Being a teacher : practice theory, exemplification and the nature of professional practice

Some recent applications of practice theory to education (Kemmis 2010 and 2012) draw on the work of Theodore Scahtzki and has offer a conceptualisation of the nature of schooling and the professional practice of teachers as an architecture and ecology of practices. This paper briefly outlines some of the main benefits of this application of practice theory but also some attendant problems – particularly the difficulty of characterising the personal dimensions of experience. We argue that Nelson Goodman’s work in the general theory of symbols provides a way of filling that gap and, further, that Goodman’s theory complements, and in turn needs to be complemented by, practice theory. After brief expositons of his theories of denotation, notation and exemplification, we show how they imply something like practices and that these can be conceptualised in ways consistent with his nominalistic system.