Nick Hopwood – författare

The body matters, in practice. How then might we think about the body in our work in and on professional practice, learning and education? What value is there in realising and articulating the notion of the professional practitioner as crucially embodied? Beyond that, what of conceiving of the professional practice field itself as a living corporate body? How is the body implicated in understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education?

Body/Practice is an extensive volume dedicated to exploring these and related questions, philosophically and empirically. It constitutes a rare but much needed reframing of scholarship relating to professional practice and its relation with professional learning and professional education more generally. It takes bodies seriously, developing theoretical frameworks, offering detailed analyses from empirical studies, and opening up questions of representation.

This uniquely in-depth book offers a blow-by-blow account of the sometimes problematic dynamics of conducting collaborative fieldwork in ethnography. Tracing the interplay between co-researchers at various points of contact in both professional and personal relations, the analysis draws out the asymmetries which can develop among team members nominally working towards the same ends. It details the often complex dialogues that evolve in an attempt to navigate conflicting interests, such as team members’ resistances to particular methodological ‘recipes’ or research protocols. The authors show that such debates can create an open forum to negotiate new practices.

A key element of this publication is that it goes beyond an analysis of more traditional power relations in research teams comprising members at different academic pay grades. As well as drawing attention to gender-related dynamics in research collaborations, the authors use themselves as an exemplar to demonstrate how differences in age, experience, knowledge, professional skills and background can be exploited to generate positive outcomes constituting much more than the apparent sum of their parts. In doing so, the authors reveal the delightful, surprising and yet challenging aspects of research collaboration that are often absent from the qualitative literature.

Environmental education and education for sustainable development have become features of many countries’ formal education systems. To date, however, there have been few attempts to explore what such learning looks and feels like from the perspective of the learners. Based on in-depth empirical studies in school and university classrooms, this book presents rich insights into the complexities and dynamics of students’ environmental learning. The authors show how careful analysis of students’ environmental learning experiences can provide powerful pointers for future practice, policy and research. Environmental Learning will be a key resource for educators, teacher educators, decision-makers and researchers involved in education and sustainable development.