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Abstract
Interest in the reflective practitioner as a model of a ‘good professional’ has increased in several professional fields and is also valued within social work education as a key aspiration to address the uncertainties and challenges encountered in contemporary working environments. Reflecting on their own professional identity, as well as theories, values, and devices used in professional practice, can help practitioners deal with complex work demands and help students be better equipped to transition from university to work. Work-integrated learning (WIL) provides students with an opportunity to integrate academic learning with ‘real-world’ experiences to develop both valuable self-monitoring and professional self-constructive ability. This paper presents a case study in social work higher education in which WIL class-based teaching was combined with the use of reflective journals to explore the role of WIL in developing reflective practices for professional identity formation. 21 reflective journals by social work students are analysed. The findings suggest that teaching practices based on WIL enable professional identity formation by developing reflective practices, and that different learning conditions sustain specific dimensions of professional identity, i.e. professional expertise, membership to a professional community and sense of professional self.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank very much all the students involved in this research.
Notes
1. Although many studies are dated in the late Eighties, we recognize Bion’s psychoanalytic work as a precursor in this field (Bion, Citation1962).
2. In UK the term Practice learning arises in this tradition by emphasizing the need to consider learning as contextually located in practice (Nixon & Murr, Citation2006).
3. The learning milieu represents the totality of the human and material influences which impact learners in any particular situation. These include co-learners, teachers, learning materials, the physical environment and everything which is to be found therein (Boud & Walker, Citation1998).
4. In the field of social work research, reflective writing is often proposed to enhance reflective learning in the placement experience (Baum, Citation2012; Bay & Macfarlane, Citation2011). During the placement, students engage in critical reflection on their practice through keeping learning logs and reflecting on critical incidents, and are provided with professional supervision to help develop their reflective skills (Baum, Citation2012; Bay & Macfarlane, Citation2011; Lam, Wong, & Leung, Citation2007; Pack, Citation2014). In contrast, in class-based teaching, reflective journals are used to sustain learning and focus mainly on course content (Gursansky et al., Citation2010; Lay & McGuire, Citation2009; McEntarfer, Skiba, & Robert, Citation2012) by demanding students write about particular issues dealt with during the lesson, daily learning, or specific texts, with a variable structuring of assignments and reference to previous professional experiences and class discussion.
5. Codings were primarily guided by a careful analysis of what was in the data, unlike the theory-led approach where the structure for the initial codings is suggested by the key elements of the theory being applied by researchers (Braun & Clarke, Citation2006).