Social Practices in Higher Education

This book addresses Mohan’s (1986) concept of a social practice, an educational activity that can be considered as action in a frame of meaning, or a "knowledge framework" (KF). The KF, grounded in systemic functional linguistics, is a heuristic that provides both a theoretical framework for researching the language of social practices and a springboard for organizing lessons that can help teachers bring explicit language development into content teaching. This volume brings together the latest research on using Mohan’s SFL-based theory at institutions of higher learning. One outcome of this book is to show how a functional approach to language research can be a major tool for research in the experiential tradition of John Dewey who, as a pragmatist, regarded knowledge functionally "as arising from an active adaptation of the human organism to its environment" (www.iep.utm.edu/dewey). Another outcome is to illustrate the complexity of the role activities play in education. This is the first book to examine the linguistic demands of the activities that occur in higher education. It provides empirically grounded examples of how Mohan’s work is being implemented in universities worldwide. It thus adds to conversations addressing the use of educational activities to teach and describe disciplinary literacy and the integrated development of language and content.