science education. The authors believe that this more integrated conception of nature of science in science education is both innovative and beneficial. They discuss in detail the implications for curriculum content, pedagogy, and learning outcomes, deploy numerous real-life examples, and detail the links between their ideas and curriculum policy more generally.
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.
Reconceptualizing Disability in Education provides an essential critical exploration of problematic discourses, practices, and pedagogies that inform how disability is presently understood and responded to within the field of education. Luigi Iannacci interrogates and destabilizes ableist grand narratives that dominate every aspect of how disability is linguistically, bureaucratically, procedurally, and pedagogically configured within education. Ultimately, this book seeks to forward human rights for people with disabilities in educational contexts by clarifying and operationalizing inclusion so that it is not just a model necessitated by a hierarchy of legality, but rather a set of beliefs and practices based on critical analyses and a reconceptualization of current understandings and responses to disability that prevent inclusion and human rights from being realized. As the book is grounded in reconceptualist theorizing, it draws on multiple perspectives—including critical disability theory, post-modernism, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and social constructivism—to deconstruct and destabilize what is currently taken for granted about disability and those ascribed disabled identities within education. A variety of personal, professional, research experiences and data are offered and drawn on to critically address questions regarding philosophical, epistemological, pedagogical, organizational, economic, and leadership issues as they relate to disability in education. Critical incidents, interviews, documents, and artifacts are drawn on and narratively presented to explore how disability is presently configured in language, identification, and placement processes, discourses, pedagogies, and interactions with students deemed disabled, as well as their parents/caregivers. This critical narrative approach fosters alternative ways of thinking, speaking, being, and doing that forward a human rights focused model of disability that sees as its mandate the amelioration of people with disabilities within education.
This book examines the concept of authentic English in today’s world, where cultures are in constant interaction and the English language works as a binding agent for many cross-cultural exchanges. It offers a comprehensive review of decades of debate around authenticity in language teaching and learning and attempts to synthesise the complexities by presenting them as a continuum. This continuum builds on the work of eminent scholars and combines them within a flexible framework that celebrates the process of interaction whilst acknowledging the complexity and individual subjectivity of authenticity. Authenticity is approached as a complex dynamic construct that can only be understood by examining it from social, individual and contextual dimensions, in relation to actual people. Authenticity is a problem not just for language acquisition but one which affects us as individuals belonging to society.
Pressures for reform in teacher education have begun to take on the same sense of urgency as school reform. Those faculties of education who have been strong advocates for change in the schools now find themselves the subject of similar pressures from governmental policy makers. Attempts at change have taken place in many different countries and jurisdictions around the world.; This book details, through a series of international vignettes, how teachers are responding to the changing times and social contexts in which they do their work. The authors hold the view that changes are inevitable in teacher education but what is not clear is who will control the changes and whether the end result will actually improve the preparation of teachers. The theme of the book is that the reform of teacher education should be informed by intelligent debate and that any attempt to restructure teacher preparation should result from a careful reconceptualisation of it purposes and processes.
What should be the relationship between early childhood and compulsory education? While it's widely assumed that the former should prepare children for the latter, there are alternatives. This book contests the 'readying for school' relationship as neither self-evident nor unproblematic, and explores some alternative relationships.
This book takes a fresh look at professional practice and professional education. In times of increased managerialism of academic teaching and a focus on graduate learning outcomes, it discusses possibilities to teach and learn otherwise. A deliberate professional is someone who consciously, thoughtfully and courageously makes choices about how to act and be in the practice world. A pedagogy of deliberateness is introduced that focuses on developing the following four characteristics of professionals: (1) deliberating on the complexity of practice and workplace cultures and environments; (2) understanding what is probable, possible and impossible in relation to existing and changing practices; (3) taking a deliberate stance in positioning oneself in practice as well as in making technical decisions; and (4) being aware of and responsible for the consequences of actions taken or actions not taken in relation to the ‘doing’, ‘saying’, ‘knowing’ and ‘relating’ in practice. Educating the deliberate professional is a comprehensive volume that carves out and explores a framework for a pedagogy of deliberateness that goes beyond educating reflective and deliberative practitioners. As a whole, this book argues for the importance of educating deliberate professionals, because, in the current higher education climate, there is a need to reconcile critique (thinking), participation (doing) and moral responsibility (relating to others) in professional practice and professional education.