Abstract
In this chapter, we revisit some key insights into how the social, the material and the embodied enter professional work and learning. We argue that knowledge work and knowledgeable action are constitutively entangled with embodied practices in the material and social worlds. We show how matter matters in professional work, and how a ‘socially extended mind’ enables thinking with others. This entangling of mind, body and world raises some difficult questions about what is important to teach in the classroom – and what is reasonable to expect students to learn there – and what needs to be learned in real workplaces. As a part of our argument, we revisit some well-known ideas about the dialectical, dialogical and trialogical approaches to knowing and learning. We return to the notion of mediation in professional learning and work. We specifically point to the central, yet often obscured, mediating role of self-as-knower, with a resourceful mind and bodily skills, able to act within, and shape, materially and socially rich work environments. Seeing the self as a mediator, coordinator and active constructor of work and learning environments has strong implications for how we should think about professional skilfulness and the professional capacity to learn.
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Notes
- 1.
OSCE – Objective Structured Clinical Examination.
- 2.
She draws on theoretical work on ‘actor–networks’, ‘sociotechnical ensembles’, ‘the mangle of practice’ and other similar approaches that have roots in science and technology studies (STS). Some of these ideas were introduced in Chap. 5.
- 3.
In other words, we would say that people create actionable knowledge and learn for action not by acting and then reflecting (a.k.a. representing) but by enacting: by bringing forth meanings and the world.
- 4.
Indeed, there is a very fundamental human capacity, on which the modern mind has historically developed, that is largely ignored in professional education. This is the ‘mimetic skill’ used in rehearsing and fine-tuning the body and mind in systematic and voluntary ways (Donald, 2001). Billett (2014) is helping rescue the concept.
- 5.
The distinction between mono-professional and mono-disciplinary knowledge is important here. For example, pharmacy is a mono-professional field even though it draws on knowledge from multiple disciplines.
- 6.
Be they teacher-led methods, such as apprenticeship or Socratic dialogue, or student-led methods, such as students writing reflective journal entries on which they get teacher feedback.
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Markauskaite, L., Goodyear, P. (2017). Rethinking the Material, the Embodied and the Social for Professional Education. In: Epistemic Fluency and Professional Education. Professional and Practice-based Learning, vol 14. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4369-4_16
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