Abstract:
This paper explores the complexities of understanding and researching professional learning and practice. Within a broad practice-theoretical framing, the paper brings into (not always comfortable) contact theorisation of context, space/place, and the body. The aim is not to develop a clean framework and straightforwardly linked set of questions and methods, but rather to embrace the difficulties and aporias such a project presents. The following sections outline starting points and deeper commitments for the argument to be developed fully in the paper. Practice has often been overlooked theoretically, leading to a 'thin' adoption of the term with often little meaning (Green 2009; Kemmis 2009). However a body of work is emerging which asserts the primacy of practice as the focus of enquiry. Schatzki (2001a) refers to a practice turn in contemporary theorising, with others framing such work as poststructural in nature, adopting a relational perspective, and challenging dominant dualisms such as theory/practice, mind/body (eg. Green 2009; Reckwitz 2002; Saltmarsh 2009). Rich reconceptualisations of practice are crucial in developing distinctive and nuanced accounts of professional learning and education.ContextSaltmarsh (2009) suggests that the place of context in research is 'ambiguous, contested and dynamic, and reflects a diverse range of understandings about the co-implications of context and practice' (p. 157). Schatzki (2002) challenges notions of context as container for social phenomena, arguing instead for a complex entanglement that is part of social practices. A relational view of context suggests it is co-implied with practices, as each (re)constitutes the other. Notions of throwness and projection are suggestive of a means to situate an individual practitioner within such complexity (Schatzki 2006), highlighting one’s already being in the world, one's situated response to contexts. Shotter (2005) writes of chiasmic relations between bodies and their material surrounds, while metaphors of ecological relations also open up complex readings of context in which lines distinguishing features from each other are blurred and dependent on the contingencies of particular situations (Sanders 1999). A challenge thus presents itself regarding how to frame and research context (in such relational terms) within enquiry into professional learning and practice. Relationships between practice and space have increasingly come under scrutiny within a spatial turn that has enjoyed only fleeting contacts with the aforementioned practice turn. Place and space may be seen as integral to practice rather than separate entities in which practice occurs: 'practice is always embodied (and situated)' it is what people do, in a particular place and time' (Kemmis 2009, p. 23).Kemmis' wording suggests an intimacy between practice, place/space and the body. Casey's (2001) phenomenology of place starts with/from the body, arguing that the body constitutes a central mediating phenomenon between self and place. Schatzki (2001b, 2006) highlights the need to weave corporeality into notions of practice, agreeing that the body lies at the heart of complex relations between self, place, practice and context (see also Gallagher 2003). While many describe practice as 'embodied' or point to bodily aspects of it, distinctions between embodiment and the body, and the place of the body in learning and practice remain in need of elaboration and clarification. This paper does not aim to develop a clean conceptual model of practice or practice learning. Rather, recognising that practices are characteristically fuzzy, indeterminate and dynamic (Green 2009; Schatzki 2002), it anticipates parallel qualities in any conceptual account or empirical enquiry (Fish 2009). Following Wittgenstein's call to go 'back to the rough ground', I argue that we need to inhabit and pause in such difficult theoretical spaces. The full paper will further develop these ideas and explore the opportunities and tensions they present with respect to framing and engaging in empirical study of learning and practice in health professions. As such the paper offers an account of complex theorising as part of the process of developing informed research questions and approaches. This does away with rational models of research design and methodology, and presents research as a messy, unpredictable form of practice in itself.