Agency, learning and knowledge work: Epistemic dilemmas in professional practices

Hopwood, N

Agency, learning and knowledge work: Epistemic dilemmas in professional practices

Hopwood, N

Permalink

Publication Type:: Chapter
Citation:: Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2017, 20 pp. 121 - 140
Issue Date:: 2017-01-01

Closed Access

	Filename	Description	Size
	Hopwood 2017 Agency at Work.pdf	Published version	686.24 kB	Adobe PDF	View/Open

Copyright Clearance Process

Recently Added
In Progress
Closed Access

This item is closed access and not available.

Full metadata record

Field	Value	Language
dc.contributor.author	Hopwood, N https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2149-5834	en_US
dc.date.issued	2017-01-01	en_US
dc.identifier.citation	Professional and Practice-based Learning, 2017, 20 pp. 121 - 140	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10453/116935
dc.description.abstract	© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The nature of professional work is changing. In particular, relationships between professionals and the people work are being reforged in more complex formations. Partnership approaches to services for families with young children are among the historically new work practices that are part of a broader shift towards coproduction. Working in partnership with parents places a particular set of demands on practitioners, including engaging in distinctive forms of relational work and developing new kinds of expertise. Less well understood is what such changes mean in terms of the ways professionals in such settings need to develop and exercise agency as a regular, but nonroutine, part of their work. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a parent education service in Sydney (Australia), casting light on agentic responses to a series of epistemic dilemmas that professionals encounter in practice. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, it works with concepts of the object, activity, motive, and practice in dialectic relation with one another. Analysis focuses on handover between professionals as an artefact of practice in which professionals do knowledge work, inflecting ‘Where to?’ questions with agentic and epistemic considerations of ‘How do we get there?’ The account provided here enriches cultural-historical understandings of agency in the context of professional work, offering an expanded description of responses to epistemic dilemmas in practice.	en_US
dc.relation	http://purl.org/au-research/grants/arc/DE150100365
dc.relation.ispartof	Professional and Practice-based Learning	en_US
dc.relation.isbasedon	10.1007/978-3-319-60943-0_7	en_US
dc.title	Agency, learning and knowledge work: Epistemic dilemmas in professional practices	en_US
dc.type	Chapter
utslib.citation.volume	20	en_US
utslib.for	1302 Curriculum and Pedagogy	en_US
pubs.embargo.period	Not known	en_US
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney
pubs.organisational-group	/University of Technology Sydney/Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
utslib.copyright.status	closed_access
pubs.publication-status	Published	en_US
pubs.volume	20	en_US

Abstract:

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The nature of professional work is changing. In particular, relationships between professionals and the people work are being reforged in more complex formations. Partnership approaches to services for families with young children are among the historically new work practices that are part of a broader shift towards coproduction. Working in partnership with parents places a particular set of demands on practitioners, including engaging in distinctive forms of relational work and developing new kinds of expertise. Less well understood is what such changes mean in terms of the ways professionals in such settings need to develop and exercise agency as a regular, but nonroutine, part of their work. This chapter draws on an ethnographic study of a parent education service in Sydney (Australia), casting light on agentic responses to a series of epistemic dilemmas that professionals encounter in practice. Adopting a cultural-historical approach, it works with concepts of the object, activity, motive, and practice in dialectic relation with one another. Analysis focuses on handover between professionals as an artefact of practice in which professionals do knowledge work, inflecting ‘Where to?’ questions with agentic and epistemic considerations of ‘How do we get there?’ The account provided here enriches cultural-historical understandings of agency in the context of professional work, offering an expanded description of responses to epistemic dilemmas in practice.

Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item:

http://hdl.handle.net/10453/116935