This book explores important questions about the relationship between professional practice and learning, and implications of this for how we understand professional expertise. Focusing on work accomplished through partnerships between practitioners and parents with young children, the book explores how connectedness in action is a fluid, evolving accomplishment, with four essential dimensions: times, spaces, bodies, and things. Within a broader sociomaterial perspective, the analysis draws on practice theory and philosophy, bringing different schools of thought into productive contact, including the work of Schatzki, Gherardi, and recent developments in cultural historical activity theory. The book takes a bold view, suggesting practices and learning are entwined but distinctive phenomena. A clear and novel framework is developed, based on this idea. The argument goes further by demonstrating how new, coproductive relationships between professionals and clients can intensify thepedagogic nature of professional work, and showing how professionals can support others’ learning when the knowledge they are working with, and sense of what is to be learned, are uncertain, incomplete, and fragile.

Nick Hopwood is a Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney, and a member of the Centre for Research in Learning and Change. He has a strong track record of published work and relevant experience of book authorship. From 2004 to the present, he has published 17 journal articles, 5 book chapters, a joint-authored book (Rickinson, Lundholm & Hopwood, Environmental Learning: Insights from Research into the Student Experience, Springer, 2009), and a monograph (Geography in Secondary Schools: Researching Pupils’ Classroom Experiences, Continuum, 2012). He has edited two special issues of international journals, and has served as a book-review editor. His publications trace a long interest in framing empirical problems in relation to learning, practice and work in different contexts.