ABSTRACT
The chapter examines how content in professional development works as social facts to be the substance and to simultaneously connect participants to socio-professional communities that recognize and use that content. Common professional terms function as social facts to connect participants as members of communities of explanation using the terms to do what they do as a community of activity. Parallels are drawn to de Saussure’s distinction in structural linguistics between “langue” as meaning and “parole” as use, and to Wenger’s distinction between participation and reification in sociocultural theory. Data analyses from the Learning4Teaching study in Chile done by Claudia Cameratti-Baeza show how these social facts define “the facts of the matter” of the professional development for public-sector Chilean teachers and to whom “these facts matter” for teachers as members of the English Language Teaching (ELT) community.
