Re-writing professional discourse.
Year: 1991
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The following thesis is concerned with what I have termed professional discourse. I \nhave used the term to call attention to two elements. With professional, I have \nindicated a recent move in educational analysis and research on teachers and other \npractitioners which represents a shift to a concern with practical activities, a tacit or \nexplicit resistance to theory, and an attempt to displace the cognitive paradigm of \nresearch and theorizing. With the notion of discourse, I have indicated that, in order \nthat the as yet limited debate on professional activity be opened up, it has to be linked \nwith the discourse on practice. By the latter, I mean the opposition between practice and \ntheory at the analytical level, and its most recent unfoldings and manifestations. \nThe thesis identifies a vocabulary of practice, implicating such concepts as reflection, \nrepetition, judgment, skill, example, exemplar, and a series of oppositional terms, such \nas saying/showing, competence/performance, explicit/implicit knowledge. These serve \nas a link between the professional and the practical. The problematic of the \ntheory/practice relation in its various formulations is, then, explicitly addressed in the \nwork of Dreyfus, Habermas, Lyotard and Derrida. \nThe thesis claims that (a) it is Dreyfus' thesis on exemplarity that makes the link \npossible between the professional and the practical, but (b) it is only with Habermas, \nLyotard and Derrida that the professional/practical discourse can take its linguistic turn. \nThen the thesis addresses the implications of the linguistic turn. It argues that it is only \nthrough an examination of the metaphysical presuppositions of the linguistic turn that \nthe claim of professional discourse to be free from the determinations of theory can be \nassessed; in particular, the research methodologies of professional discourse have not \nmade a decision concerning metaphysics and thus they are reduced to methodological \ntechnicity.
Source: IOE EPrints
Author: Anna Tsatsaroni
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W786118563