Nick Hopwood

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor at University of Technology Sydney

Background and Objective Migrant and refugee women, families, and their children can experience significant language, cultural, and psychosocial barriers to engage with child and family services. Integrated child and family health Hubs are increasingly promoted as a potential solution to address access barriers; however, there is scant literature o...

How do teachers elicit and sustain students’ interest and engagement in science lessons? This paper answers this question in the context of Bhutan, where students’ performance in science is low compared to other subjects, and where falling levels of interest in science are a concern. Like other countries in the Global South, a large proportion of s...

Higher education curricula require regular renewal. Varied expertise is needed to meet the multi-faceted challenges of curriculum development, hence the importance of collaborative approaches. Co-design is one approach to curriculum making as a relational practice, with evidence showing it can improve pedagogical quality and stakeholder involvement...

Activist scholarship inspired by a cultural-historical tradition often seeks to foster agency with people facing crisis. The aim is to develop new understandings and bases for action that can help people break away from the status quo and change what is possible. Cultural-historical theory understands crisis and agency dialectically, linking both t...

Aim This study addresses the absence of a definition of care for children with feeding disorders, limited agreement on key performance indicators (KPIs), and the lack of data linked to those KPIs. Methods Clinicians, consumers and researchers involved in outpatient feeding care in New South Wales (NSW), Australia were invited to participate in a t...

In this chapter, we analyse the life-cycle of international partnerships between an Australian university and universities and schools in Nepal and Bhutan. The collaboration placed the Australian university hosts in a distinctive role with special responsibilities of providing stimuli, engaging teachers and teacher educators in joint processes of w...

This book offers theoretical and practical discussion on the inclusion of students with disabilities and learning impairments within the learning environments and beyond.It explores how social relations and social activities can support the personal and social transitions of children, young people and adults in need of specialized support. Written...

Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core...

Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core...

Viewing research supervision as praxis offers alternative perspectives on this crucial aspect of academic work. In this paper, we consider the contributions in this Special Issue as counterpoints to dominant discourses on research supervision by drawing on the idea of praxis as morally committed and history-making action. This brings insights from...

Understanding and promoting agency are crucial to addressing urgent social problems of our time. Through agency, we can take transformative steps toward the future that ought to be. This book shows how contemporary conceptualizations from cultural-historical activity theory can inform research and practice that fosters positive change. At the core...

Clinical supervision is crucial for the professional learning and development of practitioners in many fields. While many have articulated what should happen in clinical supervision, and evaluative research has been undertaken, little is known about the details of what actually happens in clinical supervision. This study addresses this gap, focusin...

We cannot live well without food. However, a significant number of children experience medical issues that impact their feeding, in some cases requiring feeding via a tube. The SUCCEED Child Feeding Alliance recognises the challenges that tube-feeding presents, and collaborates with parents, healthcare providers, and others to take steps towards a...

Introduction To extend research on positive aspects of health care, this article focusses on health care for children who tube‐feed—this is because knowledge about tube‐feeding for children is limited and fragmented. This is achieved by consulting with clinicians and carers who supported children who tube‐feed to clarify their understandings of and...

Working with others is key to professionalism but little attention has been given to how specific actions contribute to collective practices to secure shared ends in work. This essay considers how professionals’ actions connect with one another in distributed (multi-participant) work practices. Recently, Hopwood, Blomberg, Dahlberg and Abrant Dahlg...

Theorizing agency is crucial to intervening in social, economic, political, and environmental crises. This paper examines three approaches to agency within cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT): transformative activist stance (Stetsenko), transformative agency by double stimulation (Sannino), and relational agency (Edwards). All three uphold C...

This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conducted in six continents. The aim is to illuminate and examine the common threads, important differences, and new challenges of formative intervention studies to address "wicked problems" in different cultural, political, and economic contexts. Formative i...

This double symposium brings together activity-theoretical formative intervention research conducted in six continents. The aim is to illuminate and examine the common threads, important differences, and new challenges of formative intervention studies to address “wicked problems” in different cultural, political, and economic contexts. Formative i...

Learning is crucial to how professionals enact practices, and to how practices change. Professionals frequently encounter uncertainty regarding what to do, requiring praxis informed by practical wisdom, which takes into account the virtues of practice. Critical praxis takes this further, questioning current norms to reduce untoward effects. A simul...

To understand how people change the course of their own lives and the lives of those around them, we need to understand the dynamics of agency. Sannino (2015a, 2015b) model of transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), centres on how people use auxiliary tools to break away from conflicts of motives. Focusing on the serious but overlooked...

Purpose Clinical supervision is a crucial workplace practice for professional learning and development. Research is needed to investigate in detail what happens in supervision to understand how this practice contributes to learning. This paper aims to examine how professionals work with knowledge and navigate epistemic challenges in working with pr...

Child healthcare can be vexed by moral concerns – this extends to the care of children who tube-feed. Children who tube-feed often receive care from family members and clinicians of various disciplines. Each brings expertise, experiences, values, and views to a situation, prioritising the child’s needs while attending to those they deem important i...

What is higher education praxis in a world beset by crises? Sjølie et al. (2020) explore this in relation to academics’ learning during the, using the theory of practice architectures, to highlight key responses and adaptations to the Coronavirus pandemic. I offer a re-reading of their cases of changing practice, challenging a sense of being accept...

How to bring about positive change is a key concern in cultural-historical theory. There is an urgent imperative to address questions of transformation at the nexus of the individual and the social. One way to approach this is through the concept of agency, the means through which people go beyond coping with problems or adapting to the status quo,...

Brilliance has been overlooked in studies of professional work. This study aimed to understand how brilliant practices are made possible and enacted in a multidisciplinary paediatric feeding clinic, where professionals from different disciplines work together and with parents and carers of children. The existing literature has thematically describe...

Secondary students’ perceptions of learning science and mathematics have been researched internationally, but less in the global South. This study investigated Grades 9 and 10 students’ experiences of learning biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics in Bhutanese secondary schools. A mixed-methods sequential design was used. First, 524 students...

This article presents an agenda to improve the care and wellbeing of children with paediatric feeding disorder who require tube feeding (PFD‐T). PFD‐T requires urgent attention in practice and research. Priorities include: routine collection of PFD‐T data in health‐care records; addressing the tube‐feeding lifecycle; and reducing the severity and d...

Background: Complex feeding difficulties requiring enteral (tube) feeding affect everyone around the child. Parents experience additional stress and are at risk of social isolation. This study investigated the strategies families develop and use to adjust and adapt to enteral feeding so they were not just surviving, but thriving as a family. Meth...

Theories of agency are often borrowed from psychology and sociology; truly educational theories of agency are rare – theories that not only classify and measure dimensions of agency but enable us to understand how its formation can be pedagogically facilitated. Based on Sannino’s recent work on transformative agency by double stimulation (TADS), a...

This paper explains how simulation-based continuing professional education can enable professionals to overcome significant challenges in healthcare practice. It focuses on pedagogies that address conflicts of motives experienced by teams at work by promoting collective use of protocols and an auxiliary motive to collaborate in agile, relational pr...

This article examines how transformative agency arises in families where parents are struggling with aspects of caring for young children. The mechanisms of how volitional action develops into transformative agency in everyday settings are not well understood. A fine-grained analysis of change is presented in the case of a parent who resolved diffi...

Introduction: Shoulder dystocia is a complex birth emergency where patient outcomes remain a concern. This article investigates the detailed processes of simulation-based continuing education in a hospital where evidence over 10 years demonstrates improvements in practitioner knowledge, enacted practices, and maternal and child outcomes. Methods:...

Purpose Shadow organizing refers to the emergence of parallel arrangements that sit alongside and imitate mainstream or conventional ways of organizing. It can be a response to challenges that require new ways of working without abandoning what is valuable about conventional arrangements. However, the processes through which shadow organizing is ac...

This chapter illustrate how the social and material arrangements for interprofessional simulation produces different conditions for learning. The first section focuses on the emerging medical knowing, affective knowing and communicative knowing in the socio-material arrangements of three locations involved in the simulation, i.e. the simulation roo...

Recent theorisations of practice have suggested that a focus on the role of the body in professional practices, in simulated or naturalistic settings, might enable educators and learners to draw attention to other dimensions of knowledge, which are not easily accessible through cognitive perspectives. Recognising the role of the body in knowledge p...

Relational aspects of professional practice demand increasing attention in research on work and learning. However, little is known about how knowledge is enacted in practices where different people work together. Working in partnership with clients surfaces a number of epistemic demands, responses to which are poorly understood. This paper analyses...

Parent–child interactions significantly influence children’s development. Focusing on parenting practices is therefore a crucial means to disrupt trajectories characterised by risk or disadvantage. Hedegaard’s approach to understanding children’s development looks at the interplay between society, institution and person, foregrounding motives and d...

Relationships young children have with caring adults are important in mitigating the effects of adversity in early childhood. Facilitating parents’ learning is central to support that helps parents cope with difficult circumstances. Within this, a focus on parent–child relationships is crucial. This presents significant challenges to professionals,...

How do professionals at different locations within a firm collaborate to provide services across borders? This article addresses how knowledge-intensive service provisions are coordinated across borders, time zones and expertise. Empirical material from two engineering firms providing services to a global customer base are analysed, comprising over...

Professionals are increasingly called upon to work with clients. We employ cultural-historical concepts to reveal how professionals and clients accomplish joint work on problems in services for families with young children. Professional–client interactions in day stay and home visiting services are considered, first focusing on how matters of conce...

In this chapter, I put the theory of practice architectures to work in re-imagining simulation pedagogy in university-based professional education. I locate simulation within a broader landscape of links between higher education and the professions, before outlining key features of existing research on simulation in health professional education. T...

Purpose This paper aims to introduce, explain and illustrate the concept of “sites of emergent learning” (SEL), which pinpoints particular instances of learning in everyday practice. This concept is located within contemporary practice-oriented and sociomaterial approaches to understanding workplace learning. Design/methodology/approach This con...

The nature of professional work is changing. In particular, relationships between professionals and the people work are being reforged in more complex formations. Partnership approaches to services for families with young children are among the historically new work practices that are part of a broader shift towards coproduction. Working in partner...

Nursing work increasingly demands forms of expertise that complement specialist knowledge. In child and family nursing, this need arises when nurses work in partnership with parents of young children at risk. Partnership means working with parents in respectful, negotiated and empowering ways. Existing partnership literature emphasises communicativ...

Interprofessional collaboration involves some kind of knowledge sharing, which is essential and will be important in the future in regard to the opportunities and challenges in practices for delivering safe and effective health care. Nursing assistants are seldom mentioned as a group of health care workers that contribute to interprofessional colla...

The first five years of parenting are critical to children’s development. Parents are known to respond best to interventions with a partnership-based approach, yet child and family health nurses (CFHNs) report some tension between employing their expertise and maintaining a partnership relationship. This article identifies ways in which CFHNs skilf...

The concept of double stimulation provides a framework for understanding the promotion of volitional action. In this article the concept is applied "in the wild", to analyse professional practice in parenting services for parents with young children at risk. We answer questions about (i) how concepts of double stimulation account for features of pr...

Three core ideas are at the heart of this book: relational expertise, the capacity to interpret problems with others; common knowledge, which consists of knowing what matters for professionals in other practices; and relational agency, which involves using that common knowledge to take action with others. These ideas are based in cultural-historica...

This chapter articulates a distinctive connection between practice, the body and pedagogy. Linking these is the idea of attuning, conceived as relational, corporeal and enacted. In this way, binaries between mind and body, knowing and doing, self and other, teacher and learner are disrupted. The account of embodied pedagogy also explores how such w...

Knowledge sharing is an essential part of interprofessional practice and will be even more important in the future in regard to the opportunities and challenges in practices for delivering safe and effective healthcare. The aim of this ethnographic study was to explore how professional knowledge can be shared in an interprofessional team at a spina...

This chapter describes the professional practices under examination throughout the book, and the site at which the empirical work took place. The role that services for children and families play in addressing major social problems linked to disadvantage and inequality is explained. Relevant features of contemporary public policy in Australia are p...

This chapter continues the exploration of four essential dimensions of professional practices and learning, focusing now on spaces. Concepts from Chap. 3 are entangled with ethnographic data. It draws on Schatzki’s practice theory and Thrift’s non-representational approach in order to enrich Gherardi’s notion of connectedness in action through the...

This chapter continues the exploration of four essential dimensions of professional practices and learning, now focusing on bodies. Concepts from Chap. 3 are brought into entangled relations with ethnographic data, enriching a Gherardian notion of connectedness in action by focusing on the body work involved in producing, maintain, repairing, resto...

This chapter outlines the ethnographic basis for the book, and develops particular arguments linking ethnographic approaches with practice-based and sociomaterial perspectives. Details of the fieldwork undertaken at Karitane are then provided, framing the account in practice theoretical terms by describing fieldwork practices and the site of resear...

This chapter explores the idea that partnership-based practices intensify the pedagogic nature of work that may not be traditionally seen as such. It brings a four-dimensional view of professional practices into contact with the arguments about professional learning presented in Chap. 9. It entangles these with basic Vygotskian concepts of the zone...

This chapter focuses on one of four essential dimensions of professional practices and learning: times. Concepts from Chap. 3 are entangled with ethnographic data, viewing times as multiple and enacted into being through practices and material arrangements. It begins by examining how professional practices on the Residential Unit of Karitane produc...

This paper discusses how cultural-historical theory can be used to promote GNH in Bhutan. Cultural-historical approaches stem from the work of Lev Vygotsky into early childhood development. Although GNH and cultural-historical theory have different historical origins, there are valuable points of intersection that point to useful areas of research...

The importance of pedagogic practices in addressing major social problems is increasingly acknowledged. This is especially so in areas of work not traditionally understood in pedagogic terms, such as services for vulnerable families with young children. Policy mandates for change in relationships between professionals and clients have challenged co...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to shed new light on how partnership practices that build resilience in families work. Two broad questions are explored: first, what are the forms of expertise required in practices that effectively build resilience through partnership?; and second, how can some of the challenges practitioners experience when...

Despite the widespread interest in using and researching simulation in higher education, little discussion has yet to address a key pedagogical concern: difficulty. A ‘sociomaterial’ view of learning, explained in this paper, goes beyond cognitive considerations to highlight dimensions of material, situational, representational and relational diffi...

As the field of health care simulation matures, new questions about appropriate pedagogy are emerging which present challenges to research and practices. This has implications for how we investigate and deliver effective simulations, how we conceive effectiveness, and how we make decisions about investment in simulation infrastructure. In this arti...

This chapter provides a detailed overview of contemporary sociomaterial and practice-based approaches, focusing in particular on their implications for conceiving workplace learning. It lays the theoretical foundations for the analysis and arguments developed in Parts II and III. It sets out an ontological position, and key concepts that are not so...

This chapter concludes the exploration of four essential dimensions of professional practices and learning, now focusing on thing. Concepts from Chap. 3 are brought into entangled relations with ethnographic data, enriching a Gherardian notion of connectedness in action by zooming in and out on a range of material features of the Unit. Things are n...

This chapter takes up the ideas presented in Part II—times, spaces, bodies, and things as essential dimensions of professional practice and learning. The focus here is specifically on how professionals learning about, from and with the people they are there to help (in this case, families with young children), and each other. The chapter begins by...

This chapter takes a practice-theory informed approach to understanding the body doing ethnographic fieldwork. It treats ethnographic fieldwork as a form of professional practice, albeit a contested one, in which the notion of embodiment is widely established. However new lines of understanding and new ways of giving accounts of these practices are...

This chapter introduces the key questions around which the Body/Practice book is framed. How the body matters in practice, its significance for understanding and researching professional practice, learning and education, and the implications of an approach that centres the body are all raised as central matters of concern. These questions are locat...

As health services are becoming more complex, communication is critical to enable healthcare clinicians to provide safe and high-quality care. In response to the growing emphasis on clinicians' capacity to practise effective communication, Communicating Quality and Safety in Health Care provides real-life communication scenarios and inter-professio...

The preparation of future professionals for practice is a key focus of higher education institutions. Among a range of approaches is the use of simulation peda- gogies. While simulation is often justified as a direct bridge between higher education and professional practice, this paper questions this easy assumption. It develops a conceptually driv...

This chapter provides a detailed theoretical account of what it might mean to theorise professional practice, learning and education in a way that brings bodies to the fore. Taking up notions of corporeality and bodyness as central themes, it develops a conceptual thesis located within broader ontological shifts in the basis for understanding socie...

This article presents a sociomaterial account of simulation in higher education. Sociomaterial approaches change the ontological and epistemological bases for understanding learning and offer valuable tools for addressing important questions about relationships between university education and professional practices. Simulation has grown in many di...

Purpose – This conceptual paper aims to argue that times, spaces, bodies and things constitute four essential dimensions of workplace learning. It examines how practices relate or hang together, taking Gherardi’s texture of practices or connectedness in action as the foundation for making visible essential but often overlooked dimensions of workpla...

This paper situates the geography PhD within the broader context of doctoral education. It addresses questions relating to the PhD as preparation for future academic work. Theoretical and practical ideas are woven through a discussion of the work of the Centre for Excellence in Preparing for Academic Practice, at the University of Oxford, UK. The C...

Purpose – To explore the methodological implications of sociomaterial theory for qualitative research about practice. The purpose of this paper is to assess the potential and limitations of video stimulus to discussion about practice as embodied and material, and to theorise this in terms of epistemic objects. Design/methodology/approach – A video...

Professional work is often heralded as undergoing radical transformation. This paper focuses on partnership between health professionals and families as a specific instance of changes aimed at delivering shared responsibility and joint knowledge work. An ethnographic study of a residential child and family health services provides the empirical bas...

Individual reflections on research teamwork research in this chapter capture each team member’s view of how collaboration unfolded at two distinct stages during the writing of this book. The first set was written at the draft publication phase, with each author writing independently, unaware of what the other had written. These reflections cover ho...

Making sense of what goes on in ‘the field’ is complexly messy in ethnographic research. Analysis is often more difficult in research teams because of team members’ individual insights, and multiple, diverse and often conflicting interpretations of what is going on. Negotiating this complex messiness can be fraught with power tussles, which often r...

Traditional ethnographic research methods employed in the case study in this book are well documented. This chapter, therefore, documents the asymmetries in team members’ data generation methodologies and practices and their different materialisations. It describes the methods employed in the study, focusing on the differences that emerged organica...

Key processes, methods and approaches to asymmetrical research teams are identified in the book’s concluding chapter. What is listed is what the authors see as essential for collaboration in ethnographic teams, yet it is for readers to judge which may be useful to their own particular contexts and requirements.

Ethnographic teams comprise individual members who contribute vastly different knowledge, experiences and skills to the collaborative research enterprise. This introductory chapter first outlines the context, setting and research focus of the ethnographic case study in this book. The study is broadly located in the domain of learning as it occurs i...

Collaboration in ethnography can describe vastly different relationships between individual researchers, research team members, the people they study, and those on whom they rely for background information, support and fieldwork data. This chapter traces a number of historical trajectories of collaboration in ethnography through two terms that cons...

Abstract It is widely recognized that every workplace potentially provides a rich source of learning. Studies focusing on health care contexts have shown that social interaction within and between professions is crucial in enabling professionals to learn through work, address problems and cope with challenges of clinical practice. While hospital en...