This paper discusses professional learning from an educator’s point of view, problematising the relationship between education and practice in health care. A central issue that has been identified in health policy as critical for a sustainable future is that health professionals must be able to collaborate, communicate and negotiate more effectively to produce safe care. This requires a major shift in the ways health professionals practise, understand their practice and are educated for practice. The relationship between professional higher education and professional working life has traditionally been theorised in terms of how higher education prepares for work, encompassing a one-way flow of knowledge from the centre to the periphery. If we recognise the materiality and specificity of knowledge production and knowledge relations in enacted professional activities, where professional learning is understood as a matter of negotiating different knowledge resources in these local enactments, what are the consequences for professional education? How can theories of practice contribute to the critical study of curriculum and to the conceptualisation of professional learning? Is professional education, as currently conceived, possible? The paper will discuss two examples of professional education where the materiality of professional practice becomes curriculum: student-led training wards and simulation-based medical education.