The Social Theory of Practices effectively criticized conceptions of social practices as rule-governed or regularity-exhibiting performances. Turner’s criticisms nevertheless overlook an alternative, "normative" conception of practices as constituted by the mutual accountability of their performances. Such a conception of practices also allows a more adequate understanding of normativity in terms of accountability to what is at issue and at stake in a practice. We can thereby understand linguistic practice and normative authority without having to posit stable meanings, rules, norms, or (...) presuppositions underlying the manifest diversity of social life. Key Words: normativity • practices • rules • language. (shrink)

I argue here that Alasdair MacIntyre is mistaken when he claims that teaching is not a practice. In particular, I try to throw some doubt on his claim that ‘teaching is never more than a means’ and to challenge his list of things that all students should learn. In the second section, I show how analyses of professionalism endorse MacIntyre's emphasis on complexity and internal criteria for practices. Finally, building on the doubts observed in the first section and the criteria (...) identified in the second, I describe teaching as a relational practice. (shrink)

This paper starts from the point in the early 1970s at which educational theory and research was temporarily structured under the ‘foundation’ disciplines of psychology, sociology, philosophy and history of education. It observes the way the intellectual resources of educational research have become enlarged and enriched and these disciplines themselves fragmented and hybridised to a degree that prompts talk not just of interdisciplinarity but of ‘postdisciplinarity’. The paper argues, however, that without discipline, in the sense of a shared language, a (...) rule governed structure of enquiry—something ‘systematic’—we lose the conditions that make a community of arguers possible. Further, we lose the basis for the special claim which research might otherwise make on our attention and on our belief. (shrink)