The challenge of establishing a professional practice within practical education

Abstract

Clinical teachers in the discipline of nursing in Denmark undergo additional education in addition to their registered nursing education to establish their teaching skill qualifications practicum. This ethnographic study examines some of the pedagogical initiatives clinical teachers are practicing as working professionals attempting to gain a foothold in their own jurisdiction. This study demonstrates that teaching practices contain implicit norms of what counts as knowledge among clinical teachers. Consequently, the classic knowledge hierarchy is continuously reproduced, and the intrinsic qualities of practice that are characterised as opaque, fluctuating, concrete and highly personal are overlooked and downplayed in the clinical teacher's teaching practices. Instead, bringing abstract, academic knowledge into play seems to be a strong marker that emerges when distinguishing the actual practice of nursing from clinical teaching. Organisational imperatives strongly disrupt the pedagogical agenda. When clinical teachers struggle to demarcate jurisdictions, their professional identities are at risk of being blurred and becoming unclear.

Keywords:

• professional practice
• teaching practice
• practical education
• nursing education
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. A clinical teacher has conducted a training programme of nine European Credit Transfer System points, equivalent to a one-sixth man-year of student workload. The education is offered at university colleges and is interdisciplinary, aiming to upgrade the educational knowledge of midwives, nurses, radiographers, bioanalysts, occupational therapists and physiotherapists (Undervisningsministeriet [Ministry of Education] 2002).

2. The ethnography is produced as part of a Ph.D. thesis (Højbjerg 2011).