Profile
Tara Fenwick
Professor of Professional Education
School of Education
A33 Pathfoot Building
University of Stirling
Stirling, FK9 4LA
Email: tara.fenwick at stir dot ac dot uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 1786 467 611
Key words
Professional knowledge, workplace learning, practice-based learning, continuing professional education
Perspective and Recent Research:
My remit at Stirling is broad and interdisciplinary: to promote innovative studies of professional knowledge, practices and learning across domains such as health care, management, social services and education, and to explore effective new approaches to support professional learning across contexts of higher education, workplace, and community. I have written about theories of learning and gender in relation to work practices and education, most recently focusing on what some call ‘socio-material’ theories, particularly actor-network theory and complexity sciences [see: Actor-Network Theory in Education, by Tara Fenwick/Richard Edwards, Routledge 2010, and Tracing the Socio-Material: Emerging Approaches to Educational Research, Tara Fenwick/Peter Sawchuk/Richard Edwards, Routledge forthcoming]. My past research has focused on lifelong learning and education in the everyday activity of ‘workplaces’ and organizations, with particular interest in understanding how identities, power relations and knowledge emerge in the rapidly changing conditions of globalized workplace practices.
My empirical research has been qualitative and collaborative, drawing upon ethnographic and life history approaches. Recent large projects funded by Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council include studies of (1) older professionals’ informal learning and its relation to aging and generational issues; (2) knowledge networks and practices of ‘portfolio’ workers (independent and mobile professionals who work with multiple employers and organizations simultaneously); and (3) social responsibility learning among small business owners, including professional firms. My current project with a Canadian research team is comparing knowledge-creation practices of nurses, social workers and teachers in changing organizations, using an activity theory framework.
Issues and Questions in Researching Professional Learning/Responsibility:
How is ‘responsibility’ enacted in different professions and professional practices?
How is ‘care’ performed?
What tensions and ambivalences emerge in practices/discourses of professional responsibility and care in different systems of work?
What forms of knowledge, knowledge strategies, and professionalism are emerging as ‘caring’ professionals negotiate various reconstructions and consequent contradictions of their work? e.g. decentralized service, new textual practices of audit, professional standards moving from universities to regulatory agencies, increased emphasis on innovation, etc
How do professional practices and enacted knowledge compare across different national regions where individuals must balance transnational knowledge, resources and standards with local knowledge cultures, values? e.g. engineers, accountants
In what different ways does creativity materialise in professional knowledge and practice in different work arrangements? What are its effects and limits?
What implications do such issues have for professional education?
