Provocations and possibilities in professional practice, education, and learning

This Special Issue of Studies in Continuing Education presents a selection of papers originally presented at the fourth Professional Practice, Education and Learning (ProPEL) conference, hosted by the University of Technology Sydney in December 2019. ProPEL is a collaborative, multi-professional international network (launched in 2010 at the University of Stirling) to promote research and knowledge exchange in issues of professional education, practice and learning. The theme of the 2019 conference was Provocations and possibilities in professional practice, education, and learning. It aimed to shine a light on the unspoken, unasked, and intangible, and embracing the creative, emerging and unexpected. The conference invited participants to extend the conversations from the previous conference in 2017 where there was a significant interest in the changing nature of professional practice, and the ‘practice’ of learning, as noted by Fenwick (2018), as well as foci on messiness, coordination work, and objects; time and temporality as overlooked actors organising practices; and the need for nuanced approaches to differentiating expertise in ways that keep the notion closer to practice (Dahlgren, Gustavsson, and Fejes 2018). As a result, many of the questions that vexed presenters in that 2017 conference remained pressing in 2019, including questions of how practice gets done, the learning that happens in the course of practice, and the learning that needs to happen for those who are not-yet professionals (and indeed, whether this is an appropriate way to frame initial professional education). This Special Issue includes papers that represent the diversity of ideas explored and the participants engaging with them. Within the papers that follow are studies that focus on varied professions including teaching, engineering, medicine, architecture, law, allied health, early childhood education, and sports coaching, plus methodological papers exploring research practice itself. Authors include distinguished professors, research students, and practitioners, some working alone, others in collaborative teams, from around the world. So, what of provocation? In a reflective and conversational piece, Kemmis (this issue) appears to even surprise himself on reaching the conclusion that learning is not, in itself, a practice. We take Kemmis’ argument as suggesting that vexed questions of the relationships between education and practice cannot simply be resolved by collapsing one onto the other through a notion of learning as practice. How the practices of professional education and professional work can and should connect remains a key focus of much work in this field, complicated by the need to address this connection without creating artificial bifurcations between separate worlds that need ‘bridging’. Instead, a sense of becoming and the inbetween, of emergence rather than structure, and what is on the edge of being seen came through in the conference. Papers by Stewart et al. (this issue), Clerke et al. (this issue), Maclean (this issue) and Fawns et al. (this issue) tackle this through concepts of space, praxis, quasi-objects, and seamful learning respectively.