Exploring the practice-pedagogy middle ground: progress report on a hermeneutic inquiry into education for practice

What is an appropriate university eductaion for practice in the 21st century, a time when workplaces and the nature of work itself seem to be undergoing continuous change? In this paper we explore the 'ideas space' in which the constructs of practice and pedagogy face each other in this climate of change and uncertainty. Our collaboration on the paper arises out of our longer-term work on the first author's doctoral inquiry into 'meaning making capability for 21st century university education', which seeks to develop new ways of designing and implementing vocational professional preparation courses.Preparing students to cope with uncertainty in the workplace requires rich and careful curriculum planning. To illustrate this we refer readers to a curriculum redevelopment in the early 2000s aimed at helping rural management students to be 'job-ready' on graduation. The subject Cropping Systems was redesigned to provide students with a support structure for their self-managed knowledge and capability development. We profile that design and use it to introduce our new four field of interest schema, which is proposed as a potentially useful curriculum design tool for appropriate eductaion for practice. The paper also illustarates how hermeneutic research affords fresh insights into deep questions of understanding and human purpose, and how such thinking can be seen as part of university-level education.