What are the future possibilities for the standing of professional practice as it faces growingly problematic markets for services, complex demands for managerial accountability and control, and problematic circumstances and expectations in its ethical and self-regulative governance? New sources of inspiration may be needed if professionalism is to be either a viable or desirable form for the social organisation of work in the coming years of potentially deep economic and social change. Set in the UK, South Africa, Australia and the USA, the empirical studies included elaborate problematic situations of professional practice concerning issues of identity and knowledge. The theoretical studies explore the notion of generic processes; elaborate the plurality of notions of professional practice; theorise the hybridisation witnessed in inter-professional and cross-disciplinary team work; and outline new theoretical departures relating to these. Elaborating professionalism also raises important methodological issues relating to professionalism as ethical practice. The book offers valuable resources to enrich practice, and provokes thought and new ideas about professionalism.

This is an important book. Ethics is not an easy topic, and arguably the ethics of IT is less so—not leastdue to its potential for developing and evolving in ways that are either unforeseen or unimaginable . . . . Use this book as a practical resource, an informative and educational source of material in developing expertise, but also as an invaluable toolkit to support practical application of ethical thinking. —Declan Brady, President of the Irish Computer Society and a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies Digital technology is about people. It is about those who plan, develop and implement applications which other people use and are affected by. It is about the impact on all these people as well as on the world at large. Ethical Digital Technology in Practice takes a real-world perspective to explore these impacts over time and discover ways in which to promote ethical digital technology through good practice. It draws upon the author’s published articles in trade magazines, professional journals and online blogs. These are synthesised into a blueprint which addresses, in a practical manner, the societal issues surrounding the increasing use and abuse of digital technology. It is a follow-up book to the author’s book The Evolving Landscape of Ethical Digital Technology, which has a researcher’s perspective. This book is a hands-on account of the computer revolution from 1995 to the current day when the world is increasingly dependent on digital technology. It explores some of the social and ethical issues that are part of this revolution. This is not a book about deep philosophical and technical concepts. Nor does it claim to be comprehensive. It is the author’s personal account of technological change and its effects on people. It is written by a boy who was smitten by computer technology at the age of 15, became a computer professional and subsequently spent many years showing young people how to develop and use digital technology in a good way. It is a book based upon the author’s engagement with practitioners, academics and students during the period as well as his continued fascination with this fantastic technology. Ethical Digital Technology in Practice is a book about the real world, of what has happened and what might happen as digital technology continues to pervade.

This volume provides an overview of key contemporary themes in educational leadership. It focuses on developing professional capacity, organisation improvement and the implementation of change, looking at theoretical frameworks and concepts, recent research studies and case examples of effective practice. The book covers: - leading learning and learner leadership - change processes and distributed leadership - leading professional development for educational contexts. Designed to encourage critical analysis and debate, this volume will be a useful resource for postgraduate and professional development courses in educational leadership and for practitioners. It is a companion to Educational Leadership: Context, Strategy and Collaboration, also published by Sage.

Public services have been a target for reform in Western-style democracies for more than three decades. This volume documents and examines the case of School Business Managers (SBMs) as an example of a growing but scarcely-acknowledged phenomenon: the government-backed creation of new 'professions' within the public sector for groups of support workers not formally recognised as such. The dawn of the millennium saw the beginning of an unprecedented professional project as the New Labour government set about the systematic creation of a pool of suitably skilled and qualified School Business Managers in England. The Government's stated purpose was to support educational leaders in meeting mounting public expectations for state schools in increasingly complex and challenging circumstances.Although the 'war stories' of lead professionals such as teachers and physicians in the context of reform have been extensively documented, the contribution of the army of less high-status professionals in public service institutions is poorly-understood. Drawing on first-hand accounts of people involved in bringing the SBM professional project about, and those whose professional lives the project sought to target, the SBMs themselves, the book turns the spotlight on an under-recognised group. It explores the purposes and outcomes of the professionalization initiative, comparing the process to the professional projects of SBMs in other countries and to parallel projects within the health sector.

“What might the futures of practice be like?” is far from a straightforward question. Emphasising "the" before the word future, implies one future. But futures thinkers have identified a range of futures that people think about. In this book we reflect on possible, probable, and preferable futures in relation to practice and work. Readers are invited to consider how their own engagement in shaping possible futures will support ways of working that they deem preferable, even those they can hardly imagine. Challenging Future Practice Possibilities also examines influences that are maintaining the status quo and others that are pushing interest-driven change. Authors consider the major challenges that practice and practitioners face today such as wicked problems, fears for the future and complex demands and opportunities posed by the digital revolution. A number of examples of future-oriented work directions such as protean careers and artificial intelligence enhancing or even replacing human workforces, are considered along with concerns like the vulnerability of many work situations and workers. In some cases workers and employers alike are unprepared for these challenges, while others see adapting to these situations as yet another pathway of practice futures evolution.

Informal Learning at Work reflects the growing interest in changing the way the workplace encourages and enhances learning and professional development. Due to societal, economic, and technological developments, organisations face the pressure of growing knowledge-intensity and the need for innovations. As a result, employees are expected to adapt to new situations and constantly update their skillsets within an increasingly challenging environment. This book brings together cross-disciplinary perspectives from leading international researchers, drawing on a range of theoretical and empirical studies. Extensively researched and expertly edited, this new addition to the EARLI New Perspectives on Learning and Instruction series outlines the starting points for future research, and highlights the benefits and implications for those aiming to foster informal learning at work, covering areas such as: professional judgement improving the structure of work tasks facilitating innovative work behaviour the place of informal learning within teaching Informal Learning at Work presents original quantitative and qualitative studies as well as integrative analyses of worldwide research and is an invaluable introduction to this highly topical subject.

Character Education for 21st Century Global Citizens contains the papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Teacher Education and Professional Development (InCoTEPD 2017), Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 20—21 October 2017. The book covers 7 topics: 1) Values for 21st century global citizens 2) Preparing teachers for integrative values education 3) Teacher professional development for enhanced character education 4) Curriculum/syllabus/lesson plan/learning materials development for integrated values education 5) Developing learning activities/tasks/strategies for character education 6) Assessing student’s character development (values acquisition assessment) 7) Creating/managing conducive school culture to character education.

The quality, resourcing and accessibility of healthcare is a key issue facing societies in the 21st century. Despite the system delivery focus of these factors it is critical to remember that healthcare is a human service and as such, people need to be placed at the centre of healthcare systems and processes. To do this we need to improve the way that people are valued and involved in healthcare practices. Professional relationships lie at the heart of such practices. This book illuminates and challenges professional healthcare relationships. The authors examine the nature, context and purpose of healthcare relationships, explore models through which these relationships are enacted, developed and critiqued, and provide narratives of health practice relationships in action. These narratives reveal how health practice relationships are experienced and created in real-world situations. The various chapters generate a range of implications and recommendations for healthcare practice and systems and for the education of health professionals. This is a book for practitioners, educators, clients, members of the community, advocacy and agency groups, regulatory bodies and those with power to shape the future direction of healthcare. There are four sections in the book: Section 1: Health practice relationships context Section 2: Understanding professional relationships Section 3: Health practice relationships narratives Section 4: Implications for practice, systems and education

Practice Theory and Education challenges how we think about ‘practice’, examining what it means across different fields and sites. It is organised into four themes: discursive practices; practice, change and organisations; practising subjectivity; and professional practice, public policy and education. Contributors to the collection engage and extend practice theory by drawing on the legacies of diverse social and cultural theorists, including Bourdieu, de Certeau, Deleuze and Guattari, Dewey, Latour, Marx, and Vygotsky, and by building on the theoretical trajectories of contemporary authors such as Karen Barad, Yrjo Engestrom, Andreas Reckwitz, Theodore Schatzki, Dorothy Smith, and Charles Taylor. The proximity of ideas from different fields and theoretical traditions in the book highlight key matters of concern in contemporary practice thinking, including the historicity of practice; the nature of change in professional practices; the place of discursive material in practice; the efficacy of refiguring conventional understandings of subjectivity and agency; and the capacity for theories of practice to disrupt conventional understandings of asymmetries of power and resources. Their juxtaposition also points to areas of contestation and raises important questions for future research. Practice Theory and Education will appeal to postgraduate students, academics and researchers in professional practice and education, and scholars working with social theory. It will be of particular interest to those who wish to move beyond the limiting configurations of practice found in contemporary neoliberal, new managerialist and narrow representationalist discourses.

The three concepts central to this volume—practice, learning and change—have received very different treatments in the educational literature, an oversight directly confronted here. While learning and change have been extensively theorised, their various contexts articulated and analysed, practice is notably underrepresented. Where much of the literature on learning and change takes the notion of ‘practice’ as an unexamined given, its co-location as a term with various classifiers, as in ‘legal practice’ and ‘teaching practice’, render it curiously devoid of semantic force. In this book, ‘practice’ is the super-ordinate organising idea. Drawing on what has been termed the ‘practice turn in contemporary theory’, the work develops a conceptual framework for researching learning in, and on, practice. It challenges received notions of practice, questioning the assumptions, elisions, conflations and silences on the subject. In so doing, it offers fresh insights into learning and change, and how they relate to practice. In tandem with this conceptual work, the book details site-ontological studies of practice and learning in diverse professional and workplace contexts, examining the work of occupations as various as doctors, chefs and orchestral musicians. It demonstrates the value of theorising practice, learning and change, as well as exploring the connections between them amid our evolving social and institutional structures.