establish or re-establish our engagement with practices if we are to flourish as human
beings. Although, it should be noted, this will require an element of classification in
order that we may be able to distinguish those activities which can properly be regarded
as practices from those that cannot.
Thus a list of sorts is inevitable as claims are made that some particular occupation,
hobby, game, or other activity is a practice. And the current project to characterise
nursing as a practice carries with it a danger that the exercise may ultimately only add to
this classification tendency. It has been a surprise to many that MacIntyre denies
teaching is a practice as such for many teachers find the idea of teaching as a practice
to be a helpful and accurate description of what they do. MacIntyre’s denial is
understandable from the perspective of his grand theory as he finds the act of removing
the teaching of a practice from the practice itself symptomatic of what he takes to be the
fragmentary tendency of modernity. Teaching and teachers, he says, should not be
divorced from the practice into which the novice is being instructed. He explains that a
teacher is first and foremost a practitioner, for example, a mathematician who teaches is
engaged in the practice of mathematics both in terms of pursuing the excellences of the
mathematics and in terms of instructing the ‘apprentice’ in the appreciation of the
internal goods of the subject. While this example is consistent with what he says
elsewhere, and in particular with his extended view of induction into social practices in
his book Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre 1999), it only works as an example
because it is a simple and subject limited case, it is, in the words of Dunne an “...
impoverished conception of teaching ...” (Dunne 2003 p. 357). The example may well
work for some subjects and for some types of teaching (that is, discrete and self-
contained subjects as typically taught in UK secondary schools) but it does not reflect
the experience of many teachers for whom the reality is that teaching is neither subject
specific in this way, nor taught in isolation from other related topics. Primary school
teaching in the UK is designed to integrate subject specific work in order, we might say,
not to compartmentalise subjects unnecessarily. Similarly, while some teachers in
higher education have the luxury of single subject practice (philosophy itself might be
one such example) many do not, and the teaching of nursing requires an emphasis on
the integration of evidence from many disciplines, some of which might claim, with
justification, to be practices in their own right. Of course, to these criticisms MacIntyre
might reply that these examples merely serve to reinforce his view that modernity has
fragmented our experience of the world to such an extent that we can no longer see how
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