ABSTRACT
The core proposition underlying this chapter is that performing a complex role involves the creation of an ecology of practice that enables people to engage and interact with their environment and the things in it that matter to them and to solve domain-specific problems and communicate learning through making and sharing new disciplinary artefacts. An ecology of practice effectively projects practitioners, as whole sensing, thinking, tool-using organisms, into their environment, and through skilled practices, they interact with and take in their environment and are changed. Using the field geologist as an example of a skilled practitioner, the chapter illustrates how the idea of an ecology of practice is realised in the making of a geological map and explores how the geologist's creativity emerges through the making of this important cultural artefact.
