Learning for knowledgeable action: The construction of actionable conceptualisations as a unit of analysis in researching professional learning

摘要

Professional concepts and other kinds of formal articulated knowledge play a critical role in the kinds of complex professional work that involve research- and evidence-informed practice and innovation. However, empirical approaches for investigating how people learn to enact professional concepts in complex practical situations are underdeveloped. The lack of a productive unit of analysis and analytical approaches that permit tracing connections between articulated concepts and embodied action-unfolding in concrete social and material settings-presents serious conceptual and methodological challenges. This article draws on the grounded cognition and distributed object-oriented practice perspectives and shows how construction of actionable conceptualisations serves as a productive unit of analysis for investigating conceptual learning for complex professional action (and action more broadly). By extending ideas on conceptual and material blending, it shows that a multimodal blending perspective can offer a generative analytical approach for researching how people construct actionable conceptualisations. The article illustrates this by tracing how some pre-service (student) teachers enact formal disciplinary and pedagogical concepts during lesson design meetings. It concludes by outlining eight features that characterise pre-service teachers' work constructing actionable conceptualisations and discusses the main theoretical, methodological and practical implications.