Learning for knowledgeable action: The construction of actionable conceptualisations as a unit of analysis in researching professional learning

Abstract Professional concepts and other kinds of formal articulated knowledge play a critical role in the kinds of complex professional work that involve research- and evidence-informed practice and innovation. However, empirical approaches for investigating how people learn to enact professional concepts in complex practical situations are underdeveloped. The lack of a productive unit of analysis and analytical approaches that permit tracing connections between articulated concepts and embodied action—unfolding in concrete social and material settings—presents serious conceptual and methodological challenges. This article draws on the grounded cognition and distributed object-oriented practice perspectives and shows how construction of actionable conceptualisations serves as a productive unit of analysis for investigating conceptual learning for complex professional action (and action more broadly). By extending ideas on conceptual and material blending, it shows that a multimodal blending perspective can offer a generative analytical approach for researching how people construct actionable conceptualisations. The article illustrates this by tracing how some pre-service (student) teachers enact formal disciplinary and pedagogical concepts during lesson design meetings. It concludes by outlining eight features that characterise pre-service teachers' work constructing actionable conceptualisations and discusses the main theoretical, methodological and practical implications.