ABSTRACT
Professional life may be considered to be an ecosystem, in possessing a loose assemblage of elements, of systems and ethics. Material and expressive elements are here in plenty, and, as with ecosystems generally, so too diversity, self-sustaining capacities and impairments are all in evidence. This chapter focuses on the matter of professional life in general and what it means to educate for professional life. It explores the concept of ecological professionalism. Supercomplexity is a shorthand for a particular set of challenges facing the ecological professional. Educating the ecological professional will involve stretching the student into the many zones of professional experience – human, social, epistemological, institutional, cultural, economic, environmental and her own learning too; in short, into and across the ecosystems. This is an ecological professionalism that calls the professional self-reflexively to make choices continually, choices that bring instrumental strategies and actions to self-summoned ethical tribunals.
