Practice knowledge and teacher mentoring

Research into professional development and learning (PDL) is often hampered by an unhelpful dichotomy between subjective and objective understandings of practice and how it develops. Furthermore, while much of the literature focuses on the context and conditions for PDL, the practice knowledge itself is often obscured. We examine this problematic to consider a possible conceptual integration of ontological and epistemological approaches and to identify a methodology appropriate for the evaluation of PDL programmes. We explore a case of professional practice in mentoring, as a form of social practice, and its emergence. Our aim is to elaborate a conceptual/theoretical model that is transferable to other PDL contexts. Critical realism provides the ontological basis for this by providing that there is a reality that may not be possible to know, and which is differentiated, structured, and stratified. Social realism explores the sociological implications of critical realism for education and the ways in which “the sociology of knowledge in the sociology of education can have as an ‘object’ the socially organised ways in which such knowledge is systematically produced and transformed”. We show this methodological insight to be important in examining the underlying basis of professional learning.