Thinking Bodies: Practice Theory, Deleuze, and Professional Education

Abstract

This chapter offers a (different) way of thinking about the relationship between bodies and practice in professional education. It explores what it means to think the body in such circumstances, to think about the body, to draw the body into Thought. It begins by reviewing, specifically in the context of addressing the question of the body in professional practice, learning and education, what has come to be called practice theory and philosophy, understood as a loose assemblage of arguments and interests centred on practice as concept and primary organising principle for the social world. Schatzki’s work is an initial reference-point, as a key figure in the contemporary ‘practice turn’ in contemporary theory. Of particular interest here is the manner in which the body is mobilised in Schatzki’s self-described ‘residually humanist’ theory of practice, bearing in mind too his views on language and representation and his own measured, somewhat ambivalent engagement with Deleuze and Guattari. This is followed by a Deleuzian account of practice and the body, taking into account the primary question, ‘What can a body do?’. A final section is addressed specifically to the Early Years classroom, reading pedagogy, and the body-work of teaching.