This paper offers a way of reconsidering learning-teaching in courses for education professionals using constructs derived from Habermas. Against the backdrop of what is seen by many (Hodkinson and Hodkinson 2005, Bottery and Wright 2000, Ball 1999, Carr and Hartnett 1996) as a technicist curriculum ideology for teacher formation in England I explore how some of the key constructs from Habermas' work could be used with current curricula to counter a tendency to emphasise performance, procedures and learning outcomes at the expense of reflection, problem solving and learning processes. The concern here is to consider how we might work within the constraints of centrally controlled curricula, rather than to add to their critique and deconstruction, though some setting out of the main elements of the critique is necessary in order to present the argument. The paper concerns itself with the wider questions of how curriculum processes might be conducted, as opposed to the more specific discussion of curriculum contents. This position is based on the assumption that, although the dominant forms may be instrumental/technicist, such curricula have a strong rational basis for inclusion in an area of professional activity where 'getting the job done' and other pragmatic concerns (basic levels of conformity of practice, measuring achievement, minimal levels of competence) are not only part of the accepted common sense of policy makers, leaders and managers, but also key concerns of practitioners. The paper makes a key proposal based on the theory of communicative action (Habermas 1984, 1987): that in the course of our everyday attempts to reach agreement on what we must do and to work together we inevitably must work outwards from our common sense knowledge as practitioners, a knowledge that must be congruent with what are taken as the concrete realities of our experience. Such a construct sees learning as a form of intersubjective labour in which the current knowledge of a community serves as a backdrop of taken-for-granted assumptions, any of which may be held up for scrutiny in a selective way as problems present themselves to social actors. From here I argue that we can present issues regarding good or 'right' practice in education, such as those we see in the National Standards for Qualified teacher Status (QTS) in England as problematics rather than simply as assessment goals, using a simple framework that poses a number of questions regarding what can we consider to be safe knowledge, what moral concerns are associated desired practices and what we as individuals prepared to accept. This framework is developed from the forms of knowledge identified by Habermas (1996). The learning process is thus envisaged as a discourse in which consensus has been disrupted (1990: 67) and where the aim is to restore or achieve the best possible agreement through a process of critical enquiry, so that practitioners can return to the persistent concerns of how to take right action in given situations. Finally, I suggest that the framework can be used by individuals (reflexively) and by collectivities (intersubjectively) through the same course process that aims at establishing agreement (a process not an outcome) on what can be safely taken as true and right in matters of educational practice.

This paper is intended primarily as theory-building. It is based on a wide reading of Habermas, whose work is underused in pedagogical theory.

Refinement of the theoretical framework. Empirical testing in professional development settings.