Professional Knowledge, Professional Lives sets out to examine the state of professional knowledge with regard to teaching and teacher education. The current situation of professional knowledge is scrutinised with particular regard to the location of educational study within the faculties of education. The fate of disciplinary patterns of study, which have come under attack from the proponents of more practical perspectives, are also examined.

Practical perspectives promoted by a wide spectrum of advocates have become part of the fashionable discourse around teacher education recently. These perspectives are interrogated and some of the results of such practical fundamentalism are held up for scrutiny. The author argues that confining professional knowledge entirely within the practical domain would not seem to be a well-thought out strategy for raising professional standards. A more active notion of teachers' professional knowledge can, and should, be explored and consolidated by work which focuses on the teacher's life and work, using more reflective and 'public intellectual' modes.