ABSTRACT
Learning has become a key issue across different disciplines. The school is no longer seen as the only significant site of learning, and learning is no longer seen as a matter of the ‘mind’ alone (Säljö, 2009; Lave and Wenger, 1991). The approach put forward in this chapter embraces these changes in the theorisation of learning. The starting points of our approach are, first, that teaching and learning are social practices. Hence our theory is a socially based theory, concerned with the interaction between people and the identities and social roles they take up across different sites, including clinical workplaces. Our second starting point is that teaching and learning are instances of communication, so that a theory of learning and teaching is set within the general frame of a theory of communication. We study communication not to identify ‘communication failures’ in clinical work (see Lingard et al., 2004) but to draw attention to the resourcefulness of clinicians as communicators and the complexities of their encounters with patients and other clinicians, whether as teachers or as learners.
