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.
