Building the Foundations of\ud Professional Expertise: creating a dialectic between work and formal learning

Recent critiques of management and teacher education curricula and\ud teaching pay particular attention to the disconnection between the\ud de-contextualised, formal knowledge and analytical techniques\ud conveyed in university programmes and the messy, ill-structured\ud nature of practice. At the same time, research into professional\ud expertise suggests that its development requires bringing together\ud different forms of knowledge and the integration of formal and nonformal\ud learning with the development of cognitive flexibility. Such\ud complex learning outcomes are unlikely to be achieved through a\ud ‘knowledge transmission’ approach to curriculum design. In this\ud article we argue that in many ways current higher education practices\ud create barriers to developing ways of knowing which can underpin the\ud formation of expertise. Using examples from two practice-focused\ud distance learning courses, we explore the role of distance learning in\ud enabling a dialogue between academic and workplace learning and\ud the use of ‘practice dialogues’ among course participants to enable\ud integration of learning experiences. Finally, we argue that we need\ud to find ways in higher education of enabling students to engage\ud in relevant communities of expertise, rather than drawing them\ud principally into a community of academic discourse which is not well aligned with practice