ABSTRACT
In this chapter we examine the disruptive aspects of learning. In the Learning in and for Interagency Working (LIW) study we saw organisations resisting the learning that practitioners brought to them from interactions with other professionals, and we also worked in sites where their main purpose was to develop a new systems that could respond to the demands inter-professional work. We met practitioners who were initially reluctant to recognise the strengths and constraints of other professionals, and those who were eager to embrace the new insights that other ways of seeing the same child brought. We saw practitioners who, as we described in Chapter 5, ‘balanced on the boundaries’ in their conversations with other professions, and heard of others who were accused of ‘going native’ when they took ideas from these conversations back to their home organisations. The difficulties associated with professional learning are rarely simply cognitive, a result of a problem being poorly understood. They are more often than not contextual and personal.
