Studying Professional Learning from the Perspective of Wittgenstein's Picture of Language and Meaning

In professional learning, both practice and research have tended to limit focus on linear features of dissemination, the development of programmatic change approaches, and scientism. The aim of this dissertation is to find a grounding way to open up differently thinking about professionals learning in situ. By turning to Wittgenstein I shift the fundamentals underlying our talk about professional learning towards a picture of language and meaning. Reacting to the representationalist approach to language initiated by Frege, Wittgenstein sketches a picture of language and meaning consisting of the interrelated parts of language-games, grammar, and rules, focused around the use of signs. My view of Wittgenstein emphasizes language-games, and thus I emphasize moves and move-making (as per Sudnows picture of language as a moving between places). Professional learning, then, can be viewed as a matter of being able to play more relevant language-games and to have more and better moves to make and places to go. Understanding, in this picture, is a matter of being able to go on correctly in the contexts of community and the institution of language; thus I view professional learning not in terms of knowledge but rather in terms of meaning, i.e., mastery of the use of signs. I apply this picture of professional learning by exploring a species of the classic learning paradox, and then by considering the discourse of educators in actual learning sessions. A professional learning paradox emerges through application of Wittgensteins ideas concerning novices training into a practice, a paradox which oscillates throughout the thought of other theorists of education as well. Next, by applying this picture of professional learning in the case of educators peer-group learning discussions, I show how to view the learning efforts of professionals on the basis of their use of relevant signs. Insights drawn from taking up this perspective have to do with the ways in which the professional learners attempt to forge for themselves new connexions between signs. In sum, by turning to Wittgenstein and his picture of language and meaning, one finds the extraordinary in the ordinary.