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This groundbreaking study of work placements looks at the experiences of

Learning to Work
50 young short-term trainees in various Australian work settings.

Learning to Work is based on taped interviews with trainees in business,


education, engineering, IT and nursing. Jo Reidy reveals the issues,
challenges and rewards for undergraduates beginning to make the
transition to work in their chosen profession.

Her study also provides a revealing insight into Australian employers and
workplaces, and how they can make traineeships valuable for employer,
colleague and trainee.

About the Author


Dr Jo Reidy has had a diverse career as a teacher, a consultant, an academic
in the area of literacy education and an Academic Skills Adviser. She is
currently teaching at the Australian Catholic University. Dr Reidy’s research
interests include academic literacies, international students’ experiences Learning to Work
in Australia and the interface between higher education and work. She
won RMIT’s University Research Prize in 2004 with the PhD thesis on work
experience on which this book is based.

Reidy
Students’ experiences during work placements

Supplementary digital content is available from


www.mup.unimelb.edu.au/ebooks/0-522-85238-6/index.html

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS


• •

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited


Joanne M. Reidy
www.mup.com.au

Cover design by Phil Campbell

SOCIAL STUDIES

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Learning to Work

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Learning to Work

Students’ experiences during work placements

Joanne M. Reidy

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS
An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
187 Grattan Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia
mup-info@unimelb.edu.au
www.mup.com.au

First published 2006


Text  Joanne M. Reidy 2006
Design and typography  Melbourne University Publishing Ltd 2006

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act
1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without
the prior written permission of the publishers.

Designed by Phil Campbell


Typeset in Utopia by J&M Typesetting
Printed in Australia by University of Melbourne Design & Print Centre

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Reidy, Joanne M.
Learning to work : students’ experiences during work
placements.

Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 522 85237 8. (paperback)
ISBN 0 522 85238 6. (e-book)

1. Education, Cooperative - Australia. 2. Vocational
education - Australia. 3. School-to-work transition -
Australia. I. Title.

370.1130994

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Contents

Acknowledgements vii

Introduction 1

1 Learners in Unfamiliar Workplaces 19


From significant approaches to significant images 23
The learner as ‘potential’ 25
The learner as agent 27
The learner as apprentice 36
The learner as performer 42
The learner as new community member 51
The learner as border crosser 54
Further layers of complexity: the ideas of Bourdieu 59

2 Belonging, Acquiring, Situated 65

A time of great challenge 65


Students’ perceptions of ‘the very beginning’:
belonging and becoming competent 66
Learning how to belong: greetings, gatherings and gifts 67
Greetings 68
Gatherings 73
Gifts 78
Performing the workplace self 85
Belonging and performing competently: the initial tasks 86
Building bridges from old worlds to new 92
The importance of the initial period 94
Bourdieu’s concept: ‘habitus’ 96

3 Becoming, Negotiating, Scaffolded 100


Challenging interactions 100
Selves, supervisors, significant tasks 101
‘Strategic silence’ 112

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Empowerment through commitment and trust 114
‘Committed presence’ 117
‘Trusting space’ 119
‘Trusting dialogue’ 121
‘Trusting revelations’ 125
‘Committed presence’ and ‘enabling trust’ 125

4 Networking, Transforming, Distributed 127


Alternative interactions, alternative places 127
Salient, friendly peers 129
Friendly, accessible, competent peers 133
Salient, accessible, expert intimates 142
Bourdieu’s concept: having a ‘feel for the game’ 151
Salient, accessible peers, friends and partners; salient,
expert, professional families 153

5 The Centrality of Placements 154


The first question 155
The second question 158
The third question 165
Re-framing the placement experience 166
Re-framing resources and support 166
Re-framing the learner 168
The fourth question 175
Recommendations 176
Final reflections 181

Bibliography 185

Index 207

vi Learning to Work

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Acknowledgements

A number of important people offered me wonderful resources and


sustained support during the writing of this book, most importantly,
Pam Green. The students I interviewed joined in the project with
enthusiasm and Des Cahill offered valuable suggestions at key
moments in the project. Finally, I would like to mention the small, but
vitally important, network of ‘significant others’ who made the writing
of the book both possible and enjoyable. To my husband, Michael
McNamara, and my two daughters, Natasha and Helen, my mother,
Cela Reidy, my brother, Patrick Reidy, my sister, Christine Nichols, and
her family, David, Dave, Hannah, Madeline and Jack, and to my special
friends, in particular, Pauline Nunan, I would like to say, thank you.
While writing the following pages, I have thought often of my
father, Patrick Reidy, and his sisters and brothers. This work is dedi-
cated to them and, above all, to my mother, Cela Reidy. Throughout
my life, she has been my most unwavering resource, my most con-
stant support. In some fundamental way this work is hers as well.
Naturally, I alone am responsible for any shortcomings that this book
may have.

Joanne M. Reidy
Melbourne, 2006

vii

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Introduction

My own first experience of work consisted of serving in a souvenir


shop at a large tourist complex. Unfortunately for everyone concerned,
it was a rainy summer and there was a noticeable lack of tourists. I
soon found out that one of the main requirements of the job had not
been specified at the job interview: from early in the morning to the
final moments of those wet afternoons, I had to find ways of looking
busy and productive even when there was absolutely nothing
happening in the shop and not a single customer in sight! I had to
learn to love my feather duster.
Nor was my introduction to my first full-time job any easier.
Preparing for my first day as a teacher meant that I was also preparing
for my first prolonged and serious encounter with the world of work.
Compared to the demands of teaching in a chalky, cheeky classroom,
the trinkety world of the souvenir shop seemed like a piece of cake.
I was also to discover that the actual work of preparing lessons
and speaking to a large class was only one aspect of the challenge.
Although it was true that the students overturned every assumption
that I had, I found the life-style changes that were required even more
difficult than inventing exciting lessons on the topic of Hadrian’s Wall.
The pace of life was new—its tempo and its timing—but so was the
amount of work I had to do after work. I also had to keep my emotions

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in check. Even when I cried after a spectacularly unsuccessful class, I
had to act as if my eyes weren’t really red at all.
Hence, although I have always been interested in general issues
to do with work and workplaces, I am particularly interested in the
transition to work, perhaps because I found each of my many dif-
ferent work transitions unexpectedly complex, demanding and, at
times, simply overwhelming. As is true for most people, these feel-
ings were quite surprising because I had expected to make the transi-
tion to work without much trouble. However, I was in for a great
awakening. I found every aspect of my new role exhausting: the long
hours, the unfamiliar people and their jokes, the endless work after
work, and the Sunday evenings before the Monday mornings that
always made me feel slightly sick in the stomach.
Why was it all so unsettling? After all, work is part of our lives
and our everyday landscapes. Even when we are on holidays or asleep
we think and dream about work. We make lasting friendships at work,
we talk about work over dinner and we have a great deal of our lives
invested in our work—even after a bad day, we hope that the next will
be better.
After having worked for many years, the shock of those memo-
ries had faded and I had relegated my own first experiences of work
to the back of my mind. However, it soon became apparent that many
of the students I interviewed found work, workplaces and work col-
leagues very challenging which was surprising. They had to work at
being workers—for many students the new role did not come easily.
However, as often happens in new or difficult situations, the students
utilised their existing resources and support networks in order to
compensate for their own inefficiencies, inadequacies or understand-
able lack of expertise.

The students
So, perhaps unexpectedly, this book does not introduce you to groups
of students called by intriguing names such as ‘The conformers’ or
‘The rebels’. Instead, the chapters are organised according to the
resources the students called up and fell back on in their hour of need
when they were tired and depressed or excited and challenged. In
fact, the sheer number of times that people told me that they had
accessed resources or social support was quite startling. Interestingly,
though, they did not talk much about electronic resources and so

 Introduction

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information technology in all its many forms does not loom large in
this book. Surprisingly, and yet unsurprisingly, the students talked
about people and indeed people throng this book—principals, super-
visors and human resources managers, as well as mothers who stocked
the fridge or friends who provided a sympathetic ear, reference books
and useful, perfectly tailored advice.

The placements
While different societies have always prepared people for adult roles,
including work, in a multiplicity of ways, contemporary societies use
a mixed formula of study away from the workplace and controlled
exposure to the workplace in which the newcomer’s role is often that
of a master’s apprentice. A mixed bag of study and practical, work-
based experience prepares people for a workplace that is constantly
referred to, described and discussed in lectures and tutorials whether
face-to-face or online. However, the workplaces spoken of with such
authority in such contexts never quite exist. Located in the textbooks,
in the lecturer’s anecdotes and in the stories of family members
swapped over dinner, these workplaces are always safe. They lack the
risk and the realities of the office, classroom or lab that kicks into life
at eight o’clock or a bit later every Monday morning.

The risk and the reality


Not surprisingly then, the students that I interviewed often felt that
there was a gap between their studies and the very real and the very
specific demands of individual workplaces and workplace colleagues.
Seemingly straightforward office protocols such as ‘Always use
your own coffee mug’ came as a shock to the interviewees because
many such unwritten rules were not made explicit until a boundary,
only dimly perceived, had been crossed. The fact that most novices I
interviewed for the book had worked at several quite responsible
part-time jobs while completing their tertiary studies made this
shock even more surprising. Some were simply not ready for the par-
ticular challenges and the ongoing demands of their new workplace or
supervisor.

Work and workplace training


This book then is about work, workplaces, education and training. But
most importantly, it is about the people who are getting ready for work

Introduction 

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in demanding workplaces such as hospitals, schools and companies,
both large and small.

The interviews
In order to find out about people and their work-related placements,
I interviewed fifty people who had volunteered to talk to me about
this topic. They were not in their workplaces because they had part-
time jobs in these locations, but because their university courses con-
tained compulsory programs that were located in the workplace. For
many of the people I spoke to this was the first time they had had con-
tact with the real-world face of the professional occupation they
hoped to be involved in for a large part of their lives.
The people who so generously gave me these interviews were
aged between twenty and fifty years and came from many different
cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Almost half of the interviewees
were ‘international’ students, that is, students who had come to
Australia to undertake an accredited course at an Australian univer-
sity. One woman spoke Farsi as her first language and yet was a
Swedish national studying in Australia. Many of these students talked
about their families and their home communities as well as the
Australian workplaces and, predictably enough, more than one stu-
dent talked at length about the great differences between working at
home and the work environment he was experiencing in Australia.

Working lives
The book will interest people who spend their lives in education and
training, but it should also fascinate those who are fascinated by work,
workplaces and work colleagues, by talk at work, time spent at work
and changes in work practices—in other words, anything to do with
the world of work.
The writing of this book depended on the cooperation of many
people. People in workplaces both large and small were unexpectedly
co-operative and even though I had to observe the normal ethical
conventions of privacy and confidentiality, even the large companies
supplied me with a room for the interviews and gave me access to all
the graduates who were undertaking work there. I interviewed a great
range of students including would-be engineers, nurses, teachers,
and communication and information technology specialists. I also

 Introduction

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ate my lunch in many different staff canteens and had access to work
environments and work practices radically dissimilar from the
schools and universities in which I have spent my own working life.
The workplaces themselves were fascinatingly diverse, ranging
from a small school on the outskirts of Melbourne where the bush
came up to the edges of the playground, to a large hi-tech multina-
tional whose employees travelled internationally on a very regular
basis. Very often, I interviewed the students-in-training in little rooms
and sometimes I could hear the noises associated with a certain kind
of human activity going on in the background as I interviewed. I
always tried to keep the interview focused on work and workplaces as
I had signed an ethics agreement telling my university that I would
stay well within certain boundaries but, in a few cases, the students
themselves added other stories to their accounts of work in order to
stress a point or explain the real reason behind their seemingly novice
behaviour.

Resources in abundance
The students’ stories have been arranged according to the key
resources that they were given or that they were able to access during
their workplace experience.
The first group of interviews focuses on the resources that the
students were given in their workplaces. Many students made it clear
that their workplaces were extremely generous with their resources,
time and personnel. The second crucially important resource focused
on is the student’s immediate supervisor who again and again
emerged from the interviews as a highly significant person. The third
resource is that of the people outside the workplace—family, friends
and the friends of families who rallied around the students at this
taxing time to offer them extra support, encouragement, advice and
other more tangible resources.

Lacking resources
It will also become apparent that some students lacked resources
and that, as a consequence of this, their workplace experiences
were difficult, frustrating or boring. It is to be hoped that these
students had further opportunities to work and practise work in
other places as, at the time I interviewed them, they had had very

Introduction 

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negative experiences and were reconsidering their career choices or
seeking to shed the professional identity that they had just tried on
for size.
Here then are the students, their voices and their stories.
Although the students and their workplaces have been given pseudo-
nyms, in most cases the students chose the names they are called by
in this book. One student chose her mother’s name, while others
chose names that reflected their ethnicity or linguistic background. It
is hoped that by reading this book, you will gain some insight into
people as novices, workplaces and the constant need for those who
are able to supply resources, especially resources in the shape of
finely tuned social support, to all those who are beginning a signifi-
cant venture in new times and in a new world.

Three questions
For many years, my brother worked for a large multinational com-
pany. He often cited a little mantra that people in his office used to
summarise the task of interviewing prospective employees. The ques-
tions always stuck in my mind even though he has probably long
forgotten them. The questions that seemed to drive any interview
were these: Can she do it? Will she do it? Will she fit in?
However, as soon as I began interviewing the students, I realised
that the question ‘Will she fit in?’ did not foreshadow the radical
uncertainty contained in the question, ‘Will I fit in?’ and had even
less to do with the anxious self-assessment that accompanied the
question regarding expertise, ‘Can I do it?’ I realised, of course, that
my brother’s colleagues were framing these questions from the
employer’s point of view, but I became more interested in the stories
of the employees, in this case, novice employees and their struggles
to attain an appropriate workplace ‘self’, a satisfactory level of com-
petence and even some idea of whether or not this would become for
them a significant and satisfying professional role.
Hence, the three questions seemed too light-hearted when com-
pared to the soul searching that accompanied an individual novice’s
decision to take another path after an unsatisfactory workplace expe-
rience. As a result of the interviews, the questions also seemed to
need re-ordering: for most of the students, the issue of ‘fitting in’ was
the primary one and the issue of expertise came a little bit later.

 Introduction

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Hence, one of the main chapters in this book deals with the issue of
‘belonging’.
Finally, I think there is a great deal of wisdom in that old saying
that there is nothing as practical as a good theory. Hence, several
formidable theorists stroll through the following pages—people
whose writings I always find interesting and thought-provoking even
when they are talking about a topic that is very different from the one
that I am addressing. Pre-eminent above these is the contemporary
French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu’s ideas are emphasised,
counterpointed or contradicted by other thinkers whose work has not
been addressed as thoroughly in this space: Goffman, Foucault and
Spivak and many others who I had often encountered as an under-
graduate and then had a chance to meet up with again while writing
this work.
Hopefully, the brief excursions into theory do not render the
book ‘heavy’ or ‘dry’ nor distract from the main purpose of the book,
which is to present a range of people’s views on a very significant
topic—that of learning to work.
Readers who want to skip straight to the students and their
experiences can now turn to the opening of the next chapter. The fol-
lowing section of the Introduction takes up the many complex theo-
retical issues that arise when we base new understandings on the
findings derived from transcripts. Throughout the book as a whole,
however, it is emphasised that the issues pertaining to work and work
placements are both significant and very current. To take just one
example, a recent government report has given sustained attention
to the issue of work placements in the context of pre-service teacher
training in Victoria, Australia (see Parliament of Victoria, Education
and Training Committee, 2005). Many of the issues taken up in the
report are foreshadowed in Patricia Benner’s (1984) earlier, but per-
ennially fresh, account of the perceptions of novices and experts.
Both the Victorian report and Benner’s major work offer paths into
this vitally interesting and multi-faceted topic.

Introducing the students’ accounts and the ‘lighthouse’ narratives


This book is based on a series of fifty interviews conducted with uni-
versity students during, or immediately after, their work placements.
During the interviews, the students were encouraged to tell stories as

Introduction 

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well as to answer questions, make comments and reflect on their
experiences in a variety of ways.
When the interviews had been recorded and transcribed, it
seemed that some stories were more important than others, both
within a single interview transcript and across the whole series of fifty
interviews. The role of the most important stories can be usefully
associated with the word ‘epiphany’, a word used by James Joyce
(1922/1968) in various writings. Denzin (1995) has drawn attention
to this word in his writings on interpretive interactionism, defining
the ‘epiphanic moment’ as one that ‘leaves a mark on a person’s life’
(p. 83) and is most often experienced in moments of crisis. It is
possible that Denzin has based his image of epiphanies on the earlier
sociological idea of ‘turning points’. Both the idea of the turning
point and the epiphanic moment are significant in sociological theory
because each provides a vehicle for showing the ways in which
individual biographies intersect with the ‘larger historical, insti-
tutional, and cultural arenas’ (p. 83) that also require analysis.
In his writing, Denzin (1995) argues that there are four kinds of
epiphanic ‘moment’—the ‘major upheaval’ and the ‘cumulative’,
‘illuminative’ and ‘relived’ moments (p. 83). Each meaning centres on
the ‘problematic’ (p. 83) nature of the experience. However, Ellman
(1968), a writer whose books have centred on Joyce’s life and works,
defines the word epiphany rather differently. In contrast to that of
Denzin (1995), his definition focuses on the ordinary moment rather
than on a crisis or turning point. Ellman writes that, in Joyce’s work,
‘epiphanies’ can be understood as ‘sudden, unlooked for turns in
experience—which could prove the more momentous for being
modest’ (p. 708).
The narratives told by the students often involved new or special
experiences. However, the significance of these incidents for the
student who recounted them could not have been predicted by their
subject matter. To draw on Ellman’s (1968) definition once again, the
incidents recounted were often ‘modest’ (p. 708). With Woolf’s
(1927/1969) novel To the lighthouse in mind, it was decided to term
these narratives ‘lighthouse’ stories. Often, however, the subject
matter of the stories was ‘modest’ (Ellman, 1968, p. 708).
The salience of the lighthouse narratives can be accounted for
in several different ways. Firstly, certain narratives had been given

 Introduction

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special prominence by the speaker in the course of the interview. For
example, Keiko’s initial narrative about her supervisor’s absence was
referred to several times in the interview.
A second reason for the prominence of some stories seemed to
lie in the clarity of an evaluation that was made in relation to the
experience recounted. These narratives were linked to judgements
that were made about the person or the incident described or the
placement experience as a whole. Such evaluations made it possible
to link narratives that had very different topics. Hence, a very positive
evaluation of the supervision provided linked several stories.
Thirdly, certain stories caught my attention during the interviews
and so were accorded greater significance than others. Several of the
lighthouse stories raised questions that were difficult to answer and
remained in my mind long after other interviews had been conducted.
Hence, Mark’s interview prompted the question: Why did Mark talk
so much about his tie? Questions such as these made it possible to see
that the lighthouse stories had a crucial function in the research in
that they encouraged me to focus on data that had less arresting
subject matter as well as the data that seemed to take up striking
issues. Mark’s focus on his tie made it possible for me to see that all
the students who talked about the initial phase of the placement were
also talking about their struggles to cope with, forge, or resist a new
workplace-based identity. The lighthouse story about the tie identified
the issue and illuminated it simultaneously, while offering a way of
setting up a network of connections between the groups of stories
without making these mere examples that illustrated a single theme
in a repetitive manner.
The lighthouse narratives were given a special emphasis and
were seen to function in much the same way as vignettes, which,
according to Miles and Huberman (1994), may be given a ‘representative,
typical, or emblematic’ (p. 81) place in an enquiry.

Other stories, comments and observations


While it seemed legitimate, given the interpretive basis of the research,
to give certain key stories special prominence, it did not seem appro-
priate to overlook other accounts that had created a less immediate
or complex response. Miles and Huberman’s (1994) suggestions
regarding matrices were used to draw up grids so that the data could

Introduction 

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be re-processed and checked over for pieces that had been overlooked
or accorded little attention in the initial, more open-ended, readings.
This strategy meant that the lighthouse narratives retained their sig-
nificant roles, but ensured that other stories were also given due
weight.
Several different matrices based on Miles and Huberman’s
(1994) ‘Table 5.3’ headed ‘Effects Matrix ...’ (p. 96) were used to ana-
lyse the data after an initial account of a lighthouse narrative had
been arrived at. This method was found to be an effective way of
showing alternative ways in which various narratives could be com-
pared. Often it was found that an exhaustive attempt to put all the
data on a grid revealed that some examples of certain phenomena
had been missed. Diagrams were also used to explore and refine
emergent concepts.
Although the investigation did not draw on the grounded theo-
ries of Strauss and Corbin (1990) exclusively, their ideas on how
to deal with qualitative data without imposing conceptual tools
drawn from sociological writings or ‘common sense’ greatly influ-
enced the way in which the interpretations were conducted. By
writing memos and using these to compare ‘data with data’ (Charmaz
& Mitchell, 2001, p. 162), it was possible to derive analytical catego-
ries from the transcripts and to name these in ways that were not
confined to the concepts that sprang to mind from writers such as
Goffman (1959, 1961).

Reaching interpretive understanding


One of the most critical tasks facing any writer is that of drawing con-
clusions but this can be very difficult if the conclusions are to be
based on interpretations of textual material. The work of Bourdieu
(Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992a) made it possible to pose one of the
main interpretive problems in the form of a question: How is it pos-
sible to circumnavigate various ‘pre-constructed’ (p. 235) categories
and yet achieve readings of the students’ narratives that do more than
achieve a ‘doubling of text’ (Derrida, 1996, p. 85) or ‘traditional dou-
bling commentary’ (p. 86)?
As has been indicated, ideas from two opposing strands of
thought were found to be very interesting and thought provoking.
Hence, Bourdieu’s (1992) belief that it is possible, albeit difficult, to

10 Introduction

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find out about the world was entertained alongside Derrida’s (1996)
radical claim that there is nothing outside the text— ‘il n’y a pas de
hors-texte’ (p. 82). While the interpretations relied to a large extent on
the emerging specificity of certain ‘issues’, I had been influenced by
works such as Belsey (2002), and was therefore sympathetic to ideas
that stressed that all texts were open to many interpretations and
indeed invited multiple readings and reading positions. In many
ways, all steps involved taking up and resolving (at least, for the time
being) the opposing paradigms of interpretation offered by Belsey
(2002) and Ricoeur (1991b), the first arguing that texts are open, the
second that any text ‘seeks to place us in its meaning’ (p. 121) and is,
therefore, not open to an unlimited number of interpretations.
Hence, while the decision to focus on narrative approaches was
easy to make, other decisions regarding the ways in which the narra-
tives were to be interpreted were difficult. An awareness that there
are many significant, but contradictory, approaches to narrative anal-
ysis meant that the task of making choices between the various ways
of dealing with the transcripts was the most difficult one faced. Once
the choices regarding certain ‘methods of narrative analysis’ (Boje,
2002, p. 11) had been made, these seemed to identify my position
with even greater clarity than had any epistemological decisions.

Defining the options


In order to choose between the many rich ideas concerning narrative,
significant streams of thought were identified and summarised. The
process of linking such ideas had two main stages. Firstly, an impor-
tant theoretical perspective was defined. Then, the discussion of the
relevant theories was followed by a brief mention of the work of a
recent writer (or writers) who had used the perspective to offer inter-
pretations of narrative texts, either spoken or written. The choices
have been written up in a conditional form as though the decisions
were still to be made.

• Hermeneutic ideas on text and interpretation, elucidated in


Ricoeur (1991a), could be drawn upon and Moloney’s (1995) study
of ageing women used as a model on which to base interpretive
readings oriented towards capturing the texts as wholes.

Introduction 11

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Moloney’s (1995) study was based on interviews with older
women. The study shows the ways in which research-related texts
can be treated as wholes so that the ‘gestalt’ of each narrative is made
the focal concern. In her writing, Moloney describes the ways in
which the transcripts were read many times both alone and with
others. She also describes the themes that ‘emerged’ from the inter-
view transcripts including those of survival, strength in the midst of
hardship and making a home in difficult circumstances. The study
has a second attraction in that it highlights gender-related issues.
However, these are not dealt with in a didactic manner. The exact
nature of the themes elicited could not have been predicted, nor
would the older women’s emphasis on ‘making a home’ been able to
emerge if a narrowly defined feminist agenda had been the focus.

• Barthes’s (1975) ‘codes’ and his commitment to a ‘step-by-step’


reading could be used to structure the interpretations of the
students’ narratives. Both the work of Barthes and that of Boje
(2002) could be drawn upon.

Barthes (1975) has demonstrated how to achieve such readings


in his own work on literary texts. In his account of Barthes’s ideas,
Moriarty (1991) summarises Barthes’s reaction against thematic and
generic categories. According to Moriarty, Barthes’s contribution to
narrative theory lies in his belief that it is necessary to ‘keep the text
open, plural’ (p. 121) and that a ‘step-by-step reading is therefore
preferable to a synthetic overview that freezes the text in order to
extract a theme or structure’ (p. 121). Meanings that are found in a
text can be related to other meanings. Meaning is made possible
because various ‘codes’ (p. 121) that have been used before in other
writings are recognised by the reader. Hence, all works, even the most
seemingly ‘original’, can be seen as an assemblage of quotations.
More recently, Boje (2002), a writer who has used narrative theory
extensively in his studies of organisational life, has offered guidance
on how to make the ideas of Barthes (1975) and Derrida (1994)
directly relevant to narrative-based research.

• Fairclough’s (1992) critical discourse analysis could be used to


focus on the power driven relationships within the text and the

12 Introduction

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work of Barker and Galasinski (2001) as a source for further ideas
on how to carry out critical discourse analysis.

Fairclough’s work is based on Foucauldian insights about the


way in which language as ‘discourse’ is always constituted by, and
constituting of, subjectivities, power relations and systems of hier-
archy and subordination. The work of Barker and Galasinski (2001)
offers a number of examples of the ways in which critical discourse
analysis might be undertaken. Although Fairclough’s analytical strat-
egies were thought to be rather rigid, his discussion of ‘discourse rep-
resentation’ and ‘speech reportage’ (p. 118) was noted. This brief
discussion underlined the significance of the many reported conver-
sations that appeared in the transcripts.

• The ideas of Labov and Waletzky (1967/1997) and Hymes (1996)


could be drawn on in order to offer readings of narrative
‘patterning’ (Hymes, 1996, p. 137) and significant aspects of
individual texts. Several examples offered in these works, and
also in an important collection of responses to the original article
by Labov and Waletzky (see the Journal of Narrative and Life
History, 7, 1997), could be modified.

The above perspectives were supplemented by several single


works all of which offered detailed ideas on various ways of under-
taking textual interpretation. Although the social construction of
gender was not probed in any detail, some of the most useful studies
that incorporated critical perspectives without imposing preordinate
categories on the texts, were studies that had been carried out by
scholars dedicated to the exploration of feminist issues. Works
included those by Rich (1979), Kristeva (1986), Butler (1993) and
hooks (1996). The research study on women’s conceptions of
‘knowing’ by Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule (1986) was also
very useful in that it offered research procedures related to the con-
cept of ‘voice’. This concept provided the interviews and their inter-
pretation with its ‘critical’ focus.
On the basis of much reading and thinking, several decisions
regarding interpretive strategies were made. The distinctions made
by Fairclough (1992, p. 73) between understanding, interpretation

Introduction 13

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and analysis were rejected. Such distinctions were thought to imply
that there was a radical difference between each category when it can
be argued that, as textually oriented activities, all face the same
‘problem of fallibility’ (Latour and Woolgar, 1986, p. 283) which under-
mines all ‘description and analysis’ (p. 283). In the account of the
research procedures, ‘interpretive understanding’ was used frequently
to describe my goal. When necessary, ‘interpretation’ and ‘reading’
were deployed as synonyms. The word ‘analysis’ was used with cau-
tion lest it be thought that positivist knowledge claims were being
made, or that it was possible to gain access to the ‘real truth’ (p. 282).
Ricoeur’s (1991a; 1991b) work also clarified some of the central
issues. In his own struggle to reconcile explanation (based on the
natural sciences), and interpretation (based on hermeneutic under-
standing), Ricoeur argues that ‘structural analysis’ can be seen as a
‘stage’ between a ‘naive’ and a ‘critical’ (1991b, p. 121) interpretation.
Hence, in accordance with Ricoeur’s advice, the interpretations of the
transcripts proceeded in ‘stages’ and various aspects of the choices
regarding narrative approaches and analytical methods referred to
above were incorporated into the analysis at several points. However,
while Ricoeur was able to bring explanation and understanding
together in his ‘overall conception of reading as the recovery of
meaning’ (p. 121), his confidence that the ‘intention of the text’ (p.
121) could be recovered was juggled with Barthes’s (1994) equally
confident assertion that ‘a text is not a line of words releasing a single
‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-
dimensional space ... a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumer-
able centres of culture’ (p. 168).

Theorising each interpretive step


With Barthes’s (1994) postmodern scepticism and Ricoeur’s (1991b)
hermeneutical methods in mind, it was decided to divide the inter-
pretive strategies into two basic categories. These categories reflected
Ricoeur’s division between ‘guessing’ and ‘validating’ (p. 158). The
first interpretive moves, that is, the first readings of the transcripts,
defined each text as a ‘cumulative, holistic process’ (p. 159), empha-
sised the whole text, and were based on the perception that if the text
were seen as a whole, it was necessarily ‘open to several readings and
several constructions’ (p. 159). Subsequent readings broke larger texts

14 Introduction

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into ‘details’ (p. 158) and reassembled a reading from these elements.
Although the first strategy was consistent with my own view of text, it
seemed to be more open to the danger that the reader would bring to
the text the inevitably ‘preconstructed’ (p. 235) concepts that Bourdieu
(1992) had warned against, but would have no way of perceiving,
much less resisting, Ricoeur’s (1991b) ‘naive’ (p. 121) interpretations.
In her study of ageing women, Moloney (1995) emphasised that
it is necessary to gain a detailed knowledge of each transcript as a
first step in trying to understand an interviewee’s experiences. Strauss
and Corbin’s (1990) work also suggested that many careful readings
of interview material have to be undertaken. Focused on inductive
theorising and the delineation of appropriate procedures and tech-
niques for achieving such ‘grounded’ theory, Strauss and Corbin’s
work answered the need for an interpretive model that sought to dis-
cover categories and ideas rather than imposing on the transcripts
frameworks and etic categories that had already been articulated.
Comparison is at the heart of Strauss and Corbin’s (1990)
methods of reaching a new theory. Each of the narratives was com-
pared with other narratives on the basis of the ostensible topic of the
narrative or the evaluation made before, throughout or at the end of
its telling. This method of analysis was also suggested by Labov and
Waletzky (1967/1997) whose influential work on narratives has been
both used and developed by many different writers. Agar (1980), too,
argues that comparisons underpin the research process. According to
Agar, once certain pieces of data have been compared, recurring cat-
egories can be constructed. Then it is possible to ‘apply the next ana-
lytical device—the scissors—and cut up a copy of the transcripts
according to the new topic-oriented code’ (p. 104).
Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) detailed accounts of the research
studies they had either initiated or participated in provided useful
models and analytical tools. Their description of the ways in which
an individual woman’s experience of pain and pain relief had been
coded (see pp. 77–81) was read many times. A deep understanding of
this one example encouraged me to find new ways of describing the
students’ experiences by registering the students’ accounts as catego-
ries or codes and writing these directly on to each transcript. A dif-
ferent, but complementary, method involved using the ‘Find’
command on the computer to look at the number of times certain

Introduction 15

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words appeared in the students’ accounts. This strategy made it pos-
sible to see that the most common word used in accounts of the ini-
tial stage of the placement was not ‘shock’ or ‘surprise’ as had been
anticipated, but ‘different’.
Grounded theory, then, was used to great advantage to arrive at
conceptual categories without taking for granted the strength of pre-
existing ‘classificatory notions’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 235). Strauss and
Corbin (1990) comment on the importance of memos, stressing their
role in the enterprise of theory-building as categories are developed.
As the interviews were read and reflected upon many times, memos
were elaborated as groups of narratives were considered. These
memos were similar to Smith’s (1984) ‘interpretive asides’ (p. 174) and
were used to record ‘a short comment to oneself about some hunch,
bright idea or insight’ (p. 150) noted ‘along the way’ (p. 174).
While the strategies of memo-writing and comparison were
used frequently, such processes are not problem-free. One of the
most obvious issues facing any reader of interviews is that by aligning
extracts from different transcripts according to their ‘recurrent topics’
(Agar, 1980, p. 104) or named ‘conceptual labels ... [i.e.] categories’
(Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 108), other features of the text have to be
suppressed. Secondly, the activity of making detailed, line-by-line
codes, which Strauss and Corbin see as an essential step to the writing
of memos, means that the narratives can lose some of the unity they
had been given by the students’ initial topic or subsequent evalua-
tion. In order to emphasise the ‘wholeness’ of the narratives, each
one was given a title. The title consisted of a phrase that had appeared
in the story and crystallised something of the ‘essence’ (Gibbins &
Thomson, 2001, p. 310) of the student’s experience.
Thus, various procedures and techniques were drawn from
Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) work. As has been outlined, the first
involved the labelling of each student’s recounted experiences in
such a way that the categories captured the texture of the experi-
ences. The process of combining the categories allowed a broader
concept to emerge from the data. In this part of the analytical process,
the section of Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) book that describes a study
of the experiences of pregnant mothers who were also chronically ill,
was found to be both memorable and enlightening. The final con-
struct that ‘emerged’ from the study described by Strauss and

16 Introduction

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Corbin—the concept of ‘protective governing’ (p. 142)—seemed to
capture with sympathy and precision the careful choices the mothers
in the study had made in order to manage their own chronic illnesses
without endangering their unborn children.
The insights offered by the grounded theory methods of Strauss
and Corbin (1990) were given a critical edge when the metaphor of
‘voice’ was used to discover whether or not the students had acquired
some degree of agency during their placements. Following on the
work of Hymes on narrative and voice (1996), Belenky et al. (1986,
p. 16) on empowerment and voice, and feminist writers such as
McNay (2000) on the issue of agency, it was decided to make ‘voice’
one of the key evaluative concepts and to use this as a basis for
important ‘critical’ insights. Although Lather (2001) has questioned
the usefulness of the concepts of empathy, voice and authenticity,
voice has been seen as a useful metaphor for various concepts
indicated by the words ‘power’ and ‘empowerment’. Hence, in order
to ‘move beyond intelligent description’ (Bourdieu, 1992, p. 255),
three questions regarding voice were asked after each key story had
been read several times. The questions, which were based on the
ideas of Belenky and her colleagues (1986, pp. 16–20), have been
reproduced below:

• Did the student want to speak?


• Was he/she able to speak?
• What prevented him/her from speaking or gave him/her the
ability to speak?

In this way, the ‘stance’ of the interpreter was made explicit and
the ideas were given a ‘critical’ perspective that was congruent with
an interpretivist approach. At the same time, the analytical frame-
work used side-stepped the clusters of assumptions that have accrued
around such words as gender, class and race. This was in keeping
with Weedon’s (1999) insight to the effect that,

we can use categories such as ‘gender’, ‘race’ and ‘class’ in


social and cultural analysis but on the assumption that
their meaning is plural, historically and socially specific.
The effects of using such categories will depend on how

Introduction 17

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they are defined and on the social context in which they are
used. (p. 130)

Although Weedon (1999) identifies such a position with post-


modern feminism, the adoption of such a perspective made it
possible to articulate and define some of the ‘preconstructed’
categories that had been regarded as unproblematic before the first
interview was recorded. A reading of Said (1995) made an important
contribution to such reflexive ‘unlearning’ (Lather, 1993, p. 680).

Towards an ‘emic’ view


It is now felt that the constructs that come closest to the kind of
sympathetic, insider, emic view that were modelled in Strauss and
Corbin’s (1990) reporting of the ways in which the idea of ‘protective
governing’ (p. 142) was reached have been recorded in Chapter 3 of
this book. In this chapter, the concepts of ‘committed presence’,
‘trusting space’, ‘trusting revelation’, ‘trusting dialogue’ and ‘strategic
silence’ as well as the enfolding categories of ‘committed presence’
and ‘enabling trust’ emerged. Whether taken separately or grouped
together, the constructs were able to offer insights into the ways in
which the students’ experiences of their workplaces were structured
by their interactions with their supervisors, mentors or managers. The
concepts also included understandings clustered around the idea of
voice, silence and speaking forth.
The constructs that emerged from the transcripts highlighted
certain issues in the students’ experiences and made it possible to
interpret these in a slightly more abstract way. A second level of
interpretive understanding was offered by the work of Bourdieu (1992,
2001). Each of the following chapters includes commentaries that
explore specific concepts elaborated by Bourdieu. These have special
relevance to the students’ situations and recounted experiences.

18 Introduction

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Chapter 1
Learners in Unfamiliar Workplaces

Before I began to write this book, I read the work of many interesting
writers who had investigated the topic of placements, practicums and
other kinds of work-related education, training and professional
learning. Although I had always thought of work placements as activ-
ities that belonged to the students that I had trained in university set-
tings during my own work life as a teacher educator, some of the most
interesting writers pushed the problem of work placements back on
to the workplaces asking very directly if the workplace could, in fact,
provide the students with the experiences and mentoring required.
Two Australian writers, Billett (1995) and Hughes (1998) tackled
this question head on. A short article written by Billet and entitled,
‘Workplace learning: its potential and limitations’ grasped the nettle
in the most appropriate fashion by directing our attention not simply
to the students on work placements, but also to the workplaces in
which the students in our universities are undertaking their training.
Similarly, the word ‘perils’ in Hughes’s short article, ‘Practicum
learning: perils of the authentic workplace’, seemed to warn students
and workplace personnel alike, reminding both groups that the real
workplace, as distinct from the one conjured up in textbooks and lec-
tures, had advantages as a place of learning, but it also presented its
own dangers and risks.

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However, few studies have evaluated a range of workplaces from
the novice’s point of view. Nor have they compared workplaces, seri-
ously taking on the idea that while one school, hospital, office or
business may offer students who undertake their practicums within
its environs diverse opportunities for professional learning, another
school or office may cramp the learners and restrict their develop-
ment. As will become clear in the following chapters in this book,
there was a demonstrable difference between the opportunities
offered by Company A and Company B to the students on place-
ments. And yet the reasons for this were not easy to enumerate. Both
companies produced goods for export, the physical environment was
similar and the personnel managers in each were professional and
well organised. Yet, all the students I interviewed at Company A had
had a positive experience, while the students interviewed at Company
B peppered their stories with tales of tepid welcomes and other more
individually felt reservations.
Most of the writing that I read on the topic of work placements
preferred to examine the students’ points of view, their experiences
and perspectives during the practicum experience. Studies from
within a particular professional area were added to the more general
ones on the effectiveness of various kinds of workplace programs.
Particularly interesting in that many works focused on the students’
experiences and added to the writer’s own professional understand-
ings, were the writings on teacher training and teaching placements.
Many of these studies highlighted the experiences of preservice
teachers, several writers, for example, MacDonald (1993), exploring
the significantly stressful aspects of teaching practicums.
Other studies focused on strategies and programs oriented
towards improving the experience or the effectiveness of the
practicum from the trainee teachers’ points of view. While many of
those involved in teacher education used Donald Schön’s (1987) work
on reflective practice as the basis of their work, others tried to improve
the quality of the training without naming a key thinker as their guide.
Morgan, Menlove, Salzberg and Hudson (1994), for example, trained
peers to interact with, and give feedback to, other trainee teachers.
According to the researchers, peer coaching was able to increase the
‘effective teaching behaviors’ (p. 59) of the five trainees who took part
in the program.

20 Learning to Work

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As I wanted to interview international students undertaking
their placements as well as local or domestic Australian students, my
reading also focused on international students’ experiences of stud-
ying in Australia. Such reading was complemented by studies of
people in transition. Among these was the study of first-year univer-
sity students’ experiences by McInnis and James (1995) already men-
tioned, a study that was interesting because of its findings as well as
because it combined a broad survey of students with intensive follow-
up interviews of a selected group from within the larger cohort that
had been surveyed initially.
As the reading progressed, certain issues in the literature became
more salient. Hence, the issue of student ‘identity’ canvassed by
McInnis, James and McNaught (1995) came into sharper focus as did
the acquisition of both specific professional knowledge, understand-
ings, skills, attitudes and values and more generic graduate capabili-
ties. Finally, the ‘potential and limitations’ that Billett (1995) had
discussed were shown to be critical issues once the students began
talking about their workplace experiences.

Problematising initial assumptions


As I have already mentioned, my initial assumptions regarding the
ways in which the ‘group’ of international students volunteered to
become involved in the interview program, were problematised by
the reading of Said’s (1995) book, Orientalism. The insights derived
were further refined by the radical critiques of anthropological and
ethnographic perspectives stimulated by the work of Clifford and
Marcus (1986). They showed that the work of early anthropologists
could not be divorced from the texts that created and gave signifi-
cance to their work and detached it from the humdrum of learning a
new language and adjusting to unfamiliar climates. I was also inter-
ested to see how the very pragmatic and realist assumptions, on
which much workplace writing was based, could be linked with
Lather’s (1993, 1994, 2001) radically postmodern perspectives on
research and identity and Weedon’s (1987, 1999) work on the ways in
which our subjectivities are produced in the situations that charac-
terise the stuff of our lives.
Before I took up the task of interviewing fifty students, I con-
ducted six initial interviews just to see how they would go. I was quite

Learners in Unfamiliar Workplaces 21

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nervous about interviewing anyone at all because I had not inter-
viewed anyone for a serious purpose for some time and I didn’t know
if people would be willing to talk to me while they were in the middle
of their work placements.
I dubbed the bundle of six my ‘pilot’ interviews, but they later
became the first phase of the interviewing as each one of the six was
so lively, so interesting and so memorable that I didn’t feel like jetti-
soning the material such as is often done when the initial ‘data’ is
found to be inadequate in one way or another. What was striking
about the first six interviews was the great differences in the accounts
that students gave of their experiences. While such differences were
seen positively from a methodological point of view because the sam-
pling method that had been chosen stressed the need to gather a
diverse range of data, the range of student responses suggested that
several interpretive frames would be needed in order to make sense
of the interviews and yet step outside the commonsense understand-
ings that I had arrived at after years working as a teacher educator.
One of the most significant differences between students was
the degree to which students had had access to appropriate work-
related resources and support both inside and outside the workplace.
The students’ access to, and deployment of, resources affected the
degree to which they felt at home in the workplace and were able to
insert themselves into a workplace’s ‘fundamental practices’, one of
de Certeau’s many helpful phrases (1988, p. ix).
Hence, the reading was interesting because it replicated the
research process in that it was composed of several discrete phases.
In each phase, reading extended the knowledge and understanding
that I was beginning to accumulate by being involved in the inter-
viewing process. The first intensive lot of reading was undertaken in
order to make a list of what other writers thought were the main
issues, while the second was undertaken in order to see if the insights
I had come up with were matched, extended or contradicted by the
theories about the social world that I was interested in exploring fur-
ther, especially those to do with the central but fundamentally prob-
lematic words, ‘identity’ and ‘agency’.
During the reading process, it became obvious that the ideas
chosen to tie various concepts together would have to be consistent
with each other on a number of different levels. Thus, the concepts

22 Learning to Work

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selected to theorise the students’ identities and situations in the
workplace would have to be consistent with the perspectives chosen
to theorise learning. Bourdieu’s (1990) statement that it is not appro-
priate from a sociological perspective to simply comment on subjec-
tive viewpoints as these are ‘quite incapable of giving an account of
the necessity of the social world’ (p. 52) provided much food for
thought as the interviews progressed. Hence, the process of choosing
the most appropriate theoretical umbrella was complicated by the
need to find a way in which the students’ subjective accounts of their
experiences could be interpreted so that the constraints and the his-
toricity of the social world could also be taken into account.

From significant approaches to significant images


The effort to organise the reading on learners and learning into a
coherent framework was complicated by the wide variety of ‘levels’ of
analysis and description. While some studies offered a rather general-
ised overview of learning in an organisation (see, for example, Trice
and Beyer, 1993)—or ‘learning organizations’ (Senge, 2002, p. 3)—
others offered learners’ perceptions of what they had gained (Gardiner
& Singh, 1991) during their time in a specific workplace.
Rather than compiling a long summary of all the main perspec-
tives on the multifaceted topic of learning, the example of McNamara
(1994) was followed and selections were made according to certain
principles. In the introduction to the literature review of his explora-
tion of literacy-focused teacher development, McNamara wrote,

It is suggested, then, that an alternative to presenting over-


views ... is to give a detailed account of the work of authors
to which the writer attaches deep significance and to use
the frameworks provided in their work as structures for
analysing the work of others ... In this way, the reviewer
makes explicit his position, narrows the focus of what is a
vast field, while acknowledging the potential disservice
that the act of summary does to the richness and complex-
ity of writers’ original work. (p. 13)

While McNamara used the work of Donald Schön as the foun-


dation of his review, the following chapter has been organised around

Learners in Unfamiliar Workplaces 23

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six key images of learners. These have been drawn from a number of
significant works on learning.
After the process of compiling the images was underway, it was
found that the works from which key images had been drawn were
very similar to the ones referred to in a list of approaches to adult
learning in Garrick and Kirkpatrick’s (1998) article on ‘work-based
learning degrees’ (p. 171). In an interesting section of their article,
Garrick and Kirkpatrick argued that,

theories of learning [that inform work-based and work-


place learning] ... relate to reflection-in-action (Argyris &
Schön, 1987), critical reflection (Mezirow, 1990), experien-
tial learning (Boud, Cohen & Walker, 1993), self-directed
learning (Candy, 1991) and independent learning
(Brookfield, 1990). Others emanate from the field of cogni-
tive psychology (Billett, 1994; Stevenson, 1994) and situat-
ed cognition (Lave & Wenger, 1991). (p. 172)

Although the above list was similar to an initial one compiled by


the present writer, it was also seen to have some gaps. These gaps
were able to be identified because, as the interviews progressed, I
realised that I was exploring important, often taken-for-granted,
images of the learner, rather than particular theories of learning.

Images and metaphors


Images rather than approaches, then, form the basis of the following
discussion. While they have not been drawn from a single epistemo-
logical orientation, they all capture significant aspects of learning and
learning in workplaces. The discussion does not seek to evaluate and
rank the images, all of which circulate in current educational thought,
but rather explores them in order to choose several that might illumi-
nate the issues that emerged from the students’ accounts of their
experiences.
The six central images, which will be discussed in order, are as
follows:

• the learner as ‘potential’


• the learner as agent

24 Learning to Work

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• the learner as apprentice
• the learner as performer
• the learner as new community member
• the learner as border crosser.

The idea of using images as vehicles for discussion is not new.


Discussions of poetry, and literary works in general, often proceed in
this manner, using an exploration of key metaphors as the starting
point of an interpretation. Moreover, as the much-cited work of
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) has shown, metaphors and images can be
used fruitfully in all kinds of analysis because they are embedded in
the taken-for-granted conversations and texts that both constitute
and characterise so much of everyday life.
The approach taken in this review is somewhat similar to that
taken by Palmer and Dunford (1996) in a chapter entitled, ‘Under-
standing organisations through metaphor’ (see pp. 7–19). A second
example that is similar in approach is that of Clegg and Gall (1998)
whose study of the metaphors used by supervisors revealed the
supervisors’ ‘implicit perceptions of what supervising involves’
(p. 325). Patrick’s (2000) study also offers an excellent model for
those who wish to use metaphors as an analytical tool. Not only does
Patrick explore various ‘conceptions’ of learning (p. 117), but she
also gives a very detailed description of the ways in which ‘an analysis
of metaphors’ (p. 122) can be undertaken in order to achieve
further insights.
As well as arranging the literature according to certain recurring
images, the literature survey develops an argument. As the discussion
unfolds, it will be demonstrated that each image of the learner carries
with it either implicit or explicit understandings about the ways in
which the learners have been viewed in relation to certain significant
contexts, types of resources and sources of support. The discussion
begins with the image of the learner as someone who is always in the
process of ‘becoming’.

The learner as ‘potential’


Vygotsky’s (1962, 1978) work, in particular his ideas about the zone of
proximal development, have achieved much scholarly recognition.
Vygotsky’s ideas about learning can be described simply. In the first

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phase, the learner is unable to do something. In the second, the
learner attempts to achieve that something and finds that it is pos-
sible to do so with assistance. In the third phase, the learner can carry
out the ‘something’ that was learned quite independently and does
not require assistance until a new cycle of learning begins. Vygotsky’s
theories are liberating because they focus on potential rather than
on actual achievement. The learner is always in the process of
‘becoming’.
One of the simple and yet effective ways in which Vygotsky’s
(1962, 1978) ideas about learning have been disseminated has been
through the single word, ‘scaffolding’. By using this word, people can
build on Vygotsky’s ideas about the zone of proximal development in
order to emphasise that learning can be scaffolded by the person
giving assistance. In a study of the ‘[t]utorial interactions’ (p. 89) of a
single learner, Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) used the concept of
scaffolding to good effect. In their seminal article, written nearly three
decades ago, the researchers show that the tutor and the child are
indeed able to work together in such a way that the child’s groping is
turned into fruitful learning with the assistance of the more experi-
enced tutor. A reading of the original study makes it possible to see
that the dyad described in the original study was intimate and spe-
cial. The interactions between tutor and child are described with such
phrases as ‘appropriate orchestration’ (p. 89) and ‘scaffolding’ (p. 91)
in order to avoid theories that equate learning with transmission.
The article by Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) also makes it clear
why the relationship between the idea of scaffolding and direct sup-
port for the learner has leached into much educational literature. To
cite a contemporary example, a report by O’Dowd, Ryan and
Broadbent (2001) discusses the ways in which ‘at-risk’ students might
be encouraged to complete their secondary schooling while under-
lining that scaffolding means a certain type of support by inscribing
both words in its title: Building scaffolds of support: Case manage-
ment in schools. In both of the writings cited, the learner requires,
and is given, social support by other people.

Resources and support for the learner as potential


In the works discussed, the person who offers to help construct the
scaffolding needed during the tutorial ‘interactions’ (Wood, Bruner &

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Ross, 1976, p. 89) is an adult. The support offered is one-to-one sup-
port, the context is low in risk, and the main form of support is human
interaction. In all of Vygotsky’s (1962, 1978) writing and in both cases
referred to, language is the chief means by which the learning hap-
pens. However, the language used is not didactic, instructional lan-
guage, but is deeply implicated in the whole process of learning. The
learning and the mutually engaged talking that accompanies the
learning are difficult to separate.
As has been pointed out, Vygotskian ideas are focused on the
potential of the learner. However, many images of the adult learner
emphasise achievement rather than becoming and so stress the state
towards which the learner is striving. Such an image is sustained by
the idea of self-direction, an idea that has at its heart the notion of
the agenic, individuated person.

The learner as agent


In their work on promoting active learning in higher education class-
rooms, Meyers and Jones (1993) argue that the presence of adult
learners in higher education has meant that traditional methods of
teaching have had to change. According to these writers, adults learn
most effectively using active-learning strategies in active-learning
classrooms. They also make claims for an active-learning approach to
teaching in terms that show that the broad aims that they have for
students are very similar to those contained in the Australian govern-
ment’s report (Kemp, 2001) on higher education. Meyers and Jones
conclude that having opportunities to practise active learning strate-
gies will enable students to ‘become self-directed and collaborative,
critically reflective, politically savvy, empathic, and fair-minded, as
well as competent in the skills that are essential to meaningful lives
and careers’ (p. 156). Each of the words listed by these writers implies
that the learner has agency.

Self-directed
Some two decades ago, Knowles (1981) stressed that teaching and
learning in higher education would have to be transformed in order
to prepare learners who would be able to assess their own learning
needs, articulate learning objectives, identify a range of ‘appropriate
learning resources’, decide on ways in which to use those resources,

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and assess the learning that had taken place. He argued that all higher
education programs would have to be organised in two phases so that
students could develop ‘the skills of autonomous learning’ in the first
phase of the program and then engage in ‘self-directed learning activ-
ities’ (p. 8) in the second part of the program.
Knowles (1981) went on to argue that the ‘process of learning’ (p.
8) and the ‘acquisition’ (p. 8) rather than the transmission of content
knowledge, had to take precedence in all programs of higher educa-
tion. Knowles predicted that people involved in higher education
would find such a re-orientation difficult because each one would
have to re-cast his or her teaching identity in order to become a ‘facil-
itator and resource person to self-directed learners’ (p. 8). In an ear-
lier piece of writing, Knowles (1975) had described his own struggles
during such changes, saying that the transition from ‘Content
Transmitter’ (p. 31) to ‘facilitator of learning’ had been both ‘funda-
mental and terribly difficult’ (p. 33).
An early reference to the concept of ‘problem-centred’ learning
and many other influential ideas can be seen in a table drawn up by
Knowles (1975, p. 60). The learner, an increasingly self-directed
learner, becomes involved in learning that is task- or problem-
centred rather than subject- or context-centred. Knowles summed
up his point of view by saying that ‘the ability to learn on one’s own’
(p. 17) had become ‘a prerequisite for learning in this new world’
(p. 17). One further point made by Knowles must have seemed rad-
ical at the time his book was published given that so much learning
was dominated by the textbook (Apple & Christian-Smith, 1991). This
was the point that learning and living were the same and that, as a
consequence,

We must learn from everything we do; we must exploit


every experience as a ‘learning experience.’ Every institu-
tion in our community ... becomes a resource for learning
... Learning means making use of every resource—in or out
of educational institutions—for our personal growth and
development. (p. 16)

Since Knowles’s (1975) ideas on self-directed learning were pub-


lished, many different collections and writers have explored the

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implications of having the ability to learn on one’s own as a major
educational goal. A collection of articles (Boud, 1981a) reported on
various innovations developed in the area of teaching and learning in
higher education. Student autonomy, self-direction and independ-
ence were the common themes of the articles although the ways in
which these goals had been set about in practice varied greatly.
Boud (1981b) in his own contribution to the collection, noted
that various terms had proliferated in the area of ‘developing student
autonomy’ in higher education. These included ‘independent study,
self-directed learning, student-initiated learning and project orienta-
tion’. He went on to argue that all had important aspects in common:
‘the goals of developing independence, self-directedness, and respon-
sibility for learning’, learning that could continue to take place
without the teacher’s ‘constant presence or intervention’ (p. 11). Like
Knowles (1975) had done some years earlier, Boud drew a picture of a
relatively lonely learner, remarking that although a learner might not
want to learn independently from a personal point of view, the ability
to do so would enable that same person to ‘function effectively’ (p.
12) in contemporary settings.
Hence, Boud (1981b) asserts that teachers in higher education
should design programs that encourage the development of learner
autonomy and the transition from learner dependence through ‘self-
appropriated learning’ (p. 15) to learner independence. Resources
are important, but it is the learner’s responsibility to determine what
those resources are, where they are, and how they should best be
used. This seems consistent with the image of the independent
learner, although the costs of such learning have been described by
an unidentified student (see Ferrier, Marrin & Seidman, 1981) who
had studied Medicine at McMaster University in Canada. In her
report, she commented on her involvement in a program that had
emphasised independent learning, problem-solving, and self- and
peer-evaluation. Students learned in intense bi-weekly tutorial meet-
ings of five people and a tutor but had few other contacts and little
time to make them. The student stated that she was ‘feverishly loyal’
(p. 133) to the program that had emphasised student autonomy.

But some days the loneliness and struggle make me nau-


seous ... McMaster can be its own brand of hell on earth,

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and when you stand alone it’s just you and the flames.
Loneliness and anxiety are rampant in the programme. I
guess they are in life also. (p. 131)

Candy (1991), however, provides a different view of self-directed


learning from that provided by the student cited above when he
stresses the types of support that might be offered to a learner at
different phases in the learning process. In a section of his account of
self-directed learning entitled ‘Implications for practice’ (p. 200), Candy
discusses the role of the learner’s ‘assistant’ (p. 200) in some detail.

Independent
Boud (1981b) also refers to the significance of support. Writing briefly
about his own experiences as a learner, Boud states that several early
experiences of independent learning gave him a sense of ‘exhilara-
tion’ (p. 15), ‘buoyancy and freedom’ (p. 15). While this sounds ideal,
he also states that he was ‘forced by circumstances’ (p. 16) to become
an independent learner. However, Boud was not alone in his learning
situation, but was able to share ideas on a peer-like footing with other
senior people in the educational institution where he was employed.
Hence, the image of the somewhat solitary learner is softened by such
statements as ‘Autonomy cannot be pursued in a vacuum: it does not
necessitate isolation from the ideas and experience of others’ and,
‘Interdependence is therefore an essential component of autonomy
in action’ (p. 23).
The contributors to Boud’s (1981a) collection, in particular,
Ferrier, Marrin and Seidman (1981), Potts (1981), and Buzzell and
Roman (1981), are interested in developing learner independence,
autonomy or self-directedness in their classrooms and lectures.
However, when the complexities of such an approach have been
reviewed, it can be argued that the programs may be developing
attributes in the students that emphasise interdependence through
learning in small groups as much as independence.
In the study that had most relevance to my interviews because it
was directed at a professional preparation program, Ferrier, Marrin
and Seidman (1981) noted that the objectives of their medical pro-
gram in Canada stated that students in their progress towards inde-
pendent learning would also become skilled at ‘selecting appropriate

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learning resources and evaluating progress’ (p. 119). In their descrip-
tion of the program of study, there was great emphasis on small group
learning and the ability to work with others. Hence, concurring with
Boud’s (1981) statement that independence need not be at odds with
interdependence, the writers stressed that the students in the course
‘must also accept responsibility for facilitating the learning ... of their
peers’ (p. 119). Students in the course of study were expected to sup-
port the whole group so that ‘collectively ... all the members’ could
meet the aims of the program.
Ferrier, Marrin and Seidman (1981) describe their program dis-
cussing the orientation sessions that gave the new students some
insights into group learning, problem-based learning and self-
directed learning. Hence, in their program of study, independent
learning has a new face. The learner is no longer ‘on one’s own’
(Knowles, 1975, p. 17), but is immersed in a peer group that has the
power to both support and evaluate the learner’s progress. It is not
surprising, therefore, that these writers remark that, in their program,
the autonomy that the students must develop during the course ‘is a
conditional one’ (p. 119).

Autonomous and active


In his discussion of the autonomous learner, Betts (1992) uses the
term interchangeably with some of the other terms that have been
discussed already, including ‘self-directed’ (p. 2). In an introduction to
the ‘Autonomous Learner Model’ (p. 1), Betts draws on his own earlier
definition of the learner, writing ‘An autonomous learner ... is one
who solves problems or develops new ideas through a combination of
[different types of ] thinking and functions with minimal external
guidance in selected areas of endeavour’ (p. 4).
Knowles (1975) and Boud (1981b) have explored various ways
in which learners can ‘develop and exercise autonomy in learning’
(p. 12). Many different strategies for encouraging this kind of learning
have been developed including learning contracts (Anderson, Boud
& Sampson, 1998); cooperative learning with peers and project-
based learning (Meyers & Jones, 1993); self-, peer- and collaborative-
assessment initiatives (Boud, 1981b; Heron, 1981; Ferrier, Marrin &
Seidman, 1981; Shelton, 1981) and independent study programs
(Stephenson, 1981).

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Some of the above initiatives, a number of which are centred on
peer-oriented learning, have been incorporated into higher educa-
tion classrooms under the more general term of ‘active’ learning.
Since this term can be used to cover many different types of learning
and learning environments, just one example is used to illustrate the
values, practices and resource-use required of ‘active’ learners.
Meyers and Jones (1993) argue that ‘active’ learning rests on two key
assumptions—that learning is ‘an active endeavour’ and that ‘different
people learn in different ways’. They summarise the approach in the
phrase ‘learning by doing’ (p. xi) stating that this is more appropriate
for adult learners who ‘often feel frustrated and discounted when they
are lectured to and are denied opportunities to share their experience’
(p. 7). Using various writers to support their arguments, Meyers and
Jones point out that women and people from diverse cultural back-
grounds bring a range of experiences and learning styles into every
classroom and challenge educators to change their methods of
teaching in order to accommodate the more varied audience.
Although Meyers and Jones’s (1993) emphasis on active, self-
directed learning builds on themes already elaborated by Knowles
(1975) and Boud (1981b), a close reading of their work shows that
they have departed from the earlier works of these writers in impor-
tant ways. As Meyers and Jones (1993) are conscious of the diversity
of their students, they emphasise that active learning will suit people
who are already self-directed learners when they come into higher
education. Hence, strategies for creating ‘an active-learning environ-
ment’ (p. 33) such as small groups, co-operative work, case studies,
simulations, discussions and journal writing are all ways in which the
learners’ prior experiences and learning styles can be drawn upon as
students ‘appropriate new knowledge’ (p. 21). Discussions and
working in groups are emphasised at many points throughout the
book. Also given a place among the strategies is ‘problem solving’
(p. 20), although this is not given extended treatment. Hence, these
writers imagine learners who, because they have already had oppor-
tunities to become active learners, will be developing these skills
further in higher education rather than ‘starting from scratch’.
Meyers and Jones’s (1993) diagrammatic representation of ‘active’
learning includes a list of ‘Learning Strategies’ and a list of ‘Teaching
Resources’ (see p. 20). Included among the resources are ‘readings’

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and ‘prepared educational materials’ (p. 20). As such resources are
another route by which higher education has sought to prepare
learners adequately for the workplace, three publications, all written
for use by people before, during or after teaching practicums in
Australia or the United States, are now discussed briefly in order to
consider the question of how such resources can be seen in relation
to workplace learning.
The first publication (McBurney-Fry, 2002) offers advice on ped-
agogical theories, assessment and ethics, addressing the student
teacher directly and interleaving pedagogical insights with useful
documents including lesson plan outlines and seating charts. The
second publication (Roe & Ross, 1998) follows a similar format,
adding case studies taken from schools so that student teachers will
be able to discuss problematic work-related issues in higher educa-
tion settings. The third example (Posner, 1996) is also addressed to
the student teacher and takes up some of the issues covered by the
other publications. Posner’s work is oriented towards developing the
students’ ability to reflect during their field experiences. The third
chapter opens with the following ‘equation’ about learning:

Experience + Reflection = Growth (p. 21).

Posner (1996) recommends fieldwork logs based on the analysis of


‘one or two episodes that are significant’ (p. 27) as an effective means
by which student teachers can become more reflective.
Each of the resources referred to has been carefully prepared
and makes reference to key educational thinkers such as Schön (1983)
and Bruner (1990). However, the resources have not been able to
address the complexities involved in the ‘messes’ of professional
practice (see Schön, 1983, pp. 40–1), not only because as print mate-
rials they lack the ‘note and trick’ of life, but also because the authors
have not been willing to construct in their commentary the kind of
‘implied reader’ (Iser, 1978, p. 34) who may experience the high levels
of stress reported by student teachers before, during and after their
teaching placements in studies conducted both in Australia and over-
seas (Baird, Fensham, Gunstone & White, 1989; MacDonald, 1993).
The workplace photographs in Roe and Ross (1998) depict author-
itative, friendly teachers and orderly, busy students in classrooms.

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More significantly, like many university tutorials, seminars and lec-
tures, the books’ chapters separate the complex issues of professional
work into significant ‘topics’ such as Human Relations, Curriculum
Planning, and Teaching to Diversity. The problem with practice is that
problems must be considered, as Schön (1987) and his many fol-
lowers have explained, in the midst of action. Problems, predica-
ments and dilemmas have many strands and do not usually present
as a single, easily identified ‘issue’ in practice.
Some materials published for use by professional educators and
students in programs such as nursing, ask the learner to tackle a ‘case’
in all its complexities as a single episode, critical incident or problem.
As many of these course materials are based on the idea of the learner
as one who actively engages in addressing and reflecting on difficult
professional problems, they articulate an interest in active and
‘problem-based learning’ (Boud, Keogh & Walker, 1985; Boud & Feletti,
1997; Savin-Baden, 2000).

Problem solving
In the medical course reported on by Ferrier, Marrin and Seidman
(1981), incoming students were told that self-directed learning and
problem-solving abilities would be expected and developed during the
program of study. Building on a theoretical perspective developed by
Boud and Feletti (1997), Duch, Groh and Allen (2001) offer a compre-
hensive overview of problem-based learning, its various rationales and
some of the ways in which it has been implemented in higher educa-
tion. Cannon and Schell (2001) show that problem-based learning has
many positive aspects if considered as an approach to preparing pro-
fessionals such as nurses who will have to deal with situations that
occur routinely as well as making decisions and solving problems that
are related to the ‘safe, effective and efficient delivery of care’ (p. 165).
After an extensive, if succinct, review of the literature on
problem-based learning (PBL), Cannon and Schell (2001) offer a
detailed example from one section of the nursing program at the
University of Delaware (see p. 170). The strategies centre around the
case study of a patient. Having been prepared beforehand to empha-
sise specific details related to haemorrhages (for example), the case
study is analysed in small groups of two to five students. Then the
same case is reintroduced in another course, this time the focus being

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shock related to blood loss. The writers offer further details, but their
main point is clear: ‘Extending problems over several courses guides
learning from the understanding of basic concepts to managing com-
plex situations of increasing depth and breadth’ (p. 170).
Various studies have discovered the wide differences between
different practitioners in terms of expertise. Very striking in this
respect is the work of Benner (1984) who draws attention to the ‘risky,
situation-specific decisions’ (p. x) that nurses have to make. Benner’s
scholarly study, which was based on both observations and inter-
views, distinguishes between five different levels of ‘clinical compe-
tency’ (p. xvii). The various levels of expertise are designated as
‘novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient and expert’ (p.
xvii). Problem-based learning offers a way of closing the gap between
the learning that is offered by higher education and the problems
that will face a professional in a workplace, as well as allowing nov-
ices to practise in a safe environment the types of skills that they will
require during their professional lives.

Resources and support for the learner as agent


Like Knowles (1975), Boud (1981b) sees the learner as a person who
can identify, assess, access and use ‘appropriate learning resources’
(p. 8) as they are needed. Knowles defined these learning resources as
‘material and human’ (p. 132) also emphasising the importance of
other students in the same program and the prior experience of the
learner as further resources. The relationship of the learner to the
resources is one of ‘use’ (p. 132). Boud summarises the relationship
between ‘autonomous learners’ (p. 12) and any potential resources in
the following way:

Anyone acting in a responsible position needs to be able to


plan his or her own learning and draw upon a variety of
resources to assist putting his or her learning plan into
action. He or she needs to draw upon the experience and
expertise of others, but it is his or her own responsibility to
ensure that the answer needed is found. (p. 12)

Seen from Betts’s (1992) perspective, the autonomous learner’s


goal is to become a ‘responsible, creative, independent learner’ (p. 4).

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Betts states that the achievement of such goals will not be easy
because it will require ‘new orientations to learning’ (p. 2). The
resources required for the program that develops such skills appear
in a short list towards the end of the publication. These are as follows:
‘Teacher/Facilitator; Content specialist; Mentor; Facilities; Research
materials’ (p. 86). Resources are divided into two categories, the first
in which people are important, and the second in which materials
from the surrounding environment are significant.

The learner as apprentice


The learner can also be seen as an apprentice. If the learner is posi-
tioned in this way, then, at times, he or she will experience moments
or periods in which the mentor offers explicit instruction and con-
tinuing opportunities for learning. In relation to both learning in gen-
eral and ‘coaching’ in particular, Schön’s (1987) work is important. His
meta-cognitively oriented perspectives not only offer a coherent and
convincing theory of learning in specific contexts, but also make pos-
sible the identification of the kind of areas that will pose special prob-
lems for the novice in any professional field.
The richness of Schön’s (1987) work can be gauged by its impact
on significant learning communities within such diverse fields as
nursing (Short, Sharman & Speedy, 1995), teacher preparation
(Loughran, 1996; Loughran; 2000; Loughran & Russell, 1997) and pro-
fessional forestry and land management (Boyle & Trevitt, 1997).
Commenting on the relationship between reflective practice and
nursing, Short, Sharman and Speedy (1995) argue that, ‘Acceptance
of reflective nursing practice as the dominant nursing paradigm
would require all nurses at all levels in all areas of practice to address
issues of power and control’ (p. 72). Given that ‘reflective nursing
practice’ can achieve a great deal, it is not surprising that the writers
also comment that such reflection ‘requires intellect, insight, knowl-
edge, observation and creative capacity’ (p. 73).
Schön (1987) is also able to provide people who are interested in
practicums and other types of workplace learning because, with
the tools that he provides, it is possible to differentiate between nov-
ices and those experienced professionals who manage competently
the many ‘indeterminate zones of practice’ (p. 13) that characterise
professional settings. Such predicaments arise when a professional

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situation is no longer a ‘situation of action’ to which the professional
can ‘bring spontaneous, routinized responses’, the ‘knowing-in-
action’ usually relied on. Such situations fall outside the boundaries
of the ‘normal’ (p. 28). As such, they are within the scope of the expe-
rienced professional’s ability to reframe and problem solve, but lie
beyond the novice’s capabilities.
Schön (1987) argues that it is in situations, or zones, in which
there are few obvious ‘rules and procedures’ (p. 35), that ‘unusually
competent’ professionals or performers display ‘an exercise of intel-
ligence, a kind of knowing’ a profound, not fully appreciated, ‘artistry’
(p. 13), as they solve the new problems that arise in the midst of prac-
tice. Firstly, professionals experience a situation as ‘problematic’ (p.
34) because some aspect of the new situation does not allow ‘a rou-
tine application of existing rules’ (p. 35). In one of the most important
passages of his writing, Schön describes the way in which an experi-
enced professional responds to a problematic situation:

In such cases, the practitioner experiences a kind of sur-


prise that leads her to rethink her knowing-in-action in
ways that go beyond available rules, facts, theories, and
operations. She responds to the unexpected or anomalous
by restructuring some of her strategies of action, theories
of phenomena, or ways of framing the problem; and she
invents on-the-spot experiments to put her new under-
standings to the test. She behaves more like a researcher ...
(p. 35)

The practitioner, when faced with ‘an element of surprise’ can ignore
the problem, or ‘respond to it by reflection ... in one of two ways’, the
two ways being ‘reflect[ion]-in-action’ and reflection ‘on action’
(Schön, 1987, p. 26).
In Schön’s (1987) writing, the two kinds of reflection are concep-
tualised and differentiated with great clarity. Reflection-in-action, a
‘kind of experimenting’ (p. 66), happens when the practitioner
‘reflects in the midst of action without interrupting it’ and involves
on-the-spot decisions made to ‘reshape’ (p. 26) or fine-tune existing
knowledge in order to meet the particular demands of unfamiliar sit-
uations ‘where the problem is not initially clear and there is no

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obvious fit between the characteristics of the situation and the avail-
able body of theories and techniques’ (p. 34). Reflection on action, on
the other hand, is quite different. It is a process of detachment, a
‘thinking back’ that has no immediate connection to ‘present action’
(p. 26).
If Schön’s (1987) work helps to illuminate the types of problems
faced by professionals and the types of reflection that help them to
solve such problems when they arise, his work also shows the ways in
which novice professionals can be supported during their period of
initiation into their professional work. Hence, Schön supplements
his ideas about the ways in which skilled, reflective practitioners
carry out their professional work by arguing that such skills can be
made available to others during a ‘reflective practicum’—a practicum
that can help a novice begin to acquire the professional ‘artistry’ (p.
13) displayed by competent practitioners. One way of doing this is
through the relationship to another known as ‘coaching’ (p. 19).
Since by definition, novices or apprentices have not acquired a
fully professional competence or ‘artistry’ (Schön, 1987, p. 19), they
find it difficult to manage ‘the use in practice of applied science and
technique’ (p. 13) that challenging professional situations require.
Novices can move forwards by encountering situations in which they
‘learn by doing’ (p. 37) and in which they can take the opportunities
offered by skilled ‘coaching’ (p. 19).
The student acquires new knowledge, skills and understandings
by the means of coaching which, in its most advanced expression,
also achieves the same ‘artistry’ (p. 19) that Schön (1987) associates
with expert professional practice and performance. In order to
explain what he means by skilled coaching, Schön describes in detail
the ways in which a competent practitioner coaches, rather than
teaches, a practicum student who is under his supervision. Schön
argues that the novice, Petra, learns a great deal about the profession
into which she is being inducted when she brings her design into the
design studio, meets the skilled practitioner, Quist, also her super-
visor, and enters into a special kind of dialogue about her design
attempt in which ‘she listens to him with operative attention—that is,
with a special readiness to translate what she hears into action’ (p.
103). Petra encounters what Schön had described earlier as the ‘expe-
rience of learning by doing and the artistry of good coaching’ (p. 17).

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The images of the novice and the learner who reflects in and on
action assume the dyad of the learner and the coach or teacher. In
the case of the problem-solving novice, a more experienced person
must be relied upon to prepare, obtain and discuss the problem that
the novices will solve. In the case of the reflective learner, both the
skills-oriented debriefing session and the modelling of the profes-
sional language and implicit attitudes to work and workplace come
from Quist. Although Petra talks and shows her drawing, she is only
able to judge it by hearing about it from Quist. Hence, in both cases,
even though they seem very different, the main resource is that of the
mentor, coach, teacher or supervisor charged with the responsibility
of re-shaping the novice’s work and implicit attitudes.
Also committed to the understanding of practice are Lave and
Wenger (1991). Theirs is a theoretical perspective that brings together
theories about the production and the reproduction of the social
world. Introducing their perspective as one in which social practices
can take their rightful place, Lave and Wenger go on to deal with the
concept of ‘legitimate, peripheral participation’ (also the subtitle of
their 1991 book), a term that depicts learners in relation to their new
settings. Influenced by anthropological rather than pedagogical
models, both Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) are inter-
ested in ‘communities of practice’ (p. 47) and the ways in which par-
ticipation in any situation is not simply influenced by, but constituted
by, the context. In this view of learning, much more is at stake than
the acquisition of skills. Learning involves the acquisition of new
identities and, as such, is a much more fundamental process than is
suggested either by theories of change that use the notion of ‘role’ as
their base, or theories of learning that involve general descriptions of
a decontextualised ‘self’.
In the writings of both Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger
(1998), the workplace is a community to which the learner has some-
thing of the same relationship as the apprentice painter in a
Renaissance workshop in Siena, Florence or Padua (Norman, 1995).
Although popular conceptions of the Italian Renaissance celebrate
the achievements of heroic individuals such as Michelangelo and
Raphael, the outpouring of creative activity that was the hallmark of
the period was made possible by the existence of hundreds of small
workshops in which craftsmen and their apprentices made objects

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for consumption by a wealthy European and Levantine clientele
(Jardine, 1996).
In the workshops of painters, which were usually run by net-
works of family members, apprentices were taken on to undertake
tasks such as grinding the raw materials that went into the pigments.
Such work was supportive of, and crucial to, the activities of those
who executed the larger paintings or undertook more highly skilled
work such as painting faces and portraits of contemporary citizens into
the large narrative works that were then popular. In an examination of
the arts of carving and casting during the fourteenth century, King
(1995) argues that, in order to understand the expertise and the func-
tions of the people who were skilled in these areas, it is also necessary
to understand the ‘interplay’ of the ‘skills and ambitions of individual
artists with the powers of their paymasters, their audiences and their
fellow guildsmen’ (p. 98) among whom would be counted the appren-
tices once they had finished the initial years of their training.

Resources and support for the learner as apprentice


It can be appreciated that reflective apprentices need certain
resources. Firstly, they need good coaches who are as astute, as com-
mitted and as skilled in their professional fields as the Quist described
in Schön’s (1987) work. Other important resources needed by learners
who are trying to achieve effective reflection on practice as well as
reflection in practice are the attributes of perceptiveness and insight,
capabilities that may develop rather slowly. That apprentices learn to
see a professional situation in all its fullness only after a certain period
of time has been demonstrated by Russell (1993) who has described
his commitment to combining teacher education with a return to
teaching in the physics classroom. Russell found that rather than
learning simply from observing the practice of a skilled teacher, the
student teachers who were arrayed at the back of the room observing
the lesson could not discern that certain situations had been man-
aged skilfully. The trainees did not have the experience needed to dis-
tinguish predicaments from other moments in the teaching. As a
consequence, they were not able to pick up the strategies that they
would have been able to perceive if they had had the professional
‘eyes’ needed to categorise the reality before them into different pro-
fessional ‘moments’.

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Various writers have proposed ways in which reflection can be
encouraged by resources other than the coach. Boud, Keogh & Walker
(1985) recommend a phase-oriented process, while Prawat (1991) has
argued that an explicit focus can be established for the reflection.
These examples have been chosen to represent a few of the many
strategies designed to support the learner’s development towards
becoming a reflective practitioner. The literature on the area is replete
with strategies for promoting ‘Effective reflective practice’, the title of
one of Loughran’s (2000) many contributions to this area.
Like Schön (1987) and Russell (1993), Benner (1984) has explored
the differences between the practices and reflections of expert and
novice practitioners. Her work, which was built on a series of com-
parisons between the ways in which experts and novices perceived
and described the same professional situations, was ground breaking
in that it assumed that practical knowledge had much to offer theo-
retical knowledge in the field of nursing. This overturned the common
understanding that was enshrined by the structuring of programs
and courses that theory came before practice and that their relation-
ship was one of ‘application’.
Like Meyers and Jones (1993) who assumed that the adult
learner brought so much into higher education that higher education
should respond accordingly, Benner’s (1984) work was highly original
in its stress on practice as the locus of the most significant learning
experiences and the dominant knowledge construction agency. She
was able to argue that theory would benefit greatly from practice
because, at its best, skilled practice was based on the kind of experi-
ence that enabled the expert to make ‘rapid decisions based on con-
crete examples’ (p. 187).
Benner (1984) was also able to demonstrate that the high levels
of expertise shown by the most proficient practitioners could not
always be articulated, but could be demonstrated. For these reasons,
‘the theoretician must always depend on the practitioner for clinical
knowledge development and for finding puzzles and questions that
current theorizing does not predict or cover’ (p. 187). Although var-
ious workplace-based programs of training have not always invoked
Benner’s ideas, many of their principles are in harmony with her
ideas as they also stress the significance of practice in relation to
theory. Such ideas have been explored in Australia by Lee and

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Loughran (2000), some of whose work has centred on ‘school based’
teacher training, a type of training that allows student-teachers to
undertake their practicums on a more intensive, longer term basis.

The learner as performer


Bourgeois, Duke, Guyot and Merrill (1999) state in their book, The
adult university, that the number of studies that have emphasised the
‘viewpoint of the actors’ (p. 99) in relation to the issue of access to
higher education is meagre but increasing in volume. At various
points throughout their book, they make use of Goffman’s (1959,
1961) ideas, incorporating his concepts of ‘frame’ (see p. 98) and ‘sec-
ondary adjustment’ (p. 106) into their work. Goffman’s (1959) work,
which describes and explores his ‘dramaturgical’ perspective (see
preface, n. p.), makes creative use of the concepts of ‘theatrical per-
formance’ (p. 79), ‘cues, hints, and stage directions’ (p. 79) and ‘reper-
toire’ (p. 80) in order to describe the ways in which social actors orient
their performances and positions to each other as discerning audi-
ences. Goffman’s work draws on the metaphor of the self as an actor
who can take on and perform certain ways of presenting the self to
others. His work offers a way of thinking about the strategies adults
use in order to learn to change in new situations, and seem especially
appropriate to the first phase of the placement experience.
The idea of role seems both pervasive and persuasive because it
offers a way of explaining the continuity of social life in a general
sense while enabling theorists to describe the changes that individ-
uals may undergo in the course of their lives. Although it can be seen
as a concept unable to accommodate change, the term ‘role’ is often
accompanied by a modifier so that the general concept becomes
more dynamic. Hence, roles have been described as being at once
ascribed and achieved, negotiated, ambiguous, in conflict with other
roles, and part of a ‘set’ of slightly differing roles that together make
up a larger identification (Jary & Jary, 2000). Although they do not
make the point explicitly themselves, Bourgeois, Duke, Guyot and
Merrill’s (1999) work also demonstrates that the concept of role is
useful because it can explain the ways in which the adult learner can
‘adapt quickly’ (p. 100) to a new situation. Goffman’s (1959) most rel-
evant theories are now outlined briefly and then discussed in relation
to ‘support’ and ‘resources’.

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In an extended account of the social life that takes place within
‘the physical confines of a building ... be it domestic, industrial, or
commercial’ (Preface, n. p.), Goffman (1959) explores the identity and
impressions created by ‘the individual in ordinary work situations’. In
order to do this, he defines various concepts needed to undertake
this task before he begins. Importantly, face-to-face interaction
involves much more than speaking or listening and can be seen as
the ‘reciprocal influence’ people have on each other when they
are together. Interaction, in Goffman’s terms, is ‘all the interaction
which occurs throughout any one occasion when a given set of indi-
viduals are in one another’s continuous presence’ (p. 26). A single
interaction, then, can be seen as an ‘encounter’ (p. 26). Performance,
another of Goffman’s key terms, also contains the concept of influ-
ence and seeks to define the ways in which participants organise
their activities in order to have a certain impact on other people who
then serve as ‘the audience, observers, or co-participants’ (p. 27) of
the performance.
Goffman’s (1959) concept of ‘social role’ (p. 27) has several
aspects. Firstly, the role involves the acting out of certain rights and
obligations that have been ‘attached’ (p. 27) to a given status or posi-
tion. Secondly, the role is made up of one of more parts or routines
(p. 27). A ‘“part” or “routine”’ (p. 27) is not synonymous with ‘role’ as
might be expected, but can be defined as the ‘pre-established pattern
of action which is unfolded during a performance’ (p. 27). Hence,
rather than necessarily being unitary, roles can be made up of several
different parts. This is an important point that culminates in the fol-
lowing statement:

a social role will involve one or more parts ... each of these
different parts may be presented by the performer on a
series of occasions to the same kinds of audience or to an
audience of the same persons. (p. 27)

The concept of role has been criticised for its rather rigid view of
social life and institutions. However, Goffman’s (1959) emphasis on
the many parts that can contribute to a role allows the concept to
attain some complexity. Although Goffman does not elaborate on this
point in great detail, it seems clear that if many roles contain several

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different parts, these may be taken up by individual performers in
more complex and varied ways than if every role were always an
unchanging list of rights and responsibilities. More importantly,
Goffman stresses that roles are not easily carried out. Hence, the
difficulties facing performers are of major interest. Goffman sums
this up by saying that the ‘dramaturgical problems of presenting
the activity before others’ (p. 26) provide his book with its raison
d’être.
Goffman’s (1959) concept of role emphasises the ways in which
presenting the self can be hazardous. He shows that hesitations,
embarrassment and being ‘caught out’ are all possible when the self
is involved in many roles or cannot commit to the one that is being
performed at any given moment. Some performances are easier to
give than others. Hence, the roles of ‘prizefighters, surgeons, violin-
ists, and policemen’ (p. 41) offer a great deal of scope for expression
and confirmation as the essential aspects of the role are easily
accessed by an audience. Other performances take more work and
entail many ‘expressive stresses’ (p. 47). This is often the case when
performers are doing more than simply modifying their performance
to fit audience expectations, but are trying to present ‘idealized per-
formances’ (p. 45). Goffman explains that, ‘when the individual
presents himself before others, his performances will tend to incor-
porate and exemplify the officially accredited values of the society,
more so, in fact, than does his behaviour as a whole’ (p. 45).
The questions ‘How does the performer come to learn the role?’
and ‘What sort of support can the learner expect?’ cannot be
addressed by simply invoking the dramaturgical metaphor because
the work of an actor involves the prior learning of a script before the
performance as well as the actual performing in front of an audience.
In the social world, however, scripts and performances are accom-
plished simultaneously. Goffman (1959) himself pointing out that
they are ‘sometimes not well rehearsed’ (Preface, n. p.). Goffman does
not explore the question of how individuals come to take on their
roles directly, simply referring to ‘our socialized selves’ (p. 63) and ‘the
socialization process’ (p. 64). However, he provides examples of
people who have chosen, or been forced to, take on certain roles that
they have, after some time, become accustomed to performing, giving
some insights into the process as he does so.

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In order to describe the trajectory from ‘disbelief-to-belief’ (p.
31) in a certain performance (or its mirror image—that from belief to
cynicism), Goffman (1959) takes an example from his own doctoral
work, ‘the Shetland Isle study’ (p. 30). In this example, a couple who
had come from a crofter background took over a tourist hotel and, in
having to provide amenities for the middle-class people who could
afford to travel, they themselves became more gentrified. While there
is no detailed examination of the ways in which the crofters achieved
this change in role or ‘performance’ (p. 31), Goffman’s brief descrip-
tion implies that the crofters were able to achieve this transforma-
tion, firstly, by being implicated in a certain type of ‘setting’ (p. 33)
and then by being perceived in certain ways by the clients who came
to the hotel and found the crofters in this setting. It is also probable
that the hotel keepers were able to achieve a ‘confirming consistency’
between the middle-class ‘setting’ and the ‘appearance and manner’
(p. 35) that seem to be required by this particular ‘social front’ (p. 37).
In order to discover more about the ways in which people can
be seen to move from role to role and ‘fumble their way through a
learning period’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 56), it is necessary to examine
Goffman’s (1961) analysis of the ways in which people become
inmates of a closed institution. Goffman stresses that his analysis
applies to ‘total institutions’ (p. 12) such as asylums, prisons and the
army, those institutional settings in which a person sleeps, plays and
works under a centrally organised set of rules. However, while such a
warning suggests that the analysis cannot be used to explain the ways
in which students become student-workers or worker-students,
Goffman’s essay entitled ‘On the characteristics of total institutions’
(pp. 1–124) expands on the concept of role in ways that extend his
definition of the term in earlier work. His ideas can be used to under-
stand some aspects of the students’ transitions from roles in higher
education to roles in workplaces.
Goffman’s (1961) description shows that the change in role from
non-inmate to inmate has several key characteristics all of which
involve restriction and constriction. The ‘stripping’ that characterises
a person’s entry into a total institution is identified with the loss of
certain roles that must be abandoned ‘by virtue of the barrier that
separates him from the outside world’ (p. 16). Firstly, individuals
change their locations in the worlds of home, work and leisure to that

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of the asylum. Secondly, individuals’ involvements in many roles are
exchanged for the single one of ‘inmate’. Thirdly, the many roles—
those of student, worker, parent, lover—all of which have dynamic,
changing elements, cannot be performed alongside the timeless one
of inmate. Some of these roles may be lost to the individual, never to
be recovered. Finally, the taking on of the new role involves an
‘entrance’ in which individuals are ‘immediately stripped’ of many
characteristics that have been allowed and even encouraged by their
former roles. Goffman sums up the change by observing that, as a
consequence of the inmates’ separation from the wider social world,
‘[r]ole dispossession ... occurs’ (p. 14).
Hence, if the learner is seen as a performer, the challenges of
transition and learning will lie in the degree to which the novice per-
former can sustain the performance needed to maintain the defini-
tion of the situation and of the self in it that other people in that
situation want the novice to sustain. Outward appearances and peo-
ple’s judgements regarding the degree to which the performance has
been convincing will be of the greatest importance and the stress of
the situation will lie in one’s estimation of how easy or difficult it will
be to produce and maintain the performance required. In Goffman’s
(1959) memorable phrases, a ‘perfectly homogeneous performance’
will be bought at the cost of ‘a certain bureaucratization of the spirit’
(p. 64) and ‘a mask of manner ... held in place from within’ only by
‘social discipline’ (p. 65).
Goffman (1959) shows that in order to inhabit any role, even a
very mundane one that has nothing to do with life in a total institu-
tion, the performer has to ‘pass a strict test’ related to the appropri-
ateness of the performance being given. Importantly, then, learners
as ‘characters put on for an audience’ (p. 63), cannot be conceived of
outside their relationship with that audience, an audience who par-
ticipates in the performance while watching it and evaluating it.
However, the task facing the performer who is moving into a
new role is not an easy one. Goffman (1959) adds several further dif-
ficulties to the ones already outlined. The first has its roots in the fact
that only ‘meagre stage directions’ will be given to any performer,
because it is assumed that ‘a good deal’ (p. 79) will already be known
about the role. Goffman explains:

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Socialization may not so much involve a learning of the
many specific details of a single concrete part—often there
could not be enough time or energy for this. What does
seem to be required of the individual is that he learn enough
pieces of expression to be able to ‘fill in’ and manage, more
or less, any part that he is likely to be given. (p. 79)

Another difficulty lies in the fact that the performance, the man-
agement of the overall impression, has to be sustained over a period
of time. Hence, possessing certain characteristics associated with the
role is not adequate. The performer has to accomplish the social role.
Goffman (1959) states that the social position must be ‘realized’
because it is not something that can be owned but is a ‘pattern of
appropriate conduct’ (p. 81) that must be performed.
A third difficulty faced by performers is that they must often
depend on the other people in ‘the team’ in order to sustain their per-
formance and the desired definition of the situation at hand. If the
performance is sustained in front of another audience, the ‘team’ of
performers will be ‘in the know’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 88) about the
exact nature of the performance. Hence, loyalty to one’s team and
one’s team mates will become very important so that even if one team
member should make a ‘mistake’ (p. 94) in front of others, this will
not be referred to until the audience has disappeared. Goffman adds
to his observations about ‘teams’ by showing that certain team mem-
bers can endanger the ability of any performer to achieve an effective
performance or ‘front’ before others: ‘It is apparent that if performers
are concerned with maintaining a line they will select as team-mates
those who can be trusted to perform properly’ (p. 95).
Hence, if the students are seen in Goffman’s (1959) ‘dramatur-
gical’ terms as performers, the students will have to learn to:

• present an appropriate first impression in relation to appearance


and manner
• perform effectively even if a role is not ‘believed in’ fully at the
beginning
• deploy various ‘sign-equipment’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 39) relevant
to their role

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• make up for the lack of detailed guidelines regarding their
performance of a role
• realise that the taking up of a new role might also involve the loss
of old roles
• realise that the taking up of new roles may involve the self in
the loss of certain significant ‘identity equipment’ (Goffman,
1961, p. 21)
• cope with co-participants as observers and evaluators
• cope with the dependence on others as team members
• cope with the desire for other performers to have team members
with whom an effective performance can be maintained in front
of an audience.

Resources and support for the learner as performer


The performer’s main resources are other people. These provide the
audience that requires, constrains and gives meaning to the perform-
er’s everyday presentation of the self. In order to present the perform-
ance of self, the learner as performer needs an ‘identity kit’ or ‘identity
equipment’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 21). If learners are seen as performers,
then the elements of the ‘identity kit’ that help the performer to create
a certain impression will have to be present and deployed in a satis-
factory way so that the elements of manner, appearance and setting
are in harmony with each other. Their main requirements will be the
support of those ‘team’ members with whom they are performing and
the audience’s confirming belief that the performance has been seam-
less or appropriate for that situation.
The main difficulties that the performing learners face in the
workplace relate to the meagre scripts that have been set forth for
them and the skilled improvisation that they have to carry out without
extra props or preparation. Performers also face the problem that
their identity equipment can be taken away from them (in extreme
situations) or may prove to be inappropriate or open to misinterpre-
tation in new situations (a much more common experience).
Goffman (1959, 1961) writes about transitions that involve a
change from one role to a very different one—from Shetland Isle
crofter to tourist hotel manager; from employee and parent to inmate;
from civilian to army recruit. In each process, the self that comes to
be presented is very different from the one that was performed in the

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previous situation and the participating and watching audience is
different also. The new audience can preside over a humiliating ‘wel-
come’, take away the individual’s ‘identity kit’ (1961, p. 21)—those
‘tools’ that enable a person to present a certain front to any audi-
ence—and maintain a situation in which patterns of extreme defer-
ence and other kinds of humiliation are practised in order to keep the
newcomers in their ‘place’. Such activities also quicken the process of
change—people are ‘stripped’ (p. 21) of their former images of self
and forced to take up a new identity. Hence, one identity is swapped
for another, the outward changes, at least, taking very little time to
achieve.
While Goffman (1959, 1961) offers us many insights into the way
in which the newcomer might enter one world from a very different
one, other groups of works explore the situation in which there is
great congruity between the culture the individual is leaving and the
one the individual is entering. Polsky (1971) describes how his entry
into the world of ‘hustlers’ is accomplished with ease because he is
already a very proficient snooker player. Willis’s (1977) famous ‘lads’
make an even smoother transition to the world of work because there
is ‘a clear experiential continuity’ between the seemingly disparate
worlds of the workplace and the ‘counter-school culture’ (p. 95) that
the non-conformist working-class boys participate in and maintain
at school. Hence, the ‘masculine expression, divisions and “laffs” as
learnt creatively in the counter-school culture’ (p. 100) are the strate-
gies that enable the lads to survive the demands of physically
demanding, yet repetitive, work.
Willis (1977) explains that the lads’ emphasis on the extrinsic,
group-oriented benefits of work exist alongside a holding back from
deep involvement in other aspects of work. Hence, although work is
looked forward to, the general attitude to work is ‘contained, limited
and minimised’ (p. 102). Involvement in the cultural and symbolic
aspects of work is highly developed. This means that work takes on a
‘sensuous human face’ (p. 102) for the ‘lads’ and this is what they
orient towards at school rather than any interest in the work itself. In
order to make this point in the lads’ own words, Willis provides an
extract in which Will and Joey, two of the boys who appear quite often
in the book, are talking about their future work. In this extract, Joey
comments, ‘I think every job’s got, has a degree of unpleasantness,

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but it’s up to you to mek ... to push that unpleasantness aside and
mek it as good and as pleasant as possible’ (p. 102).
In anthropological work, the ability to understand unfamiliar
linguistic meanings is considered a vital part of gaining access to the
meaning making activities, interactions and images that ‘glue’ com-
munities together (Geertz, 1973a). Hence, various writers offer
accounts of learning the spoken language of the group in which they
are the stranger, Powdermaker (1966), for example, reflecting on the
ways in which friendly ‘insiders’ were willing to give her explicit
insights into the community’s language. Writers also try to offer their
readers glimpses of the meanings accessed. Jackson’s (1989) book on
the Kuranko of north-eastern Sierra Leone is dotted with italicised
local terms and their meanings in English (see p. 81), while Rosaldo
(1993) offers the reader an extended glossary (see pp. 236–57), com-
menting that the glossary may make ‘accessible to the reader certain
aspects of the Ilongot language’ (p. 236).
Willis (1977) also focuses on language, spending much time on
showing the ways in which the ‘continuities’ between the counter-
school culture and the masculine, ‘shop floor culture’ (p. 52) of the
factories and foundries are forged by linguistic means. Hence, the
lads as a group create ‘fun, atmosphere and a social identity’ (p. 23)
by ‘having a laff’ (p. 29) and provide rich opportunities for humour.
The lads also use language that is ‘full of spat out swear words, vig-
orous use of local dialect and special argot’ (p. 33). As Joey comments,
‘... we could talk forever, when we get together, it’s talk, talk, talk’ (p.
33). Given the relationship between talking and being, it is not sur-
prising then that talking is one of the main ways in which the ‘many
profound similarities’ (p. 39) between the counter culture of the lads
at school and the culture of the shop floor are maintained and
strengthened. Language is one of the most important avenues by
which the lads can show that they have ties with the world of mascu-
line work and set themselves apart from the other boys at school. The
lads’ out-of-school involvement in violence and sexual activity needs
to be transformed into anecdotes before these experiences can be
used to gain respect at school.
While the concept of ‘role’ has been used widely both in scholarly
writing and in educational literature in general, it has obvious weak-
nesses. The first lies in the implication that the person performing the
role is distanced from it in the same way as an actor can shrug on and

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slough off a part on stage. However, it is obvious that it is difficult to
take on and put off the roles of parent or teacher with the same ease.
Secondly, the concept of role differentiates too sharply between the
actor and the setting in which the performance takes place. Thirdly,
the concepts of role, performance and setting are quite static and
cannot account for the way in which the actor, the script and the set-
ting, indeed the whole performance, can change and often do so
quite rapidly. If the social world were really constituted as a play, then
the same roles and performances would be given from one century to
the next. In the social world, actors, performances and ‘settings’ are
interwoven in a dynamic way. Time and technology are crucially
important elements and cannot be considered as mere ‘props’. It is
not surprising, therefore, that theorists such as Davies and Harré
(1990) have sought to replace the concept of role with that of ‘posi-
tioning’ (p. 43) and ‘position’ (p. 44) in order to present a more
dynamic, linguistically constituted, social being.

The learner as new community member


It is possible to see workplaces as cultures. Writing under the aegis of
the Institute of Personnel Development in London, Baron and Walters
(1994) use the term ‘culture’ to refer to a diverse array of organisa-
tional characteristics. They refer initially to the ‘culture literature’
(p. 1) and, then, more specifically, to national cultures, management
and corporate cultures, questions of culture, successful cultures and
‘good practice in culture management’. Their interest in culture has
been stimulated by the sense that globalisation has brought with it
many new issues, all of which have something to do with the ‘elusive’
concept of culture, which they describe in relation to corporate cul-
ture using the colloquial term, ‘ how we do things around here’ (p. 1).
While the concept of culture has often been used to serve as the
unifying idea for comparative anthropological and ethnographic
studies, it is a valuable idea to bring to the consideration of work-
places. This is because it offers an array of categories that can be used
to describe specific workplaces as well as offering the researcher tools
with which to ‘defamiliarise’ workplaces so that they become objects
of inquiry rather than places that are known and understood.
Handy (1993) and Trice and Beyer (1993) are among those
writers who have argued that organisations can be seen as cultures.
These writers have been chosen to introduce the discussion for four

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reasons. Firstly, their insights can be applied to a wide variety of
organisations and workplaces. Secondly, they give attention to both
language and practices within their broader description of the ways
in which cultural meanings are created and maintained. Thirdly, their
description of organisations rests on the work of theorists such as
Mead (1934) and Berger and Luckmann (1967) whose interest in the
role of language, spoken interaction and symbols was salient given
that the students’ narratives in their interviews were often organised
around the re-telling of significant spoken interactions. Finally, in
their description of the way in which people are socialised into organ-
isational cultures, Trice and Beyer make an important distinction
between socialisation into an occupational culture and socialisation
into an organisational culture. This is a useful distinction because
some of the students were undertaking work within a workplace set-
ting for the first time, while others had prior work experiences that
were relevant to both the workplace and their profession.
According to Trice and Beyer (1993), cultures involve ‘shared
views of the world’ (p. 83). A central activity in any culture is that of
‘sense making’ (p. 81), a complex process involving ‘knowing and
perceiving ... doing things and ... doing things together’ (p. 81). Social
processes of many kinds give the culture coherence and make it pos-
sible for people ‘to share similar interpretations of familiar and unfa-
miliar situations’ (p. 83).
Socialisation into an organisational culture is achieved by the
deployment of various ‘cultural forms’ (Trice & Beyer, 1993, p. 77) that
convey cultural meanings, enabling people in the organisation to
make sense of the culture and maintain the culture simultaneously.
The cultural forms that are most significant are symbols, language,
narratives and practices. Each of these general categories can be
divided into subcategories (though such distinctions inevitably give
rise to problems of overlap). Cultural forms are significant in that
they are central to sense making, crystallising the often implicit ideas,
norms and rules of the organisation and continually creating and re-
creating the meanings that people need in order to accomplish their
everyday activities.
At different points in Trice and Beyer’s (1993) book, insights are
given into the functions that the major cultural forms might have for
new members of the organisation. Firstly, forms provide a ‘concrete

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anchoring point’ (p. 85) around which various meanings, even vague
ones, can coalesce. Secondly, language in general and narratives in
particular can provide kinds of ‘scripts’ (p. 85) for people to follow.
Thirdly, frequently repeated practices convey ‘prescriptions and pro-
hibitions’ (p. 107) so that people can participate appropriately (or
inappropriately) in specific situations.
In this depiction of organisations as cultures, language plays a
significant role. Trice and Beyer (1993) argue that ‘Organizations have
no objective reality’ (p. 90), but are created by people’s everyday inter-
actions within the organisation. As a result, new members must learn
the languages of the organisation before they can fully understand the
culture and participate in it. However, the language learning extends
beyond that, as new members will also need to learn further organisa-
tional languages so that they can engage in ‘specific work activities’ (p.
90) and function within organisational ‘subcultures’ (p. 90).
In this perspective of the organisation as a culture, the new
member must learn one or more ‘languages’. The learning will involve
the acquisition of language that seems to resemble the acquisition of
a second language, which, according to Ellis (1986) in his survey of
second language acquisition, can be achieved by using a ‘natural
route’ (p. 123) via ‘informal environments’ (p. 231) and/or a process
of explicit instruction. Billett (1995) makes a similar distinction when
he argues that the learner’s ability to learn in the workplace is the
result of participation in workplace activities and ‘the direct and indi-
rect guidance provided’ (p. 22).
If Trice and Beyer (1993) conceptualise the new member as a
learner of significant cultural forms including ‘languages’, Ellis’s
(1986) work contains a list of the characteristics students require in
order to be seen as ‘good’ language learners. All of Ellis’s nine charac-
teristics are important, but four are particularly important. Ellis
argues that good learners will ‘seek out all opportunities to use the
target language’ (p. 122); have a strong motivation for learning the
language; take risks even if this causes embarrassment; and be able
to adapt to a variety of learning situations.

Resources and support for learners as new community members


If the workplace is seen as a culture, students undertaking the
workplace component of their program of study have important

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similarities with groups or individuals entering a relatively unfamiliar
culture for the first time. If interaction is the key to this kind of
learning, then the learner’s most pressing requirement is interaction
with others in such a way that cultural forms can be accorded their
relative significance even if that significance cannot be articulated
precisely.
Various writings have shown that the relationship of the new-
comer to the new culture can be one of estrangement in which local
knowledges, symbolic meanings and language are learned over a
period of time. In the second scenario, carefully described in the work
of Willis (1977), the new culture and the old culture have significant
similarities and so the learning that has to be undertaken by the new-
comer is not as great. Similarities in the identities and in the activities
and linguistic means by which these identities are accomplished
mean that the transition from place of learning to place of work is not
difficult or even very challenging.
However, some transitions are so challenging that they can be
described accurately as hazardous. One final image, of particular rel-
evance to those who must make transitions, can now be discussed.
This image defines the learner as a border crosser.

The learner as border crosser


The image of the learner as border crosser has been taken from the
work of Aronowitz and Giroux (1991), not only because they are
writing from within an explicitly educational framework, but also
because their writings on postmodernism include discussions of
‘power and politics’ (p. 73), emphasising that groups can appear to
have voices while remaining essentially marginalised. In an impor-
tant comment, Aronowitz and Giroux state that,

Within the postmodern discourse of culture and Otherness


there is a privileging of space, textuality, signs and surfaces
that runs the risk of abandoning all forms of historicity.
While some critics rightly argue that postmodernism offers
the opportunity to repossess those human histories barred
from the script of dominant historical narratives ... more
often than not, such opportunities remain concretely unre-
alized. (p. 74)

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In order to develop a positive alternative notion of what
postmodern education might look like, Aronowitz and Giroux (1991)
offer a new image of learners whose experiences and identities are
formed by ‘complex, multiple and heterogeneous realities’ (p. 120).
Contemporary students are engaged in border crossing. However,
this should not be seen as an unsettling, anxiety-producing state, but
can be seen as an opportunity to participate in and re-negotiate the
many possible cultural, political and social codes that exist.
Hence, students as border crossers do not have to dwell on the
difficulties that such a position might present, but can see themselves
as people who are crossing into ‘realms of meaning—maps of knowl-
edge, social relations, and values that are increasingly being negoti-
ated and rewritten’ as social rules are both ‘destabilized and reshaped’
(p. 119). The consequences for the students who are border crossers
are very different from those of Willis’s (1977) lads who, as he has
shown, crossed few borders of any significance in order to enter the
world of work. By contrast, Aronowitz and Giroux (1991) insist that
many opportunities await the border crosser because new positions
are made possible by the multiple identities on offer.
However, while Aronowitz and Giroux’s (1991) image of the
border-crossing learner is an optimistic one, the same image has
been used to illustrate the hazards that real attempts to cross borders
can have. Although these writings do not take up the issue of learning
directly, they offer an important corrective to the postmodern myth
that identities can be forged ahistorically. Munro (1997) states that it
is difficult for those who are not committed to any particular set of
views, explaining that those who ‘dodge and podge, and try to see the
world from ‘in-between’ divisions ... can enjoy no membership of it’
(p. 5). However, the nature of such an ‘in-between’ state takes on a
new dimension of it that is not simply a matter of the ways of seeing,
perspectives or views that Munro discusses, but is the result of cir-
cumstances that have erased any sense of agency.
Merewether (1996), who, like Aronowitz and Giroux (1991),
writes from a postmodern perspective, also takes up many of these
ideas. Rather than offering an optimistic picture of border crossing,
Merewether underlines the hazards of the transitional phase. He uses
the image of border crossing in order to talk about the spaces around
third-world cities in which women and children who have tried to

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make a successful transition from rural areas into the large cities find
that their only option is to exist on the cities’ outskirts and work as
poorly paid domestic workers in the large cities. Unlike Aronowitz
and Giroux’s image, Merewether’s discussion is historically grounded
and describes embodied subjects in real-world situations.
However, border crossing is not an activity that is engaged in
solely by those who are located in ‘other’ places. The same experiences
of dislocation and loss can be felt in many different situations. Studies
of transition have focused on a wide variety of roles—or changes in
positioning—and have articulated the difficulties associated with spe-
cific transitions in ways that reflect the transitional context.
In an Australian study conducted by Green (1997, 1998) it was
found that the transition from primary school to secondary school
had a profound impact on some of the children who took part in this
experience. This was not surprising given that entry into Australian
secondary schools involves leaving behind many of the most salient
features of the primary school including the one teacher-one grade
relationship, the integrated nature of the curriculum and the strong
links between home and school, which gain much of their strength
from the parental ‘drop-off’ in the morning. What was surprising
about the transition made by the children in Green’s study was the
intensity of the impact on individual children. To take just one case,
one girl’s involvement in reading dropped quite markedly when com-
pared with the reading she had undertaken during the final year of
primary school.
Other difficult transitions are those made by women who have
become first-time mothers (Heritage and Sefi, 1992; Sullivan, 1997),
nurses making the swap from enrolled to registered nurse roles
(Paech, 2002), and old people going into nursing homes (Minichiello,
Alexander & Jones, 1990). Each of these experiences can be described
as ‘a major life transition’ (Minichiello, Alexander & Jones, 1990, p.
323). The difficulties of each transition arise from both the general
and the particular characteristics of each situation and centre around
the interconnected notions of identity and expertise. Elderly people
find the transition to the nursing home difficult because they do not
wish to leave their own dwellings and the identities that each home
maintains and develops. They also fear the closed nature of the
options offered. They know that the nursing home—referred to in

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the Australian vernacular as ‘God’s waiting room’—can be perceived
as a final destination.
Like the elderly people described by Minichiello, Alexander and
Jones (1990), new mothers can also experience a sense of loss of
status. Obviously, this loss of status does not usually involve the pos-
session or lack of a home, but the possession of certain kinds of
expertise. New mothers perceive their own lack of expertise in that
they are aware that they find it difficult to identify the source of the
baby’s discomfort (Sullivan, 1997). They are also aware that this lack
of expertise can be perceived by those who have had more experi-
ence with babies and that such perceptions can translate their posi-
tion as ‘first-time’ mothers into that of subordinate in relation to
babies and their care. Although undertaken in order to investigate
spoken interaction rather than the situation of new mothers, Heritage
and Sefi’s (1992) study shows that the new mothers both dislike, and
subtly resist, the health carer’s implication that first-time mothers do
not know what they are doing.
Hence, both elderly people and new mothers can experience a
loss of ‘autonomy and control’ (Minichiello, Alexander & Jones, 1990,
p. 323) or agency during the transitional period described. In both
cases, people move from a situation in which they are often seen
as ‘having’ (a house) or ‘being’ (pregnant) to a situation in which
they are ‘lacking’ (their own dwelling or expertise in caring for a
young baby). However, people’s responses to the situation vary
greatly, some of the mothers resisting the negative interpretations of
their competence betrayed by visiting health workers and some eld-
erly people perceiving that the nursing home would give them greater
freedom than living with a married child (Minichiello, Alexander &
Jones, 1990).
In the studies cited, people’s perceptions of the transitional
period are influenced by the extent to which they can participate in
the decisions that affect them and gain positive perceptions of their
competence from the others with whom they come in contact.
However, while the existence of the phrase ‘a smooth transition’ bears
witness to the possibility that many transitions can be undertaken
with relative ease, the reverse is also true. Hence, studies of the tran-
sition from school to university (McInnis & James, 1995; Watson,
Johnson & Billett, 2003) have shown that students vary in the extent

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to which they are prepared for the change and the relative ease with
which they make it.
The high incidence of attrition during and after the first year of
university study in many university programs across Australia dem-
onstrates that transitions can be problematic experiences. Not all
who take on the transition make it to the next phase of greater knowl-
edge, understanding or expertise. Merewether’s (1996) work, which
discusses a very different sort of transition from the ones already
described, focuses attention on the potentially hazardous nature of
any transition. In his assessment of the work of the two Columbian
artists, Hincapie and Salcedo, Merewether asks the following ques-
tion, ‘What of the people who do not make it across the border, who
are turned back as they traverse the “middle passage”?’ (p. 102). By
emphasising that one group of people who have not been able to
move successfully between one place and another are women and
children from among the rural poor of Colombia, Merewether shows
that certain groups find transitions so difficult that they ‘fall in-
between’, never making it through the transitional phase but ‘always
occupying a space between places’ (p. 103).

The work placement and the learner as border crosser


The perspective on the learning undertaken during a placement
changes if the workplace experience is viewed as a border crossing.
While in normal circumstances such crossings are routine, they
always involve a certain degree of risk and redefinition, as does any
journey from the safety of the familiar to the unknown. Images of the
learner as a border crosser seem to suit most transitions and most
work placements as well. Not only are they challenging to undertake,
but also their outcomes can be a diminishing of opportunities rather
than an enhancement of them. In other words, border crossing can be
hazardous.
The writings of Giroux (1993), Merewether (1996) and Min-ha
(1998) allow us to see that transition and the learning that accompa-
nies changes in everyday practices and the identities they constitute,
cannot be considered without looking at the ways in which some
people require many kinds of ‘resources’ and a great deal of ‘support’
in order to both achieve and learn effectively. Furthermore, the
amount or type of resources required might go beyond what most

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people within an already constituted ‘community of practice’ (Lave &
Wenger, 1991, p. 47) may deem appropriate.
Even if the image of the border crosser seems overly romantic or
heroic, the image of learning implied seems to point to the possibility
that actors who are undertaking placements will inevitably become
involved in various exchanges, negotiations and struggles regarding
resources and that the various people concerned with the placement
experience will have interpreted the meanings, availability and
potential of various resources in very different ways.

Resources and support for learners as border crossers


What are appropriate resources for border crossers? These are of a
rather different order from the five sets already considered because in
each image, the context and the significant others that have been pre-
sented—either explicitly or by implication—have been supportive of
the learner. However, the border crosser is in a different situation. As
this kind of learner requires greater support in order to make the
rather difficult transition, those who scaffold the learning or regard
the day-to-day performance must negotiate with the learners the
extent to which they can be self-directed, independent or autono-
mous learners in any given situation.
The presence of scaffolding interactions or supportive human
resources is not sufficient for border crossers. The border-crossing
learner requires interactions that are based on empowering expecta-
tions. In this way, the learner as border crosser may engage most sat-
isfactorily with those who are committed to notions such as those
outlined by Giroux (1992) or Aronowitz and Giroux (1991). Such
guides or coaches will seek ‘the emancipatory possibilities of teaching
and learning’ (p. 82) and view learning of all kinds as much a ‘political
as it is a pedagogical project, one that demands that educators com-
bine a democratic public philosophy with a postmodern theory of
resistance’ (p. 82).

Further layers of complexity: the ideas of Bourdieu


Thus far we have seen that the situation of the student in the work-
place can be described using a variety of images and learning proc-
esses. In the first set of ideas, all of which see the learner to a greater
or lesser extent as agenic, there is an emphasis on the degree to which

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the learner must speak and act in order to become. In the second
group of images, the student is the legitimately peripheral inhabitant
of a community or culture. The learner is also a performer who must
rely on the face-to-face interactions with others for cues and clues
that offer further directions. While their work has stimulated much
debate, the works of Goffman (1959, 1961) and Willis (1977) retain
their power because, in their work, narrative, explanation and a crit-
ical stance combine to form perspectives on people’s ‘struggle for life’
(de Certeau, 1988, p. ix). The writings of Goffman and Willis also show
that any analysis of the social world has to take into account the inter-
actions of people with other people as well as with the contexts of
situation in which people live out their social identities.
Bourdieu (1990) has remarked that ‘the progress of knowledge
presupposes progress in our knowledge of the conditions of knowl-
edge’ (p. 1). Hence, it is impossible to understand the struggles and
dilemmas of students during work placements unless we have the
means to probe the meaning of practice itself. However, the ways in
which practice should or can be described and investigated are
beyond many analytical frames. Bourdieu has commented that prac-
tice has its own ‘logic’ that lies outside reflection and control. Analysis
of practice is difficult to accomplish because it is so much in the
present that it eludes concerted inquiry.
In the first part of this survey, it was argued that one of the most
persistent images of the adult learner has been that of the agenic self
who undertakes learning as a result of gaps being identified by the
self or others or as a result of changes in one’s situation. In its clearest
expression, the learner is seen as the ‘self-directed learner’ (Knowles,
1975) who obtains the knowledge and the resources needed to carry
out a particular task.
Bourdieu’s (1992, 2001) work allows us to see that the image of
the agenic learner can be used to ascribe both the learner’s successes
and the learner’s hesitations or failures to individual learners rather
than to their situations. Bourdieu (1990) has often argued against the
idea of the agenic, ‘rational actor’ (p. 50) stating that:

The principle of practices has to be sought instead in the


relationship between external constraints which leave a
very variable margin for choice, and dispositions which are

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the product of economic and social processes that are more
or less completely reducible to these constraints, as defined
at a particular moment. (p. 50)

If this seems rather deterministic, Bourdieu (1990) stresses that


the same social pattern can be seen or experienced as both con-
straining and decision-oriented. Hence, marriage rituals in certain
communities can be seen both as a set of ritual practices and as
a ‘system of strategies’ (p. 16) taken to maximise the partners’ eco-
nomic and symbolic capital.
The image of the self-directed learner is appealing in that it
offers the learner wide scope for accessing resources and seeking to
fill in any gaps in the knowledge, understandings and skills one
already has. However, the message that ‘self -directed learning is the
best way to learn’ (Knowles, 1975, p. 10) is qualified by the difficulties
faced by those who wish to undertake their own learning. These dif-
ficulties are centred around the complexities of the learner’s situa-
tion, or, more precisely, the context of the situation and the nature of
the learning site.
Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus—‘the system of structured,
structuring dispositions ... which is constituted in practice’ (p. 52) —
depicts the complexities of the constructed relationships between
selves, notions of agency, time and the social world. By developing
this concept, Bourdieu has been able to generate many valuable
insights into the problem of thinking about ‘practices’. Throughout
his writing, Bourdieu has tried to describe the ways in which practice
is the crucially important ‘site’ (p. 52) in which the historical condi-
tions and the ‘durable, transposable dispositions’ (p. 53) that people
inhabit come together to guide what is socially possible in the present
and what is not—the ‘things to do or not to do, things to say or not to
say’ (p. 53).
In Bourdieu’s (1990) description, the habitus produces both ‘indi-
vidual and collective’ (p. 54) practices in accordance with people’s early
experiences and can be understood as ‘an acquired system of genera-
tive schemes’ (p. 55). Such a definition allows Bourdieu’s insights into
practices to avoid the class-based determinism of Marxism or the
orderly mechanism of structural functionalism. Stressing that such
binaries as ‘determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity,

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consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society’
(p. 55) should be resisted, Bourdieu argues that the concept of habitus
enables thinkers to see that ‘thoughts, perceptions, expressions and
actions’ (p. 55) operate within a ‘conditioned and conditional
freedom’ (p. 55). Hence, practices arise from the ‘necessary yet unpre-
dictable confrontation between the habitus and an event’ (p. 55).
Bourdieu (1990) sums up his ideas on the ‘logic of action’ (p. 57)
in the following important extract taken from a very dense piece of
writing entitled, ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’. In this piece, Bourdieu
shows clearly how he wants us to understand the term ‘habitus’ when
he compares the relationship of bodies and historically produced
social conditions with the relationship between language in use and
the genres that precede it. Bourdieu explains that,

the real logic of action brings together two objectifications


of history, objectification in bodies and objectifications in
institutions or, which amounts to the same thing, two
states of capital, objectified and incorporated ... This logic
is seen in paradigmatic form in the dialectic of expressive
dispositions and instituted means of expression (... literary
genres, etc.) which is observed in the intentionless inven-
tion of regulated improvisation. (p. 57)

While it might be thought that Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu & Wacquant,


1992b) concepts are, in his own words, ‘formidably deterministic’ (p.
136), he wishes to stress that ‘social agents’ should not be seen as
determined ‘particles of matter’ nor ‘little monads’ (p. 136) whose
actions are guided by rational decision making. The point about
‘freedom’ that is important is that it is the way in which one perceives,
appreciates and responds to any position that is ‘inscribed’ (p. 136).
Hence, like the boys in Willis’s (1977) study, social beings actively con-
struct the situation that is also constructed. However, there is a sense
in which one is able to move away from a position. Dispositions can
be seen for what they are when they are considered reflexively.
However, as Bourdieu emphasises in various discussions (see, for
example, Bourdieu & Wacquant [1992b], pp. 211–15), such reflexivity
is not mere reflection, but rather involves the difficult process of
understanding the intellectual and social assumptions on which one’s
position is founded.

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How do Bourdieu’s (1990, 1992) ideas illuminate the situation of
the students in the workplaces they have entered? Theories that
describe the workplace in terms of a ‘culture’ depict the newcomer as
one who lacks some of the essential knowledge or understandings
necessary to become a full member of the culture (or of one of its
sub-cultures). However, as Bourdieu (in Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b)
points out, their presence in a field suggests that individuals already
have some of the essential properties needed for entry. What will
determine both the support they have and the success they win, is
the extent to which they can either bring with them, or acquire, cer-
tain forms of ‘capital’ associated with that field. It is logical then that
the ‘forces’ (p. 101) that confront each other in a field also define the
kinds of capital that are appropriate for each other to have. In a single
line, Bourdieu summarises this insight stating that, ‘A capital does not
exist and function except in relation to a field’ (p. 101; words italicised
in original).
Four other observations about fields can be made. Firstly, groups
within a field—whether ‘intellectuals, artists, politicians, or construc-
tion companies’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p. 105) —work to dis-
tinguish themselves from others in the field. Secondly, the field can be
seen as a space in which struggles for preservation or transformation
take place. As Bourdieu observes succinctly, ‘the field is also a field of
struggles’ (p. 101). Thirdly, the ‘strategies’ used by ‘agents’ to improve
their positions within a field are always tied to their specific position in
that field. Finally, both their relationship to specific capital and the
perspective they take ‘on the field’ will depend on the position they
occupy ‘in the field’ (p. 101; words italicised in original).
Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu, 2001; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992a) ideas
of ‘habitus’ and ‘field’ are given further definition in relation to
another central concept, that of ‘capital’. Bourdieu is often remem-
bered for the phrase ‘cultural capital’ which has been used very widely
since first coined in ‘the early sixties’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b,
p. 160) as Wacquant (1992) has observed (see p. 4, fn. 4). Bourdieu has
further refined his ideas regarding capital and now differentiates
between several different kinds, supplementing the influential idea
of cultural capital with other major types including economic and
social. The three fundamental kinds are supplemented by sub-types
including juridical and intellectual capital. In an important comment
on these central insights, Bourdieu explains that each of the major

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types of capital becomes ‘symbolic capital’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992b, p. 119) when perceived in certain ways. Bourdieu also argues
that cultural capital can also be seen as ‘informational’ capital (see
p. 119 for a discussion of this idea).
Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b) argues that people can
enter a field only because they possess ‘a definite configuration of
properties’ (p. 107). Forms of capital that are specific to a field are
possessed by certain people. Hence, rather than being conceptual-
ised as overly determined atoms, people are seen in Bourdieu’s theo-
retical universe as the ‘bearers of capitals’ (p. 108), the ‘s’ denoting
that certain agents may possess more than one form of capital. By
using terms that seem uncharacteristically dualistic, Bourdieu makes
a distinction between ‘small capital holders’ and ‘big capital holders’
(p. 109). However, such insights are not in themselves of great interest
as many traditions of thought, as well as common sense, have
assigned people to positions based on notions of property, namely
economic capital. What is interesting about Bourdieu’s analysis is
that he is able to show that the possession of certain forms of capital,
for example, symbolic capital, gives social agents access to certain
forms of participation that they could not otherwise have experi-
enced. Furthermore, capital is never inert. The usefulness of various
forms of capital—economic, cultural, social and symbolic—will vary
across fields, and even within different sectors of the one field. Capital
can be also be transformed into other types of capital, including the
all-important symbolic capital.
In the following chapters, the images of learners that have been
described in this one will be explored further. This exploration will
take two paths, one directed by a close examination of the interviews
with students, the second by central concepts taken from the work of
Pierre Bourdieu. The accounts offered by one group of social actors,
students undertaking their course-related placements in Australian
workplaces, are the focus of this work. As the students’ voices speak,
the three themes of identity, resources and support, and learning
become more interesting, but also more complex.

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Chapter 2
Belonging, Acquiring, Situated

A time of great challenge


Central to the present exploration of the work placement is the argu-
ment that this particular time of transition can be characterised as one
of great challenge, the daunting nature of which can only be fully
appreciated by those who are student trainees themselves. Many of the
challenges to be met by the students exist independently of them. The
people in the workplace, the furniture and the fittings, the routine
activities and familiar jokes all pre-date the students’ arrival. Even the
tasks that the students will undertake are rarely their own—the classes
are running, the companies have drawn up the projects they wish to
have completed, the clients’ accounts are already waiting to be checked,
the shares have been bought and are waiting to be sold online.
The interviews showed that the first phase of the placement
revolved around the tensions and dilemmas caused by the paradox-
ical situation that the students felt that they had to be seen to act
competently and comfortably at work even though they were new-
comers and novices who, by definition, had a rather uncertain status
in their workplaces. The narratives also revealed that the challenges
of this period were different from those that arose later on in the
placement. The initial period of the placement posed its own

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dilemmas for the students as they attempted to find ways in which to
present the self as proficient while coping with the many demands
associated with new opportunities, new people and specific kinds of
expertise.
When asked to tell a story about their placements, many stu-
dents chose to tell stories that involved their initial meetings with
people, the social events that were organised for them, they were
included in or invited to, and the resources that they were given.
These activities can be seen as interactions and transactions that
happen at the borders between the new world and the old.
Hence, the initial face-to-face interactions offered the students
opportunities for coming to terms with the environment that they
had just entered. This enabled them to reflect on and make decisions
about the extent to which they were ready to take on the identities
that the workplace seemed to demand of them.

Students’ perceptions of ‘the very beginning’: belonging and


becoming competent
Two of the most important tasks of the initial period were defined by
Zita and James. Zita spoke about the process of acquiring ‘some sense
of belonging’ while James talked about his feeling of being under
pressure to demonstrate an appropriate level of competence that he
expressed in the observation, ‘you’ve got to get up to speed’. James
used this phrase to describe his goal of attaining the kind of compe-
tence that would enable him to meet the demands of a fast-paced
company whose goods were at the cutting edge of its field of produc-
tion. The pressure to meet the external goals manifested by the work-
place as well as his own desire for high achievement are both
summarised in his phrase ‘up to speed’.
The stories told by the students about the initial phase of their
placements were grouped according to a series of significant chal-
lenges faced by each of the students interviewed. Each challenge was
linked to a significant goal. The challenges can be summarised in the
following way:

• to understand the meaning of places and spaces, the physical


environment and appropriate bodily presentations (to achieve
‘professional presence’)

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• to understand the arrangement of existing relationships and to
achieve a recognisable self within those relationships (to achieve
‘professional ease’)
• to manage initial tasks to the level expected (to achieve
‘professional competence’).

The stories from the ‘very beginning’ have been arranged in two
main groups. The first group is composed of the stories the students
told about their initial encounters. These stories have been organised
according to the themes of greetings, gatherings and gifts. All relate
to the larger issue of belonging. The second group of stories is cen-
tred on the tasks that the students carried out during the first part of
their placement. The accounts reveal that the students were given
many different types of tasks and that these tasks fulfilled a variety of
functions. The stories in this section of the chapter both illustrate and
define the ways in which the students were able to manage the first
stage in their development as participants in a specific workplace
community. Hence, while each story contributes to a further under-
standing of the process of belonging, it does so by focusing on the
ways in which the students learn to become competent.

Learning how to belong: greetings, gatherings and gifts


The importance of greetings and gatherings can only be understood if
the extent to which the student trainee felt nervous or estranged is
understood. Students described their initial feelings in various ways
in order to emphasise how difficult it was at the beginning of the
placement or to foreground their newness and inexperience. Several
students used words such as ‘unsure’ (Mai), ‘nervous’ (Anna) and
‘worried’ (James) to describe their responses to the situations they
found themselves in, while words such as ‘daunting’ (Francesca) and
‘quite a big deal’ (Emily) were used to describe the work they were
given to do.
The transcripts showed that nearly all students used the word
‘different’ to describe various aspects of the workplace. After the words
‘shock’, ‘surprise’, ‘embarrass’, ‘expect’, ‘new’, ‘strange’ and ‘different’
had been counted, the word ‘different’ outnumbered all of the other
words. The analysis of the word ‘different’ and its many contexts made
it possible to see that students were registering differences between

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their new workplace and already known and familiar routines and
places throughout the duration of their various placements.
Although the students interviewed did not articulate the chal-
lenges they faced by using words such as ‘identity’ or ‘self’, their nar-
ratives took up issues of becoming and belonging. While stressing
their initial feelings of difference, separation or even isolation, many
students recounted stories about the various ways in which they had
been introduced to their new context. Small wonder, then, that all of
the students who talked about the initial stages of their placements
and told stories about ‘the very beginning’ stressed that the exact
nature of the introduction, welcome or induction that they had
received in the beginning was very important.

Greetings

And placing his hand on mine, with a cheerful countenance


that comforted me, he led me into the secret things.
Dante, Inferno, Canto 111, 19–21

The students were welcomed and introduced to people in the work-


place, like Dante had been in the Inferno, by individuals who had
been charged with that responsibility. In many cases, the task of
greeting the student was assigned to the person who was to be their
supervisor, mentor or coach, but this was not always the case. Some
workplaces assigned the welcoming activities a larger role in the stu-
dent’s placement and gave these responsibilities to someone whose
work included such activities, for example, Human Resources per-
sonnel. Just as the greetings varied in the ways in which they were
given, they also varied in terms of their ‘friendliness’. George described
the way in which friendliness could be demonstrated in an unambig-
uous manner:

George: As a new person, I didn’t know what I was going


to be involved in. All the people are very nice so I
got a good first impression.
JR: How did they show their niceness?
George: When you talked to them, they looked you in the
eye. They’re not frowning or anything. They’re

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not impatient. They’re actually able to talk in a
friendly manner.

George’s description had several different interactional ele-


ments—he emphasised eye-contact, facial expression, and the quality
of the spoken interaction.

Zita: ‘We felt we weren’t lost’


Zita contrasted her experiences with those of other students whose
experiences she seemed to know about. On the basis of such knowl-
edge, Zita was able to make the following comparison, her use of the
phrase ‘went through’ implying that other students in the same course
had had to endure, rather than enjoy, their work placements.

Zita: I think just knowing what other people in other


companies went through, I think what helped
[the student trainees at Company A] most was
that they took us around, they showed us the
company and included us in their staff meetings
as well. They introduced us to people. So right
from the beginning we felt we weren’t lost. We
had a sense of belonging right from the start.

Showed, included, introduced—these highly significant words


combine to form a summary of Zita’s induction and lead directly to
the key word in her comment—belonging. In Zita’s discussion, it is
shown that the student’s ability to achieve an initial sense of belonging
was an interactive process that involved the workplace in giving and
expecting and the student in accepting and reconstituting. Although
such a description of the process makes it sound rather easy to set
up, this was not so. In many cases, the student responded to the
workplace’s offerings with great vigour and there was a ‘fit’ between
the ‘positions’ and the ‘position-taking’ that formed the social prac-
tices and processes of the workplace. In some cases, however, the
workplace neither gave nor provided various positions and the stu-
dent did not reciprocate with appropriate position taking.

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David: ‘They just talked to each other’
David described his colleagues in a far from positive manner.
Interestingly, his underlying criteria were similar to those of George, a
feature that was surprising given that George was talking about his
experiences within a big company and David in a large secondary
school. Both extracts used the ideas of comfortable gaze, the absence
of negative affect and the presence of spoken interaction to organise
their ideas about the attributes of their colleagues.

David: Well, at Mawdown Secondary School, it wasn’t—


one reason I didn’t really like the school, because
they were all older. There was no young staff and
they were all very old and crabby, in a way—they
... weren’t really friendly and they used to just sit
there and they wouldn’t talk and if they talked,
they just talked to each other and they just
talked about stupid things that weren’t really
valid to me in a way, but they just didn’t make
anyone feel comfortable.

Mark: ‘You need to wear a tie’


Mark was urged to dress differently when he arrived at school on the
first morning of his teaching practicum. In his story, his lack of a tie
was brought to his attention by a senior person in the school who was
also in charge of student teachers. The story recreates the sense that
the senior teacher was distracted initially, but then saw the student
teacher for the first time. In the student’s description, the observing,
evaluating gaze had three stages. The senior teacher at first observed
the student, then the student’s shirt and, finally, an absence—the
absence of an important cultural symbol, the tie.

Mark: He led me down to the staff room, and as he


opened up, it opened up to a really formal
common room thing, staff room ... and probably
the first thing when we walk into the staff room
he looks down at me—like—looked down at my
shirt and sees that I haven’t got a tie and goes,
You need to wear a tie ... he made it clear that it

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was pretty important, yeah ... I think if he had’ve
had one, he would’ve made me wear it straight
away.

Mark had had his own schooling in a very free atmosphere: ‘we
didn’t even have a uniform’. Unaccustomed to wearing a tie, he dis-
covered that he had just two ties in his wardrobe, but decided that
the second one, a comic tie, was unsuitable for his teaching round in
an expensive, private school. As Mark remarked, ‘I wanted to make a
good impression, so I wore the proper silver one every day, which no
one seemed to notice—no one made any comment’.
It is significant that the exchange between Mark and his super-
visor concerned a tie. A tie is a highly visible part of the school culture
and can be read with great ease by all those within the culture and by
those at similar schools throughout Australia. The tie sets its wearers
apart from students of other schools who may wear similar suits,
shirts or shoes and also differentiates groups of students within the
school. (At a school similar to the one Mark was in, students who
have achieved excellence in sporting or scholastic endeavours can
purchase a second, more elaborate school tie, which gives testimony
to their scholarly or sporting prowess.)
The wearing of the tie also denotes compliance with school
rules and at least outward conformity to the school’s culture. Not
surprisingly, ‘the lads’ in Willis’s famous (1977) study, ‘rarely’ wore a
tie (p. 17), while in Measor’s (1984) study, a student removed his tie in
order to show his disdain for Music, the lesson he was about to attend.
In schools with strict uniform policies, the teachers’ ties serve the
same potent symbolic functions. Ties also allow members of staff to
mingle on a more or less equal basis with the highly paid members of
the professions who, as parents of the students they teach, are
simultaneously the teachers’ clients and their employers. Finally, the
presence of a tie allows the students to join the junior ranks of the
professions of their fathers, mimicking their dress by donning suits
and ties at an early age.
By wearing a tie as directed, Mark showed that he was willing, at
least for a time, to take up a place in the school community. However,
by wearing the same tie all week, he also showed (although he did not
seem fully aware of this in the interview), that he had not wholly

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embraced the ethos of the school. Like David, Mark was able to
understand the expectations of his environment when these were
made explicit by one of its spokespersons, but found himself not
wholly in sympathy with the world view that the tie both represented
and summarised within the school culture.

Mai: ‘The room didn’t belong to me’


Mai, like Mark, was shown she did not belong. Her feelings of uncer-
tainty were exacerbated by the lack of warmth shown or care given to
her welcome. Also lacking were specific instructions, the sense of
being ‘shown around’ that so many of the students from Company A
had described as being part of their introduction.

Mai: The first day I went there I felt very unsure … I


didn’t know where I could sit because the
teacher was teaching in the front. So I didn’t
know where I could stand or where I could—I
didn’t know what to do. I didn’t fit in very well.
And because my language is a problem—if I
were teaching in Australia, but fortunately I’m
not [going to in the future]. Yeah, I just feel the
first day I was very unsure what I should do. I
generally just took observations of the class.
JR: What did you do to make yourself feel more
comfortable? Did anyone help you?
Mai: I think this really depends on the person you
work with. My previous placement—some of the
staff were very nice so I felt very comfortable.
They would tell me: Now you do this or You can
sit here and put your bag in here—so I felt
comfortable. The room didn’t belong to me—it
belonged to another teacher. I didn’t know what
to do to let her feel comfortable as well as me. In
this placement, the teacher is a bit younger. She
doesn’t really care much, so she just tells me: Just
put your bag there and sit wherever you want, so
I feel very unsure about what to do all the time.

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Gatherings
Some students were given access to, and made known to, the wider
workplace community by means of various social activities, many of
which involved food and drink. Several students, including Pam, Ines,
Ken and James, described the ways in which various kinds of social-
ising carried out at the workplaces they were in played an important
role in making them feel as if they were accepted colleagues rather
than strangers. On such occasions, the challenge of meeting people,
being introduced and learning many new names seemed somewhat
easier, perhaps because interaction could be made the focus of the
activities rather than one of the many aspects of doing a task or com-
pleting a project on time.
Pam, a student whose work involved doing the accounts at a
large institution, recounted a story that highlighted her luck in begin-
ning her placement just before Christmas. Invited to the staff
Christmas party, she met people from all areas of her workplace and,
as a result, was able to meet them much more confidently when they
returned from holidays in the New Year.

Ken: ‘Sort of part of the team’


Ken, one of two students interviewed who had chosen to do a work
placement in Sydney rather than in Melbourne, was also very aware
of gatherings as a way of being included in a network of new relation-
ships. Ken emphasised that because the student trainees were invited
to the Christmas party ‘and things like that’, he could claim by the
time of the interview that he knew ‘a lot of people’. He went on to
describe the friendly informality that allowed the students to join in:

Ken: Like people who are working on a project with,


like, ten people or something and if they go out
for lunch or have a day-trip somewhere they
invite the students along with them. Because
they were sort of part of the team, even though
they are only there once a week or whatever.
But they bring them along.

Ken described several dimensions of the students’ roles in their


large workplace. Firstly, even though the students were not on

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full-time work placements, several efforts were made to integrate
them into the work teams that divided the employees between var-
ious departments within the company. Secondly, such efforts gave
them an interesting relationship with the rest of their colleagues:
‘they were sort of part of the team’. The students’ relationship with
the company had not as yet been formalised by the offer of perma-
nent positions and until that happened, the students had to cope
with their roles as ‘sort of’ colleagues—they were insiders to some
extent, but ones whose future was yet to be determined.
In their extended accounts of the social occasions held at the
beginning of their placements, both Ines and James described the
somewhat conflicting characteristics of many workplace functions.
While the students in Ken’s stories were somewhat at the periphery,
James’s and Ines’s involvement was more central, but was therefore
more demanding and, at times, also quite stressful. This was because
the social situations were conducted with fellow employees and
therefore the roles expected of people were likely to clash with each
other. Hence, as the audience the students had to perform in front of
and impress at work was present at the social gatherings, the students
could not indulge in the ‘reciprocal familiarity’ (Goffman, 1971, p.
129) that might have characterised the students’ manner had they
been away from the gaze of their colleagues.

James: ‘I really enjoyed it’


James’s account of the swimming race held by his company showed
that he wanted to portray the company in a good light because he had
been included in the corporate triathlon. On the other hand, his story
also contained the word, ‘worried’ when he observed, ‘I was a bit wor-
ried about the swimming’ and even though the story was recounted
some weeks after the event had taken place, there was relief in his
voice when he told the interviewer how the story ended. James’s story
has been reproduced in full because it shows that, for many student
trainees, even the best experiences were ones of great challenge due
to the students’ perception that in all situations they were being
measured and tested by their colleagues. Hence, they were always on
stage and could not take part in the ‘back region’ (Goffman, 1959, p.
114) behaviour that long-term employees could enjoy to some extent
even when at work.

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James: I guess the thing that comes to mind ...
[Company A] encouraged people to do the
triathlon, it was the [a company name was
mentioned here] corporate triathlon and I got
involved with that, as a [specific university
program] student which was really good. We
had, I think it was about four to six weeks of
training beforehand, so Company A was really,
really nice. They hired a trainer, a personal
trainer, which—who took us through the various
bits of how to prepare for a triathlon. We had a
swimming session every week, we had a running
session every week, and a cycling session every
week on a Saturday. The swimming was on a
Wednesday and the running was on a Monday
night. And so, I went along to these training
sessions and it was really, really good. A fellow
senior student, [Charlie], was also doing that
with me and you do this triathlon in groups of
three, so the third person was a new graduate at
Company A, and that was really, really good. I
got to do all the training, and the triathlon, it was
really fun—a bit hard work, but it was good and
I really enjoyed it ...
JR: Gee—so your sporting skills are up to that—
James: I wouldn’t say that too, but see at Company A,
they encourage everyone to do it whether or not
they’re a triathlete or not, and there were people
who had never done triathlon, like myself, who
went out and did it, and I think it was just a lot
of fun. Um, I was a bit worried about the
swimming—a lot of people were, but the
personal trainer—I guess he sort of told us that a
lot of people usually are, and once they do all the
training, they are a lot more comfortable with it
at the end, and I was the same. In the end, I was
lucky, I didn’t have to do the swimming because,
on the day after the triathlon there was—a few

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days before that there was a lot of rain, and there
was a lot of bad weather, so there was a lot of
junk in the bay and they cancelled the swimming
leg and made it into an extra-run leg so, it was a
run, run and a ride, so it worked out in the end.
I enjoyed it—yeah.
...
JR: OK—so why did that story—why was that the
one that you plucked out of all the things that
had happened to you during all this long time—
why was that the one?
James: I guess it’s because, it’s something that I never
saw—a company would really promote that sort of
stuff, like Company A did, especially that I wasn’t a
full-time employee for Company A—I was there on
a contract to do my final year project.

James’s story can be compared with Ines’s account of a birthday


party given by work colleagues. Both stories highlight the mixture of
pressure and excitement that the students had to respond to and
manage in their new roles.

Ines: ‘A surprise party for me’


Like James, Ines was working for a multinational company, although
the settings of the students’ stories were very different—Chicago, USA,
and Melbourne, Australia. Like James, Ines had mixed feelings about
the social event that she described. While flattered by the attention her
colleagues gave her, she found many aspects of the social event alien-
ating and stressful, chiefly because a personal event had become a
work-related social occasion, allowing another student from whom she
felt distanced, to organise her party. Ines explained the many con-
flicting responses she had to her party in the following narrative:

Ines: When you go to Chicago you can’t not meet


people that you get along with because there are
so many people. It’s just like a big university—
there are thousands of people there, all learning
and all working for [Company C]. So, yeah—after

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the first couple of days I was very relaxed. The
classes weren’t threatening—I was very used to
giving presentations. For some people it might
have been, but I don’t have a fear of public
speaking, so I was fine. A lot of plays—and I’d
done drama before, so I was fine that way, too. I
was very comfortable. Other people might not
have been. And also I got to know the people
that I thought I didn’t like and I liked them more
just because they were in my class, but not in my
space. I didn’t have to make an effort to get along
with them, but I was around them. So I was
getting to know them a bit better. It was actually
one of the reasons that I didn’t want to go to
Chicago is that it was my twenty-first birthday in
the middle of all of it. And I thought I hate the
people I work with. I hate my work. On my
twenty-first no one is going to know and no one
is going to care! And I was devastated ...
   My twenty-first party was organised for
Saturday night and I got back from Chicago on
Saturday morning. So it was just a very difficult
time for me. But on my actual twenty-first in
Chicago they organised a big cake and everyone
sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me and everyone in my
class (there were about fifty or sixty) threw a
surprise party for me. And the girl from work that
I hated the most—and I still have a similar
opinion of her—but I like her a lot—she is what I
thought she was [very competitive and very
superficial], but she has a really good heart—she
was the one who organised the party for me and it
was the best birthday! And then I got home and
my twenty-first was on. It was really, really good.

The stories of James and Ines can be read as accounts of the


strain caused by the need to be seen to be relaxed and in control of a
performance considered appropriate for a person who might become

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a permanent employee. If James had done badly at the swimming leg
of the triathlon or if Ines had consumed too many cocktails at her
birthday party, their actions would have ‘contradicted the impression
fostered’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 120) by their performance at work.
Because their status was uncertain and they desired the rewards that
future employment with their respective companies would bring,
they could not afford to compromise the ‘personal front’ (p. 123) they
had tried to present. The front the company seemed to require was
articulated by Ines as her self-image: ‘I’m doing very well! ... we’re
all so young. And we’re all so smart. And we’re all—I don’t know—
competitive. And high achievers’.

Gifts
Most workplaces prompted the students to change some aspects of
their life-style or aspirations. Some felt that their new workplace was
their whole life, but others found the unfamiliar expectations rather
oppressive. Some workplaces gave the students resources including
money and equipment so that they would find the demands made
easier to bear. Some of these resources were related to the students’
appearance. James was given a full set of clothes for his triathlon, while
Ravi and Ken were given state-of-the-art computers. One student, Emily,
described her new name tag as if she had been given a very special gift.

Emily: ... just another thing that really struck me about


Company A was that when I first started, I got a
name tag, and I saw everyone wearing name
tags. Yeah—so—like everyone, so—like I’d never
seen that before. I love that, that was fantastic
just to—I don’t know—because that’s one of the
most overwhelming things, I think, not knowing
who people are, and just being—especially when
you’re new and you’ve gotta remember a couple
of hundred different names. So, that was
something that was really good.

The language Emily used to describe the idea of the name tag at
first seemed overly emotive: she used ‘love’, ‘fantastic’ and ‘really good’
to describe a practice, that of wearing a name tag, that is quite common

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in many different institutional settings. However, her warm response
to the name tag can be explained by her tacit understanding that peo-
ple’s names are of special significance and that a sign of being on the
inside of any social situation or community is familiarity with other
members’ names. Emily experienced the power of having her work-
place identity affirmed by others. As it can be argued that, ‘Naming, in
fact, reflects the progress of a person’s identity and awareness’ (Rosaldo,
1993, p. 85), Emily’s name tag enabled her to interact with people more
easily and helped her to establish an initial workplace identity.

Josh: ‘They came through with whatever we needed’


For some of the other students their ‘gift’ was not a name tag, but
state-of-the-art computer equipment. Ravi showed the researcher the
computers in offices similar to his own with some pride, while Josh
and Quoc reacted to the company’s readiness to provide assistance
for technological problems with pleasure. Both perceived in the com-
pany’s support a willingness to invest in the students’ work and an
important means of ensuring that their contribution to the workplace
would be of a high quality.

Josh: In some of the stuff we were working on we had


big problems with the equipment or something
and it turned out that it was broken. We had to end
up ordering replacement parts just so we could
keep working. The company got somebody in the
same day and they organised it and paid money
for it. We don’t even know why it broke. But they’ve
always sort of helped out. If we needed something
to keep working, they came through with whatever
we needed, which was good. It always seemed like,
from a lot of things, that we’ve had a lot of support
for what we’re doing. Even though it’s only a
student project, people have put real effort into it,
too, not saying, Oh it’s just students.

Many of the students wanted to be seen as employees rather


than ‘just students’ and worked hard to establish their competence in
a particular area.

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Ines: ‘The most dressed-up person out of everyone’
Ines’s gift from the company was not a name tag nor the latest com-
puter, but a gift voucher of money. When asked to recount how she
knew what to wear, Ines described in some detail the processes by
which the voucher was given and spent.

Ines: Before we started we got a $500 gift voucher


from David Jones. They had a parade and
showed us what corporate wear was. They were
amazing!
   ... [At the] corporate fashion parade ... they
had cocktails and finger food. They had two
people who work at Company C (both a female
and a male) parading some of the clothes that
were appropriate. But I’ve grown up with my dad
being in the same industry and seeing him going
to work and I actually helped him out a couple of
times, so I was a bit more prepared than
someone who was used to wearing jeans to Uni.
and all of a sudden having to wear a suit. It
wasn’t like that for me.

Much of Ines’s interview was taken up with descriptions of how


hard she had tried to succeed in a very demanding climate.
Commenting that although she was young —‘I’m twenty-one’—she
always wore a ‘proper suit’, Ines added by way of explanation:

Ines: You’re working with people in the company (at


your client site) who are very, very important. I
know clothes don’t really say who you are—show
the knowledge that you have—but I feel that if
you look professional that the impression of you
will be that you are. So a lot of the time I’m the
most dressed-up person out of everyone.

However, in spite of the pressures that she experienced at work,


Ines had managed to carve out her own response to the issue of dress.
She explained that as a result of being so dressed up at work, she now

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dressed much more casually at home. ‘I’m in jeans and a jumper now
... it’s funny because when I was at Uni. I always dressed up. But now,
because I’m at work and always dressed up, I just wear jeans’. Dress
and bodily presentation were commented on by other students
although these were not given money with which to buy clothes.
However, as with Mark and the tie, workplace expectations regarding
dress were very salient to the students.

Gary: ‘Very clean’


Gary articulated a similar position to that of Ines. He brought to the
foreground the issue of cleanliness, not only because he was working
with primary-aged children and would have had Health Education as
part of his responsibilities: ‘I have a shave ... I always make sure my
clothes are very clean ... In weekends, I go in jeans’.
Gary also commented, ‘I smile a lot more here and that’s prob-
ably because I enjoy it so much’, while Ophelia stated that she was
more ‘reserved’ with certain students, especially those that she hadn’t
as yet ‘come to a sense of how to deal with ... I guess I’m trying to feel
my way into where they’re at somehow’. Gary was outwardly cheery,
while Ophelia showed a more serious face to the classes unless she
was with the younger children with whom she felt ‘very comfortable’.
Both were feeling their way into a variety of expressions that would
form, in Goffman’s (1959) phrase, ‘a mask of manner’ (p. 65) appro-
priate for a teacher in an Australian primary school.

David: ‘I used to look like I was a P.E. teacher’


Of all the students who talked about the first phase of their workplace
practice, David talked at most length about the difficulties of
becoming what he felt he was required to be. Although other students,
such as Mark and Paul, indicated that they did not enjoy meeting all
of the workplace demands, it was David who articulated this struggle
most vividly in his description of the choices to be made between the
casual, sporty self implied by Physical Education (P.E.) and primary
teaching, and the trousered, well-prepared Geography teacher self
demanded of him by the secondary school. While Ines and Gary
resolved the issue of dress and professional demeanour by distin-
guishing between their professional, work-oriented clothes and iden-
tity and the more relaxed, private, home-oriented self, David had yet

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to resolve this conflict as neatly as they had. David’s anxieties about
dress mirrored his anxieties about the conflicting roles he was asked
to play in his workplace. As he worked out what to do about his dress,
he was also solving a much deeper conflict about his identity as a
future teacher and his gendered place within his family.
The difficult issue that David faced was that, unlike many
teachers and the student-teachers they supervise, his knowledge
areas and activities were derived from two very different areas of the
school curriculum. As a student who had specialised in the disci-
plines of Social Education and Health Studies at university, his areas
were much more sharply defined by the conventional subject disci-
plines of his supervisors—Geography and Physical Education. Much
of David’s very long interview was taken up with stories that showed
him trying to reconcile the boyish, active, game-playing persona he
had in both his family and his part-time job as the co-ordinator of the
after-school-hours program in a primary school, with the more
serious, intellectually demanding role he was required to play in a
secondary school. Of the stories he told, a number made a contrast
between the demands of home or his part-time job and the demands
of his secondary-school practicum.
In his preferred self-definition, David was a P.E. teacher. In his
interview, he contrasted the world of his secondary practicum with
an earlier one in a primary school, which he had enjoyed much more.
‘I don’t really like being a classroom teacher at a high school ... out-
side’s better, I like being in the outside environment ... I just feel more
comfortable outside’. At first, David seemed to be making a point
about comfort and the appropriate clothes for hot weather, but as he
added more detail to his initial ideas, a deeper conflict between his
professional roles and the ways in which he wanted to present him-
self opened up.

David: The only things I suppose I would have changed,


I’d shave—I didn’t like shaving—I don’t shave
very often ... Like at [Trent] Primary [School],
’cos it was hot ... and it was, like a primary
school—it’s more casual, so I just wore shorts
and a T-shirt, shorts and a shirt, a short-sleeved
shirt, and runners, and so that was good that I

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could wear that type of thing ’cos it’s more
comfortable. When I did the rounds at [Bateman
Secondary College], because I did P.E., I wore
trackies or shorts or something that I could be
active in. But when I did Geography, because I
was doing P.E. and Geography, when it came to
Geography, I used to look like I was a P.E. teacher
... which [meant] that, in a way, I lost that
professionalism as a Geography teacher, rather
than a P.E. teacher.

After defining the ways in which the disciplines of Geography


and P.E. set up a conflict between the ‘professional’ demeanour
required of the Geography teacher and the ‘comfortable’ dress of the
P.E. teacher, David developed the central dilemma further by showing
the practical ways in which the problem was impossible to solve.

David: ... but how do I get around that?—I can’t—Both


classes are on the same day, and I’m not taking a
change of clothes just to change to do each class.
I’m not going to wear jeans and a shirt in my P.E.
lesson—because you can’t do anything about it.
You can’t wear—well, you can, but I don’t feel
comfortable in jeans doing P.E. —showing kids
how to run—how to kick something—you can’t
do it—you can’t be active in jeans, whereas in
shorts and a trackie you can be, whereas in the
classroom, you just look like another student or
just a big kid P.E. teacher.

David’s problem was that if he wanted to exert his authority over


the students in the Geography class, he could not do so if he was seen
as a teacher who lacked the appropriate authority that is nearly
always emphasised by certain dress codes. He implied that the stu-
dents and other staff members were observing him as he articulated
their judgement: ‘another student or just a big kid P.E. teacher’.
Stressing that he wanted to feel relaxed about his clothing, he stated
that if he wore ‘something that I feel comfortable in ... then I don’t

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have to worry about me!’. The ‘comfortable’ clothes were associated
with his ordinary life away from the Geography class that he found so
confronting.
Although David had been out to buy ‘pants and some shirts’, the
purchase of these left him with the dilemma of how to wear both sets
of clothes. David also pointed out that the dilemma was heightened
by the advice university staff had offered student teachers before the
teaching rounds: ‘Dress sensibly! Dress professionally!’. If he dressed
sensibly for P.E., how could he dress professionally for Geography? If
he dressed appropriately for Geography, the students might think he
was ‘just a Maths-Science, Geography, Humanities type person. So,
that’s another downfall which you just can’t win’.
In a very fundamental way, then, David’s dress was at one his
world view, life-style and values and was therefore very difficult to
change. During the teaching round, David encountered major diffi-
culties in the Geography area over lesson planning, supervision and
student management. It was quite possible that at least some of his
difficulties were due to the ‘tendency to fragmentation in geography’
(Goodson, 1984, p. 29). However, given that his father also endorsed a
physically active way of life, it was not surprising to find that, by the
end of the teaching round, David had opted for his comfortable P.E.
clothes and persona and had rejected the idea of becoming a
Geography teacher because, in his own words, ‘outside’s better’.
That the issues of dress and identity are inextricably intertwined
can be seen in Lynch’s (1999) study of the clothing worn by Laotian
Hmong communities, many of whom had left the hilly environment
of Laos for a new home in New York. Lynch emphasises the social sig-
nificance of clothing, stressing that dress is a very important means
by which all social groups mark their boundaries, signify individual
status within a group and denote the significance of certain activities
and rituals. Dress is a central vehicle for displaying the cultural alle-
giances of a family or group, enabling them to maintain a coherent
identity even when transplanted to a radically different setting. Like
all socially constructed meanings, dress can only be interpreted fully
by those who participate in those meanings. The students in these
interviews were deeply aware of these issues even though they did
not articulate them with Lynch’s theoretical finesse.

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Performing the workplace self
Goffman’s (1959) conceptual tools add to our appreciation of the sig-
nificance of the students’ choices. While Lynch’s (1999) work on dress
allows us to see the ways in which dress constructs social meanings,
Goffman’s analysis of ‘regions and region behaviour’ (p. 109) can be
used to explain the adoption of certain kinds of dress. Goffman cate-
gorises social ‘performances’ according to the bounded places in
which they take place. He describes ‘front region’ (p. 109) and ‘back
region or backstage’ (p. 114) activities stating that ‘there are many
regions which function at one time and in one sense as a front region
and at another time and in another sense as a back region’ (p. 127).
Goffman gives the example of the executive whose office shows off his
status and can be used for performances, but who can also use it as a
backstage region if he wants to have a few relaxed drinks with col-
leagues who are also friends. Such conceptual tools are useful for
deepening our appreciation of why the issue of dress was so impor-
tant to the students. Dress, too, can be used to define the functions of
the various regions people are in. Hence, the home worlds of Ines and
Gary acted as backstage venues in relation to their workplaces in
which the maintenance of a ‘particular performance’ (p. 135) was
expected.
In his interview and the stories concerning his ‘trackies’, David
implied that he did not wish to differentiate between the ‘front and
back regions’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 115), whereas Ines and Gary were
happy to, most probably because they assumed that this was an inev-
itable part of professional life having lived with a businessman father
(Ines) and a teacher mother (Gary). In these households, dress had
been used to indicate that a family member was about to take up
their professional performance or was ready to resume an off-stage
role. Both students seemed quite relaxed about their dress because
they had set up specific sets of clothing for the two life-styles they
now inhabited.
Hence, the conversations they had, the observations they made
and the transformations they undertook with regard to dress gave the
students opportunities to gain many insights into the cultures of the
workplaces they were in. They could also use the issue of dress as a
focus for making judgements about their workplace and the people
in it. If the students described above had been interviewed only about

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the issue of dress, it might have been possible to predict that David
and Mark would end their practicums with serious reservations about
their workplaces. By the conclusion of their teaching ‘rounds’, these
students had made decisions to pursue other kinds of work in rather
different settings. Ines and Gary, however, had already decided to
embrace the career path of the parent they referred to in their inter-
views and were going to become a business consultant and a primary
teacher respectively.

Belonging and performing competently: the initial tasks


As was pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the students high-
lighted two main issues when they recounted stories about the initial
period of their placements. It has already been shown that the process
of belonging was supported by welcoming greetings and gatherings.
The ‘gifts’ given to some students had several functions. These ena-
bled the student to achieve a workplace identity more quickly and
also facilitated the production of good work. In the following section,
it can be seen that the tasks assigned to the students on their arrival
also played important roles in both achieving for the students a sense
of belonging and helping them to familiarise themselves with the
workplace and its characteristic ways of reaching certain goals.

Martin: ‘Were they going to expect me to know everything?’


Martin, an Engineering student, summed up many of the students’
responses to the first week (or weeks) of their placement in the fol-
lowing way:

Martin: I guess when I came first week, I wasn’t really sure


what was going to happen. What were they going
to get me to do? I hoped it wasn’t too hard. Were
they going to expect me to know everything?

Martin expresses in two questions the students’ need to know


what they were going to be assigned to do and also expressed a
common anxiety about whether or not the level of expertise they had
already attained would match the allotted tasks. When talking about
the first phase of the placement, many students remembered it as a
time in which they were worried that they would be unmasked, found

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wanting or have their weaknesses revealed in front of their new work-
place community. In several accounts (Mark, David, Sobash), people in
the community were described as having watching roles. Some stu-
dents felt vulnerable and relatively unprepared for the major tasks they
had to undertake in the first weeks of their placements—to identify
significant places and people in the workplace while understanding as
quickly as possible the nature of the work that they had to do.

Martin: ‘Walking around the site’


Martin, studying Engineering and interested in robotics, used the
word ‘enjoyable’ to describe his first week with a large manufacturing
plant. During this time, he was assigned a task that required him to
walk around the site. Somewhat unexpectedly, this turned out to be a
most welcome, and welcoming, task.

Martin: But the first week, the most enjoyable thing was
that they got me to do a project that involved
walking around the site and making sure certain
things were in their places. At first I thought,
‘Why am I doing this? —this is a pretty silly
project—I’m supposed to be an engineer, not
some guy that just walks round ... but I
absolutely loved doing it! Because I got to see
everything on site—all the cool machines and
stuff like that. And especially because I’m doing
Robotics—the machines here are just awesome!
The arms going up and down and ‘round and
dropping stuff! I enjoyed it thoroughly! Got an
idea of everything on site. So now when people
say, Go to Building C105, I can say, Oh yeah—
that’s over there. Before that it was, like, What? ...
I had no idea.

In a very direct way, the company that Martin was placed with
provided him with a very empowering introduction to his work. Not
only did he see the scope of the company’s production, but he was
also able to find his way around a large and sprawling work site where
much of the raw material was piled and stacked in large yards. As a

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result, Martin gained an insider’s knowledge and confidence very
quickly. His delight in becoming an insider was reflected in the way
in which he represented his own speech: ‘Oh, yeah—that’s over there’.
Martin’s tour also allowed him to see how sophisticated the robots
used at the plant really were and further fuelled his interest in the
company’s highly specialised area of work.

Emily: ‘An overview of the company’


Emily’s initial task also allowed her to understand the place she was
working in. As she was about to undertake the workplace component
of her course in the Marketing division of a large, multinational com-
pany, the understanding of the place that she was required to have
was focused on the way in which the various divisions related to one
another. In her interview, Emily described the ways in which people
within marketing had to work with their colleagues from other parts
of the company. Engineers, sales people and advertising experts were
brought together in order to produce a brochure. Initially, she had
been asked to prepare a presentation about the company.

Emily: I actually started with two other [student


trainees] during the same time, Ted, Suzi and I—
the three of us started together in the Marketing
department, and one of the assignments they
gave us was to do just an overview of the
company and where [she names a specific
section of the company], which is where we
work—where that fits in, and also then within
that, all the different components like Finance,
[Marketing], how all that works together, and ...
we had to actually prepare a presentation to give
the graduates, which were starting in January ...
it was a really good assignment to give us,
because this is the first—I mean I’ve had other
jobs but I haven’t had, like a proper office type
job that’s—you know—what I want my career to
be, and it was quite, sort of—not intimidating—
but quite big deal, just coming into an office’s
environment and trying to work out how it all

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fits together. So the first couple of weeks was
spent, just talking to different people from
different sections and then just sort of putting
together all the information, making a slide show.

Sean: ‘A lot of meetings’


Another student, in a very different professional role from that of
either Martin or Emily, was also given time to settle in. Instead of ‘just
talking to people’ as Emily had, Sean spent much of the initial period
in meetings. In these meetings, his role was that of an observer. But
his observations were very active ones, which involved feelings of
amazement and admiration for the skills of his colleagues.

Sean: When I first started, I was just helping out—


nothing major. I sat in on a lot of meetings—that
sort of stuff—to get a feel for the place ... I guess
it sort of blew me away when I first got here, the
ideas and what it’s all about. You sort of come up
with ideas to improve products ... but I guess it
amazed me how quickly people came up with
very good ideas.

Common threads run through the accounts of the three students


in that they reveal that their positive view of their workplace was fos-
tered by the roles they were assigned in the very first week. In Martin’s
case, the small checking task that he had to do as he walked around
the work site gave him a feeling of legitimacy and purpose. Sean was
similarly anchored in the meetings because his own manager had a
very special role to play in the meetings and this meant that Sean had
a definite role as his trainee and an added incentive to observe each
meeting with acute interest. It is interesting to note that both students
were surprised by the activities they observed. Martin found the
machines awe-inspiring, while the ideas aired in the meetings amazed
Sean. Their expressions of surprise are important because they show
that the students had revised their expectations of the workplace.
Such expressions conveyed that Benner’s (1984) ‘turning around of
preconceptions’ (p. 7) had taken place and that the students’ limited
knowledge had become a professional attitude based on respect for

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the sophistication of the technology and the colleagues observed.
Such an attitude could be regarded as a necessary part of the knowl-
edge required to work in a highly competitive industry whose very
existence depends on new ideas, new products and interaction.
The students’ observations allowed them to recognise that the
workplace was a demanding one before they had to demonstrate
their own skills within it. Both students had been given a breathing
space in which to take stock of their new workplace, and a chance to
re-assess what they had to offer as well. However, even though they
had been given an opportunity to participate at a less demanding
level, they had been introduced to the site and its demands very effi-
ciently. Martin had been inducted much more thoroughly than if he
had been given a quick tour around the work site. Sean knew much
more about the complex ways in which the product-improvement
meetings worked than someone who had just heard about them in an
introductory talk.
Each of the above stories shows that many different strategies
can be used to integrate the student trainee into the workplace and
that each of these is perceived in a very positive way by the student.
However, some workplaces face a dilemma when it comes to deciding
which tasks will be carried out by students. In places such as hospi-
tals, it is difficult to provide a meaningful introductory period that
places few demands on the student trainee because, very often, the
work placements are quite short. Furthermore, it can be difficult to
find tasks that provide students with the stimulation, challenge and
encouragement that they desire and need without risking a patient’s
well-being or the alienation of an experienced, often frantically busy,
staff member.

Paul: ‘doing their blood pressure and their temperature’


Paul, a student nurse, complained about the initial phase of his
nursing clinical because he was given tasks to do that were of such a
low level that he found them frustrating and tedious. He made the
point in the following way:

Paul: Basically what I’m trying to say is we didn’t have
much to do. And I don’t say that in a negative
sort of way, but it was really frustrating because

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when you’re going out and doing their blood
pressure and their temperature and doing their
pulse rates, it does get a bit tedious. I mean I can
do that as much as I want in my spare time.

Paul’s difficulties dominated his clinical placement. The ten-


sions between what he would have liked to have done, his percep-
tions of what people felt he was able to do, and the level of the tasks
he was assigned to do, ran like a bright thread through his interview.
However, given that he failed to perform well in an emergency situa-
tion that arose, and also overheard experienced staff complaining
that the trainee nurses did very little work, it is not surprising that his
tasks failed to increase in complexity as the placement continued.
This may seem anomalous when Arthur, a second Nursing student
whose clinical placement was on at the same time as Paul’s, recounted
stories that showed that he had been placed in very responsible roles
during his Clinical practice. The differences between other nurses’
expectations of Paul and Arthur cannot be fully explained by the well-
staffed hospital setting in which Arthur was placed. Rather, the tasks
assigned to the two trainee nurses seemed to have been assigned
according to silent assessments made by experienced staff, assess-
ments that were based on evaluations of the students’ expertise and
the ways in which they presented themselves and their knowledge in
the first few days of the placement.
Hence, while Paul found few challenges in the activities he was
asked to undertake, it was unlikely that he would have been given
more demanding tasks on his next Clinical unless he had acquired a
more professional knowledge base in the meantime. This could be
done either by studying more and impressing new colleagues with
his commitment to the knowledge areas that his profession rests
upon, or by working, as Arthur had done, in a place that had close
links with the work carried out in hospitals such as an elderly people’s
home. This kind of work would have given Paul ways of acting and
speaking that might have encouraged new colleagues in future hos-
pital settings to share the more interesting tasks with him.
The period of the work placement is an active one in which two
of the main orientations of the student are performance and evalua-
tion. Many of the students discussed the perceptions others had had

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of them in the workplace and their wish to maintain, modify or re-
invent the self that others perceived.
Hence, what emerged in a striking way from the interviews was
the finding that students met the workplace’s challenge to perform
and transform their identity in a variety of ways. While some students
immediately adopted the ways of being that the workplace implied as
ideal, other students struggled to construct an identity that met work-
place expectations and yet maintained the sense of the self that had
been constructed in other more familiar situations and places.

Building bridges from old worlds to new


One of the most noticeable features of the stories told about the ‘ini-
tial phase’ of the students’ work placements is that none of the stu-
dents described the welcoming or induction procedures in ways that
indicated that they had been consulted about their own introduction
to the workplace. As Mark explained rather self-deprecatingly in order
to rationalise his failure to wear the regulation jacket and tie, no ‘pre-
round’ visit to the school had been offered. He had not been sent the
booklet that purported to explain the school and its requirements
to student teachers, much less consulted about how he would like to
have been introduced to his new colleagues, students and the school
environment.
Far from being a bridge between old worlds and new, even the
most welcoming induction processes had been developed by the
workplace and, accordingly, emphasised how things were already
‘done’ in the new situation. No student reported that any of their pre-
vious experiences had been sought or taken into account, even when,
as was the case for each of the mature-age students interviewed, a
large part of his or her life had been spent in other occupations
and workplaces. All inductions, even those that the students found
enjoyable or interesting, were depicted as directive, top-down opera-
tions. Such welcomes silently cemented into place the student’s
novice position and ensured that the student had to forge a new
voice, a new set of initiative-taking strategies and a new identity.
Rather than being able to take the former self and ways of being that
had been used to good effect in former situations and the ‘home
world’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 14), many students were asked to change in
significant ways.

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Zita attached the words ‘very friendly’ to the general environ-
ment, meetings, higher management, and colleagues in general. She
reacted very positively to many aspects of her work placement with
Company A. In contrast, Tania found her workplace, Company B,
alienating. She ascribed the paucity of her welcome—a very luke-
warm greeting and no gatherings or ‘gifts’—to the large number of
male employees.

Tania: ... more women should be in the department for


sure.
JR: What difference would that make?
Tania: A huge difference! It’s a very male-dominated
department and the women are just pushed
back. It’s not a sexist thing or anything—I think
it’s natural that if there are more men, the
women are going to be pushed back a bit. It’s a
huge difference! If that section up there was half
women, that would be fantastic!
JR: Then you wouldn’t be ...
Tania: Not at all! I relate better—I know personally—I
relate better to women than I do to men. I went
to an all-girls’ school. I mean, I can talk to men.
But it would make it a lot easier. It certainly
made the time ... on Thursday they do tea. They
didn’t have anything—there were no name tags
set up; there were no pens ... and you know, give
a bit of background and say, Please make her feel
welcome—all that sort of stuff. But there was
nothing for me ... I’d do that sort of thing.

Tania’s initial representation in terms of gender was never


replaced by a more complex, task or expertise-based representation.
Gender issues dominated Tania’s interview and since she could not
undo the ways in which she presented her bodily self, she could take
few steps to become part of the workplace. At the end of the inter-
view, she said that she was looking forward to leaving.

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The importance of the initial period
Many of the students interviewed made a distinction between an ini-
tial period in which they were less secure, less expert or had fewer
contacts with other people in the workplace and a period in which
they felt both more comfortable and more competent. James linked
the initial period of his work placement with the period of triathlon
training that the company offered to him. The training lasted more
than a month. Zita described the way in which the very formal
clothing that she had worn initially gave way to a slightly more relaxed
style of dress as she became more comfortable in the workplace after
two or three weeks. Tania, who had gained her work placement in a
large engineering firm, said it ‘took me a month to find my feet’.
For some students the initial period went on for longer. Two stu-
dents, Josh and Sobash, whose family backgrounds, university pro-
grams and workplaces were very different, said that the initial period
had lasted approximately two months. An examination of the
accounts given by these students showed that their descriptions of
the settling-in period covered a range of issues. Josh was given a
demanding task to do as soon as he arrived at his workplace and felt
that it took him two months to become more proficient at under-
standing all the complexities of his task. Sobash said that the initial
period at work was marked by ‘quite a lot of mistakes’, this descrip-
tion applying to the taxation work he was given and to his use of
English, in particular, his ability to understand Australian English and
to have his own accent understood.
The students experienced a period of anxiety and newness that
was quite protracted because their ‘outsider’ status was maintained
by their ongoing inability to meet certain workplace requirements. In
two cases, this situation eventually changed: Sobash found that he
could understand his employer more adequately and that his own
English was more easily understood as people in the workplace
adjusted to his accent, while Josh gained in confidence as the com-
plexities of the project he was assigned to began to diminish. Tania’s
situation, however, did not change radically as it never became easier
for her to establish friendly relationships with the men with whom
she was working. While her feelings of isolation were eased to some
extent when she found a few other young women to join for lunch,
she had few opportunities to interact with the male employees, never

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really felt ‘at home’ in the workplace during her placement, and was
relieved when given an opportunity to change workplaces.
At the conclusion of her interview, Tania said that she was pre-
paring for the student who would take her place at Company B. The
detailed list of the preparations she was making represented a ‘wish-
list’ of the ways in which Tania would have liked to have been intro-
duced to the workplace. Her activities can be seen as constituting an
evaluation of the perceived inadequacies of her own induction—‘So,
on the first day they took me around to say “Hi”. I shook everyone’s
hands and forgot their names and that was it’. In order to make the
introduction more meaningful for the next student, she had put
together a folder with a name tag, a calendar and a list of instructions
in it. She had also arranged for a week’s overlap so that she would be
able to introduce the incoming person to both the people and the
tasks. From the energetic way in which she described these prepara-
tions, it was possible to surmise that her strongest criticism—‘Not
one person came up to me and asked: Would you like to come to
lunch?’—would be redressed in the next student’s favour.
As can be seen from the foregoing remarks, learning in this
chapter has been framed as acculturation in order to show that much
learning of great importance to the student takes place in activities
and in places that the student might not associate with formal
learning. Van Maanen (1988) writes that culture can be seen as,

the knowledge members (‘natives’) of a given group are


thought to more or less share; knowledge of the sort that is
said to inform, embed, shape, and account for the routine
and not-so-routine activities of the members of the cul-
ture. (p. 3)

Seen from this perspective, the students have been invited to


become part of a work culture, to belong to a group, to learn how to
belong through activities that some would not necessarily associate
with formal learning.
However, while Van Maanen’s (1988) definition stresses to a
great extent the informing, shaping processes by which people enter
a new environment, his perspective needs to be joined by one that
emphasises the extent to which agency can be claimed by people at

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work. Such depictions can be found in Goffman (1959) because he can
use his theatrical images of the ways in which people become social to
underline the extent to which people can put on or take off or partly
inhabit the roles scripted for them. Hence, Goffman considers

the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations


presents himself and his activity to others, the way in which
he guides and controls the impression they form of him,
and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sus-
taining his performance before them. (p. 9)

Such words as ‘presents’, ‘guides’ and ‘controls’ reveal that


Goffman’s (1959) worker has an identity in the workplace already and
plays an active part in guiding and controlling the sorts of impres-
sions that others will take away from his performance of the role he
has assumed in the workplace.
Some students did not perceive themselves as free to ‘guide and
control’ the impressions they were making in the workplace as
Goffman’s (1959) imagined ‘individual’ (p. 9) seems to have done. The
students’ activities and outward appearances were often dictated by
the workplace environment. Norms of dress were assumed and the
expectations articulated quite clearly by workplace representatives if
the students were thought to be presented in an inappropriate way.

Bourdieu’s concept: ‘habitus’


Bourdieu’s (1993) ‘notion of habitus’ (p. 86) was also shown to be
useful for thinking about the very first phase of the work placement
because the struggle to ‘belong’ inevitably involved the further acqui-
sition of ‘principles of choice ... “embodied”, turned into postures, dis-
positions of the body ... [Habitus is] that which one has acquired ...
this capacity for generating practices or utterances or works is in no
way innate and is historically constituted’ (pp. 86–7). Hence, the stu-
dents’ struggles to belong can be seen as one of the most important of
the many ‘adjustments that are constantly required by new and
unforeseen situations’ and which ‘may bring about durable transfor-
mations of the habitus’ best understood as ‘a system of schemes for
generating and perceiving practices’ (p. 87). Experiencing the new sit-
uation involved the students’ efforts to come to terms with certain

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workplace demands. While these demands took many forms and
challenged the newcomers’ identities in various ways, the issue that
was chosen for special attention was that of dress. All stories that
involved references to items of clothing and dress in general showed
very clearly that when the students were making even minor changes
to their dress, they were ‘performing’ certain struggles about their
identity and enacting decisions directed at managing certain tensions
between preferred identities inside and outside the workplace.
As Bourdieu (1990) has observed, many symbols and ritual acts
are both ambiguous and contradictory (p. 13). These are significant
in any work culture and can become the means by which students
acquire knowledge about the workplace and their own roles in that
workplace. That such knowledge had to be acquired was the case
even when the students concerned had gained their workplace expe-
rience at the end of a rigorous interviewing process and already knew
quite a lot about the context in which they were about to undertake
their placement.
The ‘welcomes’ accorded the students were critical in the first
phase. If the welcomes offered were rich and characterised by mean-
ingful introductions and tours, they gave the students feelings of con-
fidence. Just as importantly, such opportunities gave the students a
chance to meet people. Although these people could not be appreci-
ated fully in workplace terms at the beginning of the placement, they
could be re-engaged with at a later date when their support was
needed.
The welcomes, introductions and tours given to students also
enabled them to embark on the task of ‘researching’ their own role.
This task is necessary because they must become a member of the
workplace while they are there, even if they do not particularly want
to. In order to become a member, students need to become ‘cultur-
ally reflective’ (Munro, 1997, p. 18). The meanings summarised or
elaborated by greetings, gatherings and gifts were on offer in order to
be interpreted by the students who had to begin the process of
becoming culturally ‘literate’ and able to read the workplace, its prac-
tices and people. The students were welcomed and given initial tasks,
but both sets of practices underlined the newness of their member-
ship and increased their visibility. The task of walking around the
yards of raw material was attractive, not only because such a task

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could be carried out with confidence, but also because those same
yards were far from the evaluative, distancing, othering ‘gaze’ that
Foucault (1991, p. 191) has described with such power.
One of the striking things about the data assembled under the
rather broad label of ‘Belonging’ was the dominance of the word
‘different’ and the ubiquity of visual images. Students did not express
their feelings in terms of shock or anxiety, but in terms of their
‘difference’ from others or the ‘differences’ they perceived between
the university and the workplace or their identity in the workplace
and that same identity in other places. The feeling of ‘difference’ was
lessened when some sense of sameness was achieved, either by dress
or displays of expertise, but was exacerbated when the students felt
that others were watching, as in the case of David’s watching older
teachers.
Many students found the tasks of ‘belonging’ and ‘performing
competently’ challenging. Some students were not able to belong,
while others did not want to. The same was true of the students’
efforts to attain certain types of expertise that the workplace defined
as either crucial or important—sometimes they were not able to
attain the skills demanded or, after a period of time or on reflection,
they did not want to anyway. A few students were surprised by the
extent to which they were expected to display their commitment to
the role by outward demonstrations of their membership or by high
levels of expertise.
Hence, from the beginning, the students were involved in a
series of self-assessments, challenges and struggles in which they
were both positioned and position-takers, performers and audiences
of their own performances. However, Mai, David and Tania had very
different experiences from those who were able to enter the workplace
culture, take part in its offerings and present themselves as worthy
members. While students faced the ongoing tasks of becoming and
belonging, they had not yet become ‘ordinary’ (Sacks, 1992b, p. 413).
Some students seemed destined to remain ‘in-between’ in ways that
they did not like.
Finally, it can be seen in the data that Bourdieu’s (1990) insights
into the ways in which people become parts of social life can also be
used to interpret the students’ narratives. If we return to his notion of
habitus, it is possible to reflect on the ways in which the students

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both inhabited and appropriated the workplaces they were placed in.
In Bourdieu’s memorable phrase, the students, within their individual
life histories and alongside the colleagues they had just met, were
involved in revivifying their workplaces from the ‘state of dead letters’
(p. 57) by investing them with meaning or ‘reviving the sense
deposited in them’ (p. 57). Hence, the triathlon costume and the tie,
the suits, the shirts and trousers and the computers were not
incidental or unimportant. Instead, they could be seen as the silent
vehicles by which the students were socialised very directly into the
workplaces, a process by which the workplaces were also given
continued life. It can be seen, then, that Bourdieu’s insight seems apt.
At least in the early period of the placement, it could be claimed that
‘Property appropriates its owner, embodying itself in the form of a
structure generating practices perfectly conforming with its logic and
its demands’ (p. 57).
In the initial period of their placements, the students learned
that, as Baron and Walters (1994) have observed, culture is the ‘glue’
that makes workplaces cohere. Workplace cultures have to be learned
and the learning of unfamiliar cultures can be much more challenging
than phrases such as ‘how things are done around here’ or ‘the way
people think about things around here’ (p. 9) would suggest.

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Chapter 3
Becoming, Negotiating, Scaffolded

Challenging interactions
The students interviewed about the initial period of their work place-
ment reported having various intense feelings when faced with their
new environment including anxiety, excitement and a heightened
sense that they could, in this new environment, ‘prove’ themselves. In
the first phase of the placement, students responded positively when
it was made apparent by various people and activities that their
uncertainty could be seen as part of the experience of being a new-
comer and would therefore be responded to with a range of wel-
coming, integrating strategies. That this was very important was made
clear when some students depicted their initial feelings of uncertainty
as short-lived, while others felt partly or significantly estranged from
the people around them or the activities they were engaged in up
until the time they departed the workplace.
Interpretations of the interview transcripts revealed that while
the exact nature of the welcoming strategies varied according to the
specific workplace involved, by accepting and participating in par-
ticular gatherings and tasks, the students were able to learn about
aspects of the workplace including the self that they were required
to perform on their way to ‘being an ordinary person’ (Sacks, 1992b,
p. 415) in that workplace.

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The acculturating process was experienced by some students as
one of appropriation. Other students, however, most notably those
who had gained their placement after an interview and had already
accepted that their workplace would require certain transformations,
were more than happy to comply with the demands that were made.
These students perceived that the rewards to be conferred on them
by the workplace—either a high-quality experience or employment
at the end of the placement—would more than compensate for any
changes they had made to their normal activities or embodied selves.
This chapter continues to look at the students’ accounts of an
important transition in their lives, for some their very first experience
of full-time work. The chapter examines the struggles involved in
becoming more expert while interacting with certain ‘significant
others’ (Goffman, 1961, p. 14) and explores various facets of the stu-
dents’ relationships with their supervisors. Three themes dominated
the students’ interviews in relation to their supervision, namely, their
accounts of the spoken interactions they had with the supervising
person; the opportunities they had been given to make decisions, take
risks and display their developing expertise, and the support they were
offered or given in situations that were particularly challenging.

Selves, supervisors, significant tasks


Words referring to the person appointed by the workplace to guide,
teach, support and evaluate the student abound in the interview tran-
scripts. The very general term ‘supervisor’, used frequently by the
interviewer during the first six interviews without a great deal of
reflection, was not always used by the interviewees even when a ques-
tion or a prompt had included the term. Students tended to use disci-
pline-specific terms such as nursing’s ‘clinical educator’ (Wilma) or
more general descriptions such as ‘One person that I report to for the
project I’m managing now’ (Eugene) and ‘my manager’ (Eugene).
Many students used ‘my’ to distinguish the person in the supervising
role from other people on the same staff. In four transcripts, each
containing lengthy narratives about supervising personnel, various
terms were used to describe the supervisory person. David, the stu-
dent who had completed both primary- and secondary-school
teaching practicums, referred to ‘the P.E. [Physical Education] teacher’,
‘my P.E. supervisor’, ‘my supervisor’, ‘my supervising teacher’, ‘the

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teacher’, ‘that teacher’ and ‘my teacher’. An Engineering student, Suresh,
talked about ‘my supervisor for the project’, ‘the supervisor’, ‘my super-
visor’. Keiko, a primary-school student-teacher, referred to the ‘super-
visor teacher’, ‘my supervisor’, ‘my teacher’ and ‘the teacher’. One of the
Nursing students, Wilma, referred to ‘my clinical educator’, ‘my clinical
supervisor’, ‘my clinical teacher’ and ‘our clinical teacher’.
While the term used to designate the supervising person varied,
students across a wide range of workplaces seemed to share many
common perceptions about the role of their supervisors and the rela-
tive worth of their contributions to each placement. This was made
evident by the long interview with Keiko that focused almost exclu-
sively on relationships with supervisory personnel.
The exploration begins with a discussion of the accounts of stu-
dents who thought that their supervision had not been satisfactory.
These are followed by accounts given by students who reported
having very positive and rewarding relationships with their supervi-
sors. This part of the discussion, then, answers the following ques-
tion: In what ways can the students’ accounts of their experiences of
supervision be understood?

The perspectives of Keiko, Wilma, Mai and Mike


Keiko’s and Mai’s teaching practicums were conducted in primary
schools, while Wilma, a student nurse, undertook her clinical place-
ment in a large, busy city hospital. The fourth practicum discussed,
Mike’s, offered some contrasts to the placements of the other stu-
dents, but also has many similar themes. The oldest of the students in
this group of interviewees, Mike, had had two other careers before
enrolling for a Graduate Diploma in Education. In this section of the
study, the experiences of the three women, Keiko, Mai and Wilma, are
discussed and then Mike’s story is introduced separately. As Mai’s
experience was very similar to that of Keiko, it has not been treated in
any great detail. Both Keiko and Mai were international students,
while Wilma and Mike had been born in Australia.
Keiko, Wilma and Mai expressed dissatisfaction with the place-
ment they had just finished, or were still engaged in, at the time their
interviews were recorded. Each speaker gave a detailed picture of the
challenges she had faced during the placement from both a profes-
sional and a personal point of view. All three students said that they

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found the placement stressful for a variety of reasons and expressed
reservations about the supervision they had been given. They also
described the various pressures that their supervisors had been under
during the round in order to explain why the supervisor had not given
them sufficient attention. All three people compared the placement
unfavourably with a previous placement in which they had experi-
enced much better supervision.

Keiko: ‘It could have been better’


Keiko: My teacher was really nice and she was very
experienced and I think she was very
professional. But when I went [to the primary
school] she was sick and I was there for three
weeks and she was not there for half the time. So,
it was a bit hard for me because there were always
other teachers and, because they didn’t know me,
they really didn’t know I was a student teacher. So
if I did the lessons, they were not sure [unclear].
Because they had to evaluate my lessons and
because they couldn’t see my progress or
[unclear]. So it was a bit hard, so I had to explain
all the time ... But the Grade-6’s—because the
teacher was not there—so the kids were out of
control. So it means that a lot of kids were joking
with me and they didn’t take it seriously.

Keiko’s situation seemed particularly unsatisfactory as the


school she was placed in responded to her supervisor’s illness by
asking substitute-teachers to act as supervisors in individual lessons.
As she had been catered for to some extent, the consequences of her
real supervisor’s absence were hidden from view and became more
difficult to overcome.
The consequences of the supervisor’s absence were felt imme-
diately in the classroom. Keiko described her feelings of uncertainty,
lack of linguistic confidence, lack of confidence in her interactions
with the class as a whole, and a general sense of anxiety about her
own competence as a classroom teacher.

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Linguistic and interactional issues
The lack of a reliable supervisor had many undesirable consequences
for Keiko. Firstly, because her main supervisor was away from school
so much, Keiko had no consistent role model for learning the lan-
guage appropriate to classroom situations. During the interview, she
stated that she had often used careful listening and controlled usage
as strategies for introducing new forms of spoken English into her
own linguistic repertoire. Keiko outlined these strategies in the fol-
lowing way: ‘If the teachers used it all the time, I can hear particular
words and I realised, “Oh that’s the word I have to use!” That’s the way
I would remember it’. Although she had a strategy for countering the
children’s repeated requests for further explanation (she simply asked
them to articulate what they had been asked to do), Keiko felt as
though she had not been able to manage the interactions success-
fully: ‘They still couldn’t get it—and they were asking me questions’.
In the absence of the day-to-day support of an ongoing super-
visor, Keiko lacked a person to mediate between herself and the chil-
dren. She needed a supervisor who was interculturally aware,
someone who could appreciate that she had made several attempts
to explain the work and who could take over with sensitivity, simulta-
neously answering the children’s questions and modelling for Keiko’s
benefit ways in which persistent questions could be dealt with when
they arose in the classroom. In failing to clear up the children’s prob-
lems quickly, it is possible that Keiko signalled a lack of authority to
the class members who then used the situation to disrupt the orderly
atmosphere that she had been trying to achieve. Her sense of failure
in this regard was made more intense by the image she had of class-
rooms in her own education system: ‘In Taiwan ... teachers are more
strict’. When the children in the Australian classroom were disruptive,
she felt unable to ‘use the expressions’, the authoritative phrases most
appropriate for that situation, grade level, group or individual. She
summed up the situation by saying, ‘when I wanted to control stu-
dents, I didn’t know the right words to use, so that was a bit hard’.

Further difficulties
Keiko experienced various forms of student disruption during her
classes. She stated that some children joked, made fun of her, did not
work well, were ‘out of control’, and failed to take the lesson seriously.

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Because as a novice she needed the teacher’s presence to create a safe
atmosphere in which to practise, she was undermined by the students
and, later, due to her lack of expertise, by the teacher as well. Her sense
of powerlessness was summed up when she said that she could not tell
if one student was laughing with her or at her: ‘I’m not sure—he didn’t
understand or was trying to be funny’. It is not clear which one of the
teachers who had watched her lessons was present in the class when
this happened, but the incident culminated in the teacher’s own
laughter. Instead of supporting the student trainee by clearing up the
student’s misunderstanding or indicating to him that his wit was inap-
propriate or rude, the experienced teacher aligned herself with the
children so that, in the student’s words, ‘she was laughing as well’.
The supervising teacher’s lack of ongoing support meant that
Keiko not only missed out on her supervisor’s verbal leadership and
support, but also felt that the clearly understood role of novice
teacher could not be maintained because it was not assigned to her
at the beginning of the teaching round. Hence, she explained that by
not making formal introductions at the beginning of the teaching
round, her main supervisor had omitted to make explicit to the chil-
dren that she was ‘not a proper teacher’ and could not therefore be
expected to act or speak with the complete authority, expertise or
content knowledge, of the main classroom teacher.
Keiko needed the support of an ongoing supervising teacher to
enhance her authority with the children and ensure that they
responded to her teaching in a co-operative manner. In contrast to a
previous round that had resulted in ‘very good memories’, Keiko used
the word ‘lonely’ to describe her feelings of alienation, embarrass-
ment and inadequacy at the primary school. She had compromised
her own sense of presenting as a ‘professional’. Reluctant to judge
either the teachers or the pupils harshly, she seemed to accept what
had happened when she commented, ‘I know it’s not their style to
look after me’. However, later on in the interview, she summarised her
difficulties in a more critical way:

Keiko: I wish they were more organised so I could fit in


better. The students had to know who I was so ...
they knew I was a student teacher and I was not
a proper teacher ... At least give them my name

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or my background to the students so they know
I’m not from Australia.

Mai also stressed that she had been treated with indifference by
her supervisor. Like Keiko, Mai felt that her limitations as a teacher
were not dealt with subtly by the supervising teacher but were made
to seem more obvious in her classroom. Wilma’s narratives also high-
lighted her difficulties.

Wilma: ‘My clinical teacher wasn’t there all morning’


Wilma’s supervisor was also absent a great deal of the time. In this
case, the reason was not that of illness, but was based on the supervi-
sor’s responsibility for a large number of student nurses, eight in all.
Wilma’s supervisor, although neither ill nor remote, seemed to have
many different responsibilities. Wilma described the way in which the
small amount of supervisory attention she had received during the
first week diminished steadily over the placement. Her explanation
for the lack of attention she received centred around two factors: the
demanding nature of the nursing duties carried out at certain peak
times and the large number of student nurses attending the hospital
at the same time.

Wilma: I mean, obviously she [the clinical supervisor]


can’t cut herself into eight. So ... things I’d do
with her would be like drugs, medication ... She
had a really good knowledge about that ... I
didn’t spend a great deal of time with her in the
first week. In the second week I spent, I think,
even less and the third week even less.
[The interviewer asked why this happened.]
   Because of time constraints. Because it was
a small hospital ... There were two surgical wards
in this hospital, so every nurse had a student,
which can cause a bit of friction. I personally
believe that too many students were all on a.m.
shifts. Staff were getting a bit edgy with having
that many students.

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Wilma described the impact a large group of students had on
the hospital by telling another narrative. In this story, she described
the ways in which a theatre nurse had reacted to her requests to
observe operations while they were in progress.

Wilma: [I wanted to go to theatre to] observe a


procedure and—basically—the Charge nurse
yelling at me—absolutely screaming at me—that
she was sick of students. That she had it up to
here with having student nurses! I was coming
on to the p.m. shift and it was my day to go into
theatre and she had had them all morning. She
wasn’t very nice. My clinical teacher wasn’t there
all morning. I never got into theatre. I’d nearly
finished my third year and had not been to
theatre. I got to see a procedure where I didn’t
even have the gown and gloves and all that. But,
yeah, that’s basically a lot of the attitudes and
stuff for students, and it is a major teaching
hospital and a lot of it is like that now. You can’t
go into that area. Students can’t go into that area.

While Keiko’s supervisor’s absences and lack of support could


be accounted for by her illness, Mai perceived the supervising teacher
as indifferent to both her personal comfort and her professional
development. Faced with the challenges of unfamiliar demands and
extremely busy staff members, the students wanted to be supported
by a supervisor who was, in Keiko’s words, ‘really nice’ and ‘very expe-
rienced’ and ‘very professional’. However, although their desires for
supportive supervision were articulated at several points in each
interview, none of the three students felt that such support had been
made available. Moreover, rather than being supervised well, or even
in a rather minimalist manner, each felt that she had been treated
badly. Keiko’s substitute teachers knew little about her, Mai’s teacher
did not ‘really care much’ and when Wilma’s clinical teacher was
somewhere else, another staff member had shouted at Wilma. The
reasons for the lack of support that each perceived and commented
on varied, but one feature was common to all three accounts: the

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students felt that the supervisors demonstrated a lack of commit-
ment to the task of training the student. The lack of commitment was
defined by the meagre amounts of time that each supervisor spent
with the student concerned or the distance she maintained between
herself and the student by her physical or emotional absence.
Each of the three women expressed an understanding of the
pressures on the supervisor, but their absences from the workplace
had many different consequences for the students. In each of these
cases, the perception that the supervisor was ‘very professional’ or
‘had a really good knowledge’ about her professional area, was extin-
guished by the anxiety that each student experienced when the
supervisor was either physically absent or lacked the ongoing, readily
accessible presence of a committed mentor or adviser. Hence, the
resources that the student trainees most wanted were the supervi-
sors’ time and their personal and professional commitment to the
students’ well-being as persons and their development as competent
practitioners.
Even though the students, Keiko, Mai and Wilma, could see that
the situation was not entirely in the hands of the supervisor, this did
not prevent them from feeling disappointed, frustrated and stressed
when each had to face the consequences of their lack of guidance or
preparation. During their teaching rounds, both Keiko and Mai felt
that several lessons that they had put much time into preparing had
been poorly received by the children they were teaching, while Wilma
was shouted at by the Charge sister for her attempts to see an opera-
tion in progress. Hence, all felt keenly the lack of the supervisor as go-
between or link person, the person who opened doors for them and
made opportunities happen in the workplace setting, the person
whose presence might have resulted in a more pleasant and produc-
tive set of interactions with the children in the classes and the other
members of staff in both school and hospital environments.
The perception that the rounds had not been successful was
further exacerbated by each student’s sense that they had a great deal
to cope with during the practicum. In their interviews, both interna-
tional students described the ways in which their anxieties about
their spoken English made them feel less adequate in class. As has
been discussed, their anxieties in this area affected their delivery of
the curriculum (Keiko), their management of the whole class (Mai)

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and their interaction with individual children (Keiko). Wilma’s prob-
lems lay in a different direction. Put under considerable pressure by
the full-time nature of the clinical placement, Wilma indicated during
the interview that her financial difficulties were very troubling. She
had continued working during her placement, starting her shifts in
an elderly people’s home where she worked on a regular basis as soon
as the shift she had been given in the teaching hospital was over for
the day.
It should be noted that all three students, in particular the two
international students, were at pains to qualify their critical state-
ments throughout the interview, lest the interviewer think that they
were complaining. Each offered cogent explanations for the supervi-
sor’s lack of commitment—in Keiko’s case the supervisor had been
sick; in Mai’s, the supervisor’s space had been invaded; Wilma had
seen that her supervisor was in the centre of many conflicting
demands. However, each of the three women had had highly unsatis-
factory placements partly because the supervisor had not been
willing (in Mai’s case), or had not been able (in the case of Keiko and
Wilma) to direct, advise, teach or guide the trainees.
Such insights provided the link between these students and
those of Mike, a student whose gender, age group, previous work
experience and successful teaching practicum made his case quite
different from the three students whose accounts have been dis-
cussed above.

Mike: ‘I was shocked’


In answer to the standard request made by the interviewer at the
beginning of nearly every interview to ‘tell a story’, Mike responded
with the following story about one of his two supervisors. (In Australian
secondary schools it is usual to have a supervisor for each of the two
main content areas in which the teacher trainee is specialising.) In
contrast to the interactions reported above, Mike’s tale emphasised the
degree to which he felt compelled to keep his views to himself.

Mike: Perhaps the first thing that pops out is a story


one teacher said to me (and I taught two VCE
[Victorian Certificate of Education] subjects in
my rounds)—and I needed to be picked up off

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the floor afterwards. She said: Never ever give a
student an A plus to a student, because in Year 12,
that automatically creates a situation where your
work will be assessed by the Department. Do you
understand that that’s how it’s structured in Year
12? You can have work called in. The school can
randomly call their work in, check it for
consistency of marking. And she said that she
will never, ever give an A+, because the moment
you start that, then work will be assessed. And I
thought: What a ridiculous attitude! Because if a
student deserves an A+ ... And I couldn’t ... I was
shocked. Now I know you’re setting up to make it
an extreme story, but it’s the one that keeps
jumping up. But it’s so beneficial to everything
we’re learning! Reward has to be appropriate to
the work put in, and if a student’s work is
outstanding and that student deserves an A+,
how dare you not give that student an A+ simply
because you didn’t want to be put under the
microscope by external markers!

Mike’s tale represents an opportunity to see the ways in which


the most competent students can be silenced if they think that they
might contravene certain conventions by making their views known.
Once he had been reassured that the interview was strictly anony-
mous, Mike launched into the story above with barely suppressed
indignation, tacitly asking the interviewer to endorse his point of
view as he recounted his story.
Like the three other trainees, Keiko, Mai and Wilma, Mike’s nar-
rative highlighted the way in which his experience included features
that he could not have anticipated and that departed from his sense
of how things should have been.
Keiko was surprised by the inadequate arrangements that were
made for her when her supervising teacher was absent due to illness,
while Mai was shocked by the coolness of the supervising teacher’s
reception. Wilma talked about the various kinds of stress that the staff
of the hospital in general, and her supervisor in particular, had shown

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in response to the presence of a large group of trainee nurses. In each
story, the student’s initial feeling of being a nuisance was not amelio-
rated by the supervisor’s personal and professional support, by her
committed presence.
In each of the stories told by Keiko, Mai, Wilma and Mike, con-
versations that took place during the practicum underlined the dis-
tance between the supervisor (or her substitute, in Keiko’s case) and
the student. These conversations were re-created in key parts of the
students’ stories. While these stories were being told, the student
seemed to assume that the listening interviewer would take up a
position of positive affective alignment with the interviewee. Each
student seemed to think that the discrepancy between ‘what was’ and
‘what should have been’ in a particular workplace was large enough
for the listener to share the student’s sense that the situation had not
been adequate without further explanation.
In his re-telling of the story he had already told at least once to
another audience, Mike established a strong sense that there was a
very great difference between what he thought should be the case
and what his supervisor was advising him to do. Like the other stu-
dents, he did not waste any time in the interview persuading the
interviewer to see his point of view about the situation—he felt he
had a prima facie case. As he told the story, his language became
more emphatic (‘ridiculous’ and ‘shocked’), so that by the end, when
he reached the rhetorical question beginning with the words, ‘How
dare you ...’, he recreated the words that he did not address directly to
the supervising teacher.
Mike’s story showed that he did not want to align himself with
his supervisor for a number of different reasons. Firstly, he did not
want to be the recipient of the advice given. Secondly, he rejected her
because in giving him this advice, she implied that she had made
such practices a routine part of her assessment procedures. Finally,
as a father of school-aged children like those he described in the
interview, he was made very uncomfortable by the thought that expe-
rienced teachers could jeopardise the opportunities of the senior stu-
dents who depended to some extent on the teacher’s assessments for
entrance into various tertiary courses and fields of employment. In
the interview, Mike recreated the sense of shock he had at the time by
reliving the conversation that took place. Mike’s moral sense of the

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world had been reinforced by years of work in jobs that he saw as
having a very strong ethical base. He was outraged by his perception
that the supervising teacher had poor ethical standards regarding
assessment.
Hence, a number of very interesting connections between the
narrated experiences of Mike and the other trainees, namely Keiko,
Mai and Wilma, can be established. Firstly, all four students were sur-
prised to find that the attitudes, behaviour and ways of speaking or
acting of their supervisors were different from those they assumed
were appropriate. In each case, the discovery of discrepancy between
what the student had assumed to be the case, and what they actually
experienced, was a painful one. The strength of the students’ response
to their situations cannot be explained simply by either the students’
prior expectations or even by the unsatisfactory relationships with
their supervisors. What is striking about the situations of all four stu-
dents is that they felt they had no redress and could do nothing with
their dissatisfaction, embarrassment or shock. Mike’s experience
showed that many students did not build up a relationship that ena-
bled them to trust their mentors, confide in them or, much less, in
Mike’s case, disagree at any stage during the practicum.

‘Strategic silence’
The transcripts showed then, that the anxiety the students felt about
their situations prevented them from bringing their isolation, ongoing
dissatisfaction and restricted opportunities to make progress to the
attention of anyone in the workplace. Keiko and Mai retreated because
they were anxious about their perceived competence, while Wilma
understood too well the many stressful demands her supervisor faced
while the student nurses were present in the hospital. Perhaps
because she liked the supervisor and because she had worked in
hospital-like settings previously, she sympathised readily with her
supervisor’s predicaments and then held back from making her
worries about her overly restricted access to opportunities in the
workplace known to staff.
Mike, in contrast to Keiko, Mai and Wilma, had no reason to
complain about the time that was accorded him or his opportunities
to progress. However, he knew that the issue about which he had
disagreed with the supervisor was a potentially very confronting one.

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Hence, Mike, too, like the other students, kept quiet. He did not
indicate the strength of his opposition to the supervisor’s advice
about assessment issues in even the most oblique of ways, but waited
instead until he had returned to the safety of the university classroom
before discussing the incident with a lecturer he trusted.
It can now be seen that the students held back from sharing
either the difficulties they were having in their workplace or the views
they held about important workplace issues. Some of this reticence
can be explained by the fact that each of the students was an out-
sider, a newcomer who had not been able to build up a reliable web
of relationships within the workplace. However, the relationship with
the supervising person, the one closest to the student and therefore
the stand-in for other relationships, can be seen as the key factor in
determining how much the students were willing to reveal. The par-
adox that the person assigned to help the students was also the
person allocated the task of commenting on their progress from an
institutionally sanctioned vantage point was another factor that gave
rise to the students’ suppressions of their difficulties and disagree-
ments. This meant in practice that the students (in this case, Keiko
and Mai) who were in the most need of help were also the most reluc-
tant to reveal either the extent of their need or its sources.
While they were learning to be professional teachers and nurses
who would inevitably be called on to show the initiative, resilience and
presence of mind that enabled Benner’s (1984) most expert nurses to
meet the demands of their very taxing professional roles, these stu-
dents were placed in situations in which they had to carry out their
duties (for example, lesson preparation) in ways that encouraged iso-
lated independence. Furthermore, the absence or perceived coldness
of the supervisor made it very difficult for the students to participate in
a collegial relationship, even though they were entering professions in
which good communication and team work are important.
While Keiko and Wilma talked about these issues briefly, Mike
talked about them in a very direct manner. He made a causal connec-
tion between his reluctance to speak and the supervisor’s position as
his assessor.

Mike: [ T]hat’s the [story] that keeps popping up


because of how extreme her comment was. And I

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couldn’t believe that when you’re in the situation
of doing teaching rounds, you’re in that teacher’s
environment and you’re conscious of the fact
that you’re being assessed by that teacher. So
therefore you don’t challenge it—you just say,
‘That’s very good—I appreciate that comment’.
And you place as much weight on it as you think
necessary from your learning point of view. And
in my case I thought: That’s very good—I
appreciate the comment, but I can assure you that
I certainly won’t be shying away from giving good
students rewards simply because I’m shy of being
put under the microscope.

The students struggled to be seen positively by their supervi-


sors. In this case, the struggle involved juggling many aspects of the
placement experience in such a way that potentially conflictual situ-
ations were avoided. The students made this effort in order to ensure
that the placements would progress more smoothly and that the final
grade, a normative evaluation given to students at the end of teaching
practicums and clinical placements in Australia, would not be jeop-
ardised.

Empowerment through commitment and trust


Even though their workplaces were very different, Suresh’s experi-
ences were similar to those of several other students, including Keiko,
Mai, Wilma and Mike, in that his perceptions of the experience were
greatly influenced by his interactions with his supervisor. Suresh’s
course-related work experience was carried out in a university labora-
tory that was set up to carry out ‘projects in co-operation with ...
industries’, in this case an industry that needed research into the var-
ious qualities of polymers. In the interview, Suresh described the rela-
tionship he developed with his supervisor, a man whose reputation as
a supervisor before the project developed, gave Suresh ‘a nightmare’.

Suresh: ‘The supervisor was great’


Suresh: ... the supervisor wasn’t the best one as
recommended by other people. But I worked

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with him and I’m going out for lunch today with
him—and he was, like, the best guide—the only
thing [is] he makes you work hard and you have
to stand all the pressure that he puts you under.
So I had a nightmare before—like I’m going to
work with this guy—like this is what I want to do,
but because people don’t say this supervisor’s
good, I don’t want to do it, but I thought, I’ll go
with it—I’ll probably learn something and even
if—I’ll live with it and that’s what I did and I
went in and the supervisor was great—I think
some people cannot bear the pressure or he
drives them crazy—I don’t know, but he was
great. He was at the presentation today and—
very nice—he’s seventy years old, I think—
JR: Seventy—
Suresh: Sixty to seventy ... So I helped him out even on
the last day (my project was going to end one
week before the uni started). He said, Keep on
working, so I worked for him even on the
Saturdays and Sundays because he’s pretty old
and can’t type reports and all that stuff. They
said, Please do his reports ... and everyone used
to nag ... He don’t do his reports.
   ... and I worked with him and it was just
great and he brought in his wife to the—you
know, make coffees after ... and all that stuff. It’s
just that some people perceive things in a
different manner. But he was great! That’s the
story I wanted to tell.

At one point in the interview, Suresh reported that the hours he


worked on the project included a consistent twelve-hour day in the
peak time of the project, which was designed to cover the summer
break, Saturdays and Sundays. He commented that ‘even in uni, I
worked from eight o’clock to nine o’clock at night or something’.
Suresh used the word ‘co-operative’ to describe the relationship and
there is evidence throughout the interview to suggest that this was an

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appropriate descriptor. Suresh typed his supervisor’s reports, while
the supervisor was happy to set up flexible lunch hours for Suresh so
that the machines that were used to test the plastic materials being
investigated were not turned on and off at inconvenient times. This
saved Suresh extra cleaning, wasted time and a sense of frustration.
Suresh stated in his interview that he had both enjoyed and ben-
efited from the quality of his supervision and he provided different
kinds of evidence to show that this had been the case. Although a
great deal younger than his mentor, Suresh seemed to revel in the
hard work, the cordial atmosphere and the mutual regard that his
supervisor and he had for each other. It is also possible that the pres-
ence of the supervisor’s wife contributed much to the relationship
between the older man and the younger one as she came into the
laboratory during the more relaxed weekends and made and shared
cups of coffee with her husband and his young protégé. Thus, Suresh
was part of the pleasant atmosphere that characterised the weekend
work. Although the project had finished some time before the inter-
view, the supervisor for the project came across into a different area
of the university to listen to Suresh’s final group presentation for the
year. This took place on the day the interview was conducted.
The relationship between Suresh’s supervisor and himself was
characterised by (a) extended contact; (b) mutually beneficial coop-
eration; and (c) warm interpersonal interactions. Yet the relationship
was a demanding one, the supervisor asking that his student con-
tribute long hours and much repetitive work to their joint effort.
Suresh claimed that he had found an excellent supervisor and,
judging by his unusual attendance at Suresh’s final presentation on
an unrelated topic, it would seem that the regard was mutual.
It could be argued that Suresh’s perception that his relationship
with his supervisor had been mutually satisfying depended on sev-
eral rather special factors such as the commitment that both super-
visor and student had to the project at hand and the circumstances
that allowed a family atmosphere to characterise the workplace each
weekend when the supervisor’s wife came into the laboratory to help
out and make cups of coffee. Furthermore, Suresh’s outstanding intel-
lectual capabilities and personal endeavour would also have contrib-
uted to the success of the relationship. In answer to other questions,
Suresh talked about the prizes and scholarships he had been awarded

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for his scholarly efforts at university, his setting up of an association
for people in his field, and the reasons that motivated him to under-
take fourth-year subjects in his second year at university.

‘Committed presence’
In many ways, the relationship between Suresh and his supervisor
was an ideal one. Throughout the interview, Suresh could be heard
describing the supervisor’s ‘committed presence’. Of course, that
phrase was never used in the interview but only emerged when the
students’ transcripts had been examined. Furthermore, the strategic
silence that characterised the relationships between some student-
teachers or nurses and their supervisors was not present in the rela-
tionship between Suresh and his supervisor, possibly because the
polymer project’s outcomes were judged by the delivery of certain
findings to an external client, but also due, perhaps, to the interde-
pendent, task-related co-operation that had made Suresh able to ask
if the machines could be kept running so that he did not have to clean
them as often.

Ophelia: ‘She could see that he was happy’


Ophelia, a student-teacher, also experienced the benefits of a produc-
tive interaction with her supervisor. In her interview, she described a
brief, but very significant, incident in which she calmed and engaged
the child of her supervising Art teacher while that teacher was in the
classroom. At the beginning of the lesson, the child was crying.
Ophelia touched the child, diverted his attention away from his
mother, the main teacher in the classroom, and back on to the Art
lesson. Ophelia described the incident in some detail when invited to
recount ‘a little story ... a little incident or event’.

Ophelia: Well, I just said to the teacher quietly that I


would help her son, and he was sitting crying at
the table, so I just came up and put my hand on
his back and started rubbing, started rubbing his
back, and I just asked him what he wanted to do
because they were making puppets, so he was
having difficulty making the hat, so I just showed
him—how to make a hat. Once he actually saw

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the progress of the puppet coming along, I could
see he was thinking, ‘Oh, yeah, she’s OK, she’s
actually helping me, we’re achieving something’.
Then he became more outgoing with me and
started throwing in ideas. So we worked on it
together for a little bit—until it developed to a
point where I asked him, Do you want me to help
you further? and he said, No, I can go on now,
and by then there were no more tears—
everything was fine ...
JR: Why did you say ‘softly’ to the other teacher that
you would deal with this?
Ophelia: Because I didn’t want—because the teacher’s
child had been following her around, getting
teary and hiding behind doorways and that sort
of thing—other children were demanding a lot of
our attention, but I could see that perhaps he
needed another adult intervention, because, I
felt, he was just playing on his own frustration,
perhaps more so with the teacher being his
mother. But I said softly to her so that obviously
he wouldn’t hear me [laughs] ... so that was all,
just so that he wouldn’t hear what my intentions
were going to be ...
JR: So how did you signal to her …?
Ophelia: No, no, I just kept moving on to other children. It
was obvious—it was only a small class and she
could see that he was happy with what he was
doing—and she was busy with other children
anyway ...
JR: She’s not your normal supervisor ...
Ophelia: No—But she’s my mentor in that class.
JR: ... Is there anything else that you think is
interesting about that?
Ophelia: Umm—Not really—well, not really—I feel I’ve said
it all um yeah—It just—I guess—It just seemed to
work and I’ve registered that it’s worked. Store
that! (Laughs.) Maybe use it for another day.

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‘Trusting space’
What is striking about this incident is that the supervising teacher did
not intervene in the interaction between her own child and Ophelia,
the student-teacher. She opened up a space, a trusting space, in which
the learner—the student-teacher—was able to demonstrate how far
she had progressed in her ability to resolve difficult moments in her
primary classroom. This was a special experience because the child
being counselled, comforted and diverted back to his studies was
actually the teacher’s own child and yet she was able to negotiate—on
the spot—her relationship with Ophelia so that she felt that she could
give the student-teacher the decision-making power relevant to the
situation at hand. What is most striking about this situation is that the
whole episode was negotiated wordlessly. We can imagine that the
supervising teacher may have been watching out of the corner of her
eye, but she did not intervene directly—of that we can be fairly cer-
tain because Ophelia was recounting an event that had happened
only a couple of hours before and so details would not have been for-
gotten as they can be when the time gap is greater.
Although the incident of the crying child was one tiny event in
the many that would have made up Ophelia’s practicum, it exempli-
fied and clarified aspects of the ways in which a ‘trusting space’ could
be opened up by a supervisor and accessed by a student in the eve-
ryday flux of the practicum experience.

Arthur: ‘Then [she] just let us go.’


Arthur’s supervisor also trusted him. She opened up a ‘trusting space’
that allowed him to use a quiet period on the ward to practise impor-
tant skills related to bandaging and the management of sterile dress-
ings. (In the following extract, the word ‘field’ refers to the sterile
‘fields’ that are set up in such circumstances.)

Arthur: During Week Two we had a very slow week.


There was really nothing happening in the wards
... two of the other students were with me on
that ward. ... we were going to do packing and
dressing, but there were no packs so we just
drew on each other’s arms and we just did it. But
what [the supervising nurse] did was sit back

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and—well, first of all went through what we
needed ... from the book ... so she went into the
storage area and got everything that we’d need.
And she drew the wound and explained to us
exactly what it was going to be like. Then just let
us go. We set up our own field and ... the dressing
trolley and made sure everything was there.
   Then we went through and did what we
were supposed to do when the wound ... I know
how to set up my field and how to use it
effectively, but I’d never done a pack dressing
before, so she said Right—I’ll just show you one
... So that was good. And next she just showed us,
Here’s how you do it ... But by the same token,
there was no slacking off because once you’d left
your field, she’d remind you that you had to go
and wash your hands again and basically start
from scratch. So we’d pack up and start again—
new antiseptic field, set everything up—We’d
learned how to do that. We’d learned how to
apply it all and it was very good. That was just an
example. Basically she only had to show us one
little part, but she was very happy with the whole
thing—just with our techniques and stuff.

One further aspect of the supervisory relationship should be


noted at this stage. Its main outlines can be seen in the following
extract from Arthur’s interview:

Arthur: The second day we were there we had eight


admissions to the ward so there was quite a lot
of admissions ... I do know my way around all
the forms and whatnot, but ... the consent form,
and I left it. [The resident nurse] said, You
haven’t done this part, and I said, Well, that’s not
a nursing duty. It’s got nothing to do with the
nursing process at all …
   She said that when she first went there she

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had the problem as well, and wasn’t getting them
signed, but after a while didn’t go against the
flow—just went with it. But I still refused to do
that because, should that person get through
surgery and have the wrong thing written on his
admission sheet or anything like that, I wasn’t
willing to take that responsibility ... And then I
actually took it to the Clinical Teacher [his
supervisor] and she said, Oh, it’s not really my
responsibility. That’s where it stayed ...
   But then after discussing it with the Clinical
Teacher ... and she was happy and said, That’s
fine.

Arthur was able to disagree in an open manner with another


member of staff. Arthur’s reporting of this interaction formed a
unique example among the interviews. It was a testimony to their co-
operative relationship, his pre-existing expertise and his good com-
munication that this interaction was able to take place between a
student nurse and his Clinical Teacher.

‘Trusting dialogue’
From Arthur’s point of view, such was the trust that had been engen-
dered between Arthur’s supervising nurse and himself that she was
able to support his account of the disagreement and accept his deci-
sion without anger, resentment or loss of ‘face’ for either person.
Hence, in some of the richest student–supervisor relationships, cer-
tain students were able to participate in a ‘trusting dialogue’.

Emily: ‘Maybe we should have a meeting’


Emily and Terence, two Business students who had chosen the
Marketing stream of their program, had a rather angry set of exchanges
with a senior staff member whose deadline they had not been able to
meet in the time he thought appropriate for the task. The students’
supervisor responded, not by criticising their approach and telling
them to defer to the experience and greater knowledge of the senior
colleague, but, instead, by setting up a conference so that they could
discuss the dispute with several different colleagues throughout the

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multinational company. The supervisor once again, like Ophelia’s
supervisor, albeit in a very different setting, gave the students the pro-
fessional trust that enabled them to talk through their tensions at the
workplace. Both students recounted this same very anxiety-provoking
incident in great detail during their interviews. Their stories were very
similar. This is an edited version of Emily’s account of the situation
that had taken place.

Emily:
I had a situation, it was just a couple of weeks
ago, where one of the engineers that I was
working on a piece of literature for was quite
rude to me, just the way he dealt with me. He
was very, very demanding, and I’ve got lots of
work from different people, but he’s expecting
his work to always be the priority. He was
basically stressing out, I suppose, like his office,
like his workstation is downstairs so he was
calling me up: How are you going with it, are you
nearly finished, are you nearly finished it? Just his
manner was very rude and I didn’t—I mean it
wasn’t—just very bad people skills, really, and I
had to leave early one afternoon because I had
an appointment and I handed it over to Terence
who is the other student and Terence had even
more problems.
   ... the impression that we got, like, that both
Terence and I got from him that was first of all
you know, ‘I’m an engineer, I’m so much more
important than you, like I can treat you like this,
and furthermore you are a student, so I can treat
you how I want’, and [Marie] actually contacted
him, and said, ‘Oh, well, maybe we should have a
meeting with him and go over like’—just a non-
confrontational meeting with him ... so when
Marie went and contacted him he was quite rude
to her as well ... so she took it to [Anne] who is
our manager and Marie had to—it turned into—
it just escalated really, like Anne had to contact

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this engineer’s manager and in the end we had a
conference with her, the engineer, and his
manager, to try to sort it out. He, basically, like
he had nothing bad to say to, he had nothing in
response to say to Terence or I because Terence
and I didn’t do anything—like we were trying as
hard as we could ... But in the actual conference
call, it was just a lot of excuses being made about
how, you know, the mix up with data sheet—we
should have started working on earlier, and it
had to be ready to able to be sent to Japan as
soon as possible ...
   We were quite surprised that he didn’t
apologise and I know that [another supervisor]
was quite angry that he didn’t apologise ...

At the end of her narrative, Emily said that her supervising staff
member had seen the incident from the students’ point of view and
had expected an apology from the engineer who had demanded the
sheet about the latest product he wanted to discuss with overseas
clients.
Even though Emily seemed upset about the incident two weeks
later when the interview was being conducted, her supervisor’s trust
and her endorsement of the students’ position obviously meant a great
deal to Emily. Although she might not have been able to articulate it at
the time, it was obvious that the way in which the company’s personnel
had handled the incident had given Emily many opportunities for
learning. Firstly, the students were treated with courtesy, sympathy
and respect. Secondly, their worries had been taken to a suitable forum
for further discussion. Finally, their account of events had been
accepted. Emily’s future career was going to be set up somewhere
within the field of marketing. By having become involved in this
dispute and its resolution, she had been given the opportunity to learn
not only about the importance of courtesy and respect for colleagues,
but also on a much more practical level, how to negotiate a dispute
with a colleague in an appropriately professional way.
Emily’s supervisor’s trust had opened up trusting spaces and
trusting dialogues followed on from this. In this way, both Emily and

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Terence were provided with opportunities to learn more about the
nature of professional work and appropriate channels for resolving
professional conflicts. Furthermore, they had been given an
opportunity to see that, in a contemporary flat-topped organisation
such as Company A, it was not necessarily the most senior person
whose version of events was the one that was acted upon. In a most
striking way, it was shown to the students that even those with least
influence could be given a ‘space’ in which to be heard.

Gary: And he said, ‘Ahh, I’m just so tired’


For Gary, a student-teacher, his supervisor’s trust was revealed one
morning before class. During his teaching practicum in a small pri-
mary school on the outskirts of Melbourne, Gary was able to offer the
following account of his supervisor’s willingness to trust him:

Gary: ... I want to reinforce that seeing [Chris] before,


before school started and his head was almost
on the desk. He had to go to a first-aid course
last night back of beyond and then drive home.
And he said, ‘Ahh, I’m just so tired, I need four
more hours’ sleep’. And then we went across to
the classroom and he was a different person—
he’s, like, ‘OK !!’—and he was! All of a sudden he
had this energy burst and whether he was excited
to be in there, or whether it was ‘Right, I just can’t
walk around the class going ‘Brrrr’—which you
can’t do—it was almost schizophrenic. I suppose
he could just go in there and change: ‘I’m happy
to be the teacher, happy to be here and have a
positive attitude to the kids’, and they got the
same attitude back off him.

Gary’s supervisor told him that he, too, had to manage various
professional problems, but he demonstrated that there were ways in
which to cope with such situations. By having allowed his professional
mask to drop before the class, the supervisor enabled Gary to see that
good teachers know how to energise both themselves and the children
even when they feel under some pressure for reasons of their own. By

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trusting Gary enough to show what lay behind the skilled, seemingly
effortless performance that he was able to give in the classroom,
Chris was able to teach the trainee teacher about the rigours of
performing a professional role.

‘Trusting revelations’
The supervisor not only trusted Gary enough to tell him that he was
tired, but showed him the difference between his tired state and his
classroom persona without feeling any anxiety that Gary would think
that he was insincere. The supervisor knew that Gary was skilled
enough to understand the situation deeply. The trust felt by the super-
visor benefited Gary greatly as he was given an all-important insight—
a ‘trusting revelation’—about the nature of teaching in a very
economical manner.

‘Committed presence’ and ‘enabling trust’


Trusting relationships were described by Suresh, Ophelia, Arthur,
Gary and Terence and Emily. The students recounted stories that had
obvious differences due to their placements in very different work-
places, but each incident had two important similarities. The supervi-
sors were committed and present and each supervisor showed that
they had confidence in the student’s ability to manage a situation or to
accept information or advice with a more nuanced appreciation of that
incident or insight than might have been expected from a novice.
Discussions of the social self as ‘emergent, contextual, discur-
sive, multiple, relational, mutual’ (Wetherell & Maybin, 1996, p. 223)
imply that the supervisor ‘produced’ the student in the same way that
the student ‘produced’ the supervisor and that one role could only be
understood by understanding the other. Hence, the students’ own
roles, their responses, their alignments, disagreements or silences
were the other parts of the accounts that lay at the margins of the
more fully explicated description of the supervisor’s actions, demands
and speaking. Like the dark side of the moon, once fully recognised,
the students’ expectations, positive responses, disappointments or
silences could be brought from the margins to the centre of the inter-
pretation of any one account.
By exploring a series of very different incidents, it has been pos-
sible to see that the best environments for learning seem to occur

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when students can reap the benefits from opportunities that arise
when their supervisors demonstrate both a ‘committed presence’ and
an ‘enabling trust’. Such relationships bring both the student and the
supervisor great rewards. The supervisors have the pleasure of
working with, and showing the complexities of their roles to, students
whose enthusiasm and hard work demonstrates their commitment
to both the job and to their immediate supervisors. The students ben-
efit from the equipment, flexible hours and other resources that the
supervisor gives to them once the trusting relationship has begun to
build in momentum.
It is clear, therefore, that time and the committed presence of
the supervisor are crucial factors in the building of these rich
relationships. The significance of time, in particular, cannot be
overestimated. Hence, it has been emphasised that the most
important outcomes of the best supervisory relationships are neither
equipment nor resources, but the essential trusting conversations
that enable students to ask for advice, discuss difficulties and set up
the trusting spaces necessary for the risk-taking and experimentation
that so often accompany deep and lasting learning.
Some two decades ago, medical students at McMaster University
in Canada were advised at the beginning of a course that set up and
positively rewarded opportunities for self-directed and group learning
in which students were asked to record any new vocabulary that they
had learned (Ferrier, Marrin & Seidman, 1981). Although it was
probable that the students would have recorded lists of unfamiliar
medical terms, the reminder also shows that the tutor had realised
that language was an essential part of becoming a member of any
group, always a discourse community. It is possible that the students
in this study would have also benefited from an overt reminder to the
effect that their workplace placements would create opportunities
for themselves to increase their proficiency in both the specific
language of their chosen profession and the language in which they
were creating and presenting their ‘ordinary’ workplace selves.

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Chapter 4
Networking, Transforming, Distributed

Alternative interactions, alternative places


Many students’ accounts suggested that their supervisors wanted
them to demonstrate a reasonable level of competence almost as soon
as the placement commenced so that the student would be able to
share the workload by carrying out certain significant tasks with
appropriate levels of knowledge, understanding and skill. When Paul,
a student nurse whose story was discussed in Chapter 2, could not
demonstrate sufficient commitment at times, or act quickly in an
emergency situation, he was criticised, and felt ‘very uptight’ as a con-
sequence. However, when Paul recounted the incident of the emer-
gency situation, he also made it possible to see that his admission, ‘I
was shitting myself—I just didn’t know what to do’, would have meant
that his colleagues knew that he had not as yet developed the ability to
remain calm in a highly stressful situation. However, this is a vital
capability in many different professional settings. On a more practical
level, his inability to cope meant that he was not able to contact the
doctor quickly and so there was one person fewer to help manage the
life-and-death situation.
The students interviewed wanted to access various kinds of
social support so that they could present themselves at work as

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well-prepared, engaged and competent people. What emerged quite
strikingly from the interviews was the accuracy with which students
could determine and describe their own level of expertise. Also note-
worthy were the many creative ways in which students went about
meeting their needs for further resources and support without risking
being seen as ‘lesser’, ‘weaker’ or ‘other’ in the supervisor’s eyes.
Given the many roles played by supervisor and student in rela-
tion to each other and the heavy demands of the supervisor’s work-
place responsibilities, it was not surprising that the students sought
supplementary support from people other than the supervisor, man-
ager or mentor. During the interviews, it became clear that while stu-
dents wanted to acquire professional expertise and perform
competently, retain information, interpret the social environment,
and understand the workplaces so thoroughly that ‘relationships and
judgements’ could be made (Stenhouse, 1975, p. 80), they often had
to—or wanted to—access people in addition to the supervisor for
support of many kinds during this challenging period of transition.
Human resources other than the supervisor were looked to for
several reasons. Firstly, many workplaces were very busy and some
supervisors were unavoidably overloaded (in Wilma’s supervisor’s
case) or frequently absent (in Keiko’s supervisor’s case). Secondly,
students themselves lacked the extra time needed to access work per-
sonnel after work because they were undertaking their placements
while juggling many other aspects of their lives. Students such as
Mark, Ophelia, Wilma, Keiko, Pete and David all talked about their
other commitments in some detail, stressing the demands of part-
time work or raising children. Finally, as has already been pointed
out, students wanted to make use of relationships in which they were
seen in a positive light so that the learning was enjoyable or recip-
rocal rather than directive or didactic.
Hence, during their work placements, a significant group of stu-
dents wanted to access the kind of support that would enable them
to demonstrate a greater level of competence in their workplace than
would have otherwise been possible. Where did such support come
from? The following material answers this question.
The key ideas to be explored in this chapter are those of the trans-
formation and the active creation of support and resources by those
who required more of both. The discussion opens with an account of

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the roles played by friendly peers inside the workplace. Then, as the
chapter unfolds, the spotlight turns to friends, partners and family
members. The focus of the chapter is on human resources rather than
information technology as it was the support of the people around
them that the students talked about most often and in greatest detail.

Salient, friendly peers


Almost all of the students in the study referred to the support that
they had been given by peers in the workplace at some point during
their interview. One kind of support was given in the form of friend-
ship. The students were able to socialise with the friends that they had
made at work. For example, Tania’s peers joined her for lunch while
Shan’s played table-tennis with him. However, peers were able to offer
more than enjoyable social activities. A deeper understanding of the
role of peers was reached when Sobash told his first narrative. This
incident showed that peers were critically important sources of sup-
port during work placements as well as demonstrating that the ‘light-
house’ stories chosen to open up key ideas in the study could have as
their focus the slightest of incidents.
The story of the lolly box was recounted by Sobash, an interna-
tional student who was studying in Australia in order to complete a
Business degree with major studies in Accounting. At the time of the
interview, he had been in the workplace for about four months. When
interviewed at his workplace during lunch hour, Sobash chose to
recount an incident that had happened that same morning.
The lolly boxes referred to in Sobash’s story can be seen in many
Australian workplaces. The purpose of the boxes is to raise money for
charity. The square boxes are made of cardboard and are often placed
on counters. Each box contains several small bags of sweets (or ‘lol-
lies’) lined up in rows. A slot for coins enables people wanting to buy
the sweets to pay for them by dropping the money directly into the
slot as they take a bag of sweets. At regular intervals, a representative
from the charity calls to collect the money and re-fill the box with
fresh bags of sweets.

Sobash: ‘And he was saying, Yeah - trust me!’


Sobash: The lolly man normally comes every end of the
month and collects all the lolly bags and

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balances all the sheets which have been collected
during the last month, and collects all the money.
This morning, when he was collecting, he was
short of six dollars or something, and no one
remembered who had taken all the lollies. Finally,
my workmate, Andy, has taken some lollies, and
hasn’t put his money into the box, so that was the
money he was short of.
JR: Why did you choose that story to tell me?
Sobash: Well, it was kind of interesting, and it is the kind
of thing that happens out of our work
environment—and all of our workmates
congregated and started discussing what has
happened …
JR: So, I think—What is your view of Andy? —the
person who it happened to—is he a jokey
person—he enjoyed it?
Sobash: Oh, yeah—he enjoyed it—and he was saying,
Yeah—trust me!, because normally we would just
take the lollies from the box, and if we don’t have
any change—just got to put in coins—so, at the
end of the week, you have to put in coins—
JR: And is it one of those boxes of lollies that the
charities put in?
Sobash T
 hat’s right—
JR: And you put the coins in the little slot, but
sometimes you haven’t got the correct money
and you think: Later, I’ll do it later, and then you
forget. And those bags of lollies in the little
plastic packets. So, if it had been you that had
forgotten to put in your money, would have you
have handled it in the same way as Andy
handled it? How would you have felt if it had
been you that forgot to put in the money?
Sobash: I think I would have been embarrassed—’cos—
might have started to comparing my work—and
start thinking that I’d cheated them or
something like that [unclear]

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JR: So how did he feel about it?
Sobash: He was pretty all right about it—I don’t know
how he felt within him, he was all right. He
showed that he was all right.
JR: Is Andy about your age?
Sobash: Yes, he’s one year younger than me. He was a
[work placement] student in the last period, and
at the moment he’s working part-time.

The story of the lolly box is one of the least dramatic of all the
stories related by the students. This single small drama, recounted as
the opening story of the study’s fourth interview, allowed the listener
to understand more fully the challenges faced by some students
during their placements. In this story, Sobash was the one who
watched and listened. Although the company employees gathered to
discuss the missing coins, Sobash did not say that he had joined in
their conversation. He waited to see what would happen. He also
reflected on Andy’s actions.
The part of the story that was most surprising was the section in
which Sobash listed his potential responses to a similar situation as
those of embarrassment, insecurity and even fear. He imagined his
colleagues comparing his work to that of others and accusing him of
cheating. Later, he commented that, in his own country, Sri Lanka, it
would be thought unusual ‘to keep a lolly box at work’. Throughout
his narrative, Sobash depicted himself as the outsider, contrasting his
observations with his colleagues’ talking, his sense of strangeness
and insecurity with Andy’s relaxed reassurance that he could be
trusted and had simply forgotten to return with the coins after taking
a bag of sweets.
Sobash’s reactions to the incident of the lolly box can be linked
to the many difficulties he had faced during the first months of his
work placement. Sobash said that he had made many ‘mistakes’ at
the beginning. He had to get used not only to the gap between pre-
paring for work at university and ‘the real kind of thing’ in a specific
workplace, but also to the constant checking of his work by the
employer, and to the unfamiliar accounting software used by the
company. He had also discovered that he was expected to have a
more detailed knowledge of the Australian taxation system than he

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had anticipated in university classes. Sobash commented that the
pressure to perform competently in the workplace was much greater
than it was in class because ‘if you do a mistake ... you’re going to lose
your clients’. As Sobash’s work included updating clients’ accounts, it
was often checked by his employer. In his account of his placement,
Sobash used the word ‘mistake’ eight times. The words ‘wrong’ and
‘correct’ were also used several times in another part of the interview
in which he gave details of his first few weeks at work.
At the beginning of his study, Sobash had struggled with the
change in climate, with loneliness caused by the separation from his
family and friends, and with the knowledge that his family had
invested their savings in his Australian education because, in contrast
to his brother, he had not been able to gain a place in a university in
Sri Lanka. Sobash also talked at length about his language difficulties
saying that it had taken him ‘round two and a half months’ to get used
to the Australian accents of his employer and colleagues. Various
people in the workplace, including the employer, also found Sobash’s
English difficult to understand. This situation improved only after a
visitor, paid by the university to visit work placement students,
explained Sobash’s language-based difficulties to the employer.
Hence, when seen from Sobash’s lonely and anxious perspec-
tive, Andy’s friendliness meant a great deal. Sobash stated that Andy
had gone on holidays, implying that during that period he had had
little assistance. However, ‘once he [Andy] came back, he was a good
support to me. If I had any problems, he was very nice and would
help me’. Andy had also answered questions about the employer’s
accounting software.
Andy had originally entered the accountancy firm as a student
undertaking the workplace component of the same program of study
as Sobash. They were united by their common university experience,
as well as by their involvement in the same workplace. Andy was able
to provide Sobash with greater security. Sobash stated,

The other thing, [Andy] stands between my boss and me.


The gap between my boss and me is big—he’s around sixty
years and I’m twenty, so that age gap made a big difference.
Having Andy made a big difference.

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The story of the lolly box opened Sobash’s long interview. It also
alerted the researcher to the multi-faceted role played by peers. It
became clear that peers were not only the people with whom the stu-
dents socialised at work, but the people they turned to for non-threat-
ening, task-related advice, critical information and expertise in the
workplace.

Friendly, accessible, competent peers


The interviews revealed that the peers who were turned to for support
in the workplace had four main characteristics. Like Andy, all peers
who were seen as supportive in the interviews were described as
friendly. However, not only were the peers mentioned friendly, they
were also salient, accessible and competent. These peers—friendly,
salient, accessible and competent—were mentioned in many inter-
views. Josh had conversations about difficult tasks with his peers
while Emily and Terence helped each other to cope with the conflict
that arose over a deadline that they had not been able to meet.
However, the workplace was only one of the locations in which
support was provided by peers. Friends outside the workplace were
also a vital source of sympathy, advice and reciprocal assistance.
Several students reported on the crucial significance of the support
that had been provided by the people with whom they had their
closest relationships. This support was of two kinds, emotional and
professional, but the two kinds were often closely intertwined.
Extracts from several of the transcripts now follow. Each of these pro-
vides a snapshot of the assistance given to the students by the people
who were close to them. As will become evident through reading the
extracts, the support provided covered a wide range of needs, situa-
tions and workplaces. Each of the sources of support was located
outside the workplace.

Sustaining friendships outside the workplace


The friendships that students had away from work contributed greatly
to their ability to present a confident and competent persona during
the placement. In the following extract, Didi describes the creative
way in which he was able to transform existing resources (his friends)
into a dummy ‘class’ so that he could practise his tutoring skills. The
following extract was included in the discussion because tutoring is

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the most common workplace experience for future academics and
also because it was the following account that had made it clear that
the transformation of existing resources and the skilful creation of
new ones are critical processes for many students.

Didi: ‘I said, Can you guys just act like my students?’


In his interview, Didi described his experiences in gaining the sym-
pathy and the support of his girlfriend and three of his house mates.

Didi: Again, it was the first time I had a tute. Again, I


didn’t have any experience before. Especially
when it comes to teaching and how to place so
many people around. And I just get confused.
Nervous. But because—when I think about it, I
position myself as a Tutor. I shouldn’t be that
nervous ... So I sort of practised at home. Talked
to my girlfriend. Talked to my friends and stuff
like that. Do a practice tutorial at home and
learn step by step. I was … the student president
of the student union before—when I was in my
country. So I thought that might help a bit more.
We used to have a lot of meetings. And I also
used to do a lot of public speaking as well …
JR: When you imagined the classes, what aspect
made you feel anxious?
Didi: Because I’m new. So I’m not sure what kind of
questions they will ask me. And I’m not sure
when I answer questions that becomes a fairly
big impact on both me and the students. I’m
afraid I will answer the wrong questions. And
that, of course, will influence their result.
Something like that. Another thing is probably
because I think, because I’m an international
student, English is not my first language. When it
comes to talk, I’m a bit nervous. I think: Is my
English good enough? Is it clear enough or not?
JR: And what’s the answer to that question?
Didi: When it comes to explain for the first week, I

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think it wasn’t that good. But later on, I tried to
sort of … not only talk to the whole class, I also
tried to approach my students. In that way—one
to one—my conversation is actually better. Just
to get along with them. I speak English just like
nature. No more tension. The nervousness is just
gone—when I come to know them. In the first
class, of course, I don’t know who they are. I
don’t know their names. I have to just point to
them. But when I come to know them I can talk
to them like a friend instead of a tutor. So
basically after the second week, I could solve the
language problems and the problem is gone …
JR: Did you do it before that first one? Or did you
decide, after the first one, that you needed a bit
of practice?
Didi: I think it came more after the first week. I didn’t
expect that I would be so nervous. I did prepare for
myself before coming to class. But when it came to
the class I just forgot what I wanted to say! So I
thought, That’s bad. So I talked to my girlfriend—
because I’m very close to my girlfriend—and said, I
need help! So they just gathered around and I said,
Can you guys just act like my students—I’m going to
explain what I’m going to say and, if you want, you
can ask me question …
JR: Do you do that every week still?
Didi: I can’t remember how many times I did that. But
approximately twice … not more than that.

After beginning to tutor at his university, Didi realised that his


spoken English language skills were not sufficiently proficient for him
to teach in a tertiary subject with confidence or authority. Didi shared
his anxieties with his girlfriend and then with the friends with whom
he shared a house. After that, he rehearsed for the tutorial by running
a shortened version of the ‘tute’ with and in front of three of the five
people with whom he lived. This strategy enabled Didi to practise the
language he would use in the coming tutorial session.

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Hence, Didi followed a series of self-orchestrated steps that
began with his girlfriend and included his house mates before taking
on the real-world situation of the tutorial. Even in the tutorial he
devised a strategy for staying within the boundaries imposed by his
own status as a novice tutor and his perceptions of his English
language skills. Until he became more confident, his teaching empha-
sised one-to-one interactions rather than interactions with the
whole class.

Ophelia: ‘I only need to pick up the ’phone and ask somebody to


help’
Ophelia’s interview, striking in that she seemed to be able to call on so
many different sources of support, also demonstrated that friends
were willing to take up certain important tasks in order to help the
student through the placement period. In contrast to Agnes, an inter-
national student who had only needed her friend’s support for an
afternoon, Ophelia needed the support of two different groups of
friends throughout the whole teaching round. In the following extract,
Ophelia talked about her spiritual teacher and then about the people
who helped her care for her daughter while the busy teaching
practicum was in full swing.

Ophelia: Okay. Well, I meditate every morning before—


any day, whether I’m going to school or not. I
follow a spiritual teacher and basically I use him
as my sustenance to keep me going. On a
practical level, at home, I’m a single mother so I
have a thirteen-year-old daughter ... So on a
home environment, I don’t have that support—
directly from home. I have lots of friends who are
teachers—they’re very supportive—
JR: Tell me a little bit about how you feel supported
by them.
Ophelia: OK. Well—um—well my daughter goes to a
Steiner school and I know a lot of the teachers at
the school very well because I’ve had a lot of
interaction and doing things for the school, so, I
can be, for example, if I was running late to get

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home from uni one day, I know that I could ring
any one of those very good people to take [Lizzy]
home for me or, you know, take her back to—you
know, that sort of thing. Um—mostly, any of
them would—they’re just very obliging and
supportive people. For example, the office lady
there—we usually have car pools because I live
in Hollybush and the school is in Yallom and
normally there’s three families involved with our
car pool, and we take it in turns of going over,
well, this year, when I started back at uni, Susan
who works in the office, said I didn’t have to do
any of the car pools at all this year, that she
would just take on Lizzy, so that is just a huge,
huge blessing for me.
JR: And she offered that?
Ophelia: Yeah—so she—that is just a tremendous relief,
because basically, if I didn’t have that, it would
add—it would mean that it would take me two
hours to get to uni. in the morning, by the time I
did my normal hour’s travelling to take Lizzy to
school and then go another hour to get to uni.
So—yeah, that’s a real blessing. You know,
basically they’re very supportive of what I do.
And helpful. If there’s anything that I need help
with, whether it’s ‘come and fix my fence’, or ‘my
car’s broken down’, I only need to pick up the
phone and ask somebody to help. On a—I
guess—on an academic level, at the beginning of
the year when I found it very difficult to write
essays and things like that, you know, I had them
proofreading my essays for me after—
JR: That’s some group of people—
Ophelia: Well, I would run my ideas by them, and they
would say, Yep, you’re on the right track ... but I’m
not in that sort of high anxiety frenzy what I felt
like initially at the beginning of the year.

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Many other students, both international and local, male and
female, mature age and younger, named their friends as one of the
most important sources of ‘sustenance’ (Ophelia) during their place-
ments. The students’ friends, both long-standing and recent, played a
great range of roles. The experiences of many of the students who did
not have any family members living in Australia were greatly
enhanced by the friends who supported them behind the scenes.
Friends contributed to the students’ ability to undertake and
complete the placement by offering many different kinds of social
support. Various forms of support were mentioned. One of the most
important was that of friendship. Friends offered the students oppor-
tunities for fun and relaxation after work. Suresh, for example,
described the way in which the close proximity of the friends who lived
in three adjoining apartments, added a great deal to his life in Australia
in general and to his work placements in particular, because he worked
such long hours—twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Gary also
looked to friends for a break, describing the dinners that took place at
friends’ houses. These dinners were not only a great source of enjoy-
ment and relief, but also offered Gary the chance to participate in fur-
ther discussions about teaching as most of the friendships Gary
described had been made during his Education course.

Gary: ‘And they’re like, How are things going?’


Gary: [E]veryone says—We’re here to support you—we’re
here to help—especially my friends because I see
them all the time on the course and they’re like,
How are things going?, and they ask me and they
want to get involved and they want to know …
JR: You know when you talk about that
telephoning—how many?
Gary: Twenty—I got a phone call last night at 5.30:
What are ya doing for dinner, Ga? Oh, I’m just
having it here. Come around!, and it was Kara,
Kathy and Emma and Len and another friend
and there were six of us sitting around the
dinner table all with partners and whatever,
and—must drive them insane—we just sit there
talking about teaching and what’s going on—and

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it’s really good—just bouncing things off each
other—that’s—yep—and a lot of my other
friends who don’t live that close, I call all the
time and go out with them on weekends and—
yeah—and you get people ringing up: Oh, it’s
horrible today and I’m really struggling and that
stuff. Everyone’s in the same boat, so—in terms
of the students—so we all know, kind of, what
we’ve got to do to help each other through.

Friends were also willing to carry out various tasks during the
students’ placements. This meant that the students did not have to
leave work early or at an inconvenient time. Agnes opened up her
interview by telling a story about a friend. She focused on the way in
which the friend had gone into the university and re-enrolled Agnes
in her Business studies program for the coming year.

Gary: ‘I’ll ring people and go, How did you go today?’
Gary had easy access to a professionally like-minded family. The
interactions Gary described during his interview seemed warm and
pleasurable, providing encouragement and ongoing reassurance.
What is especially noticeable about Gary’s networks of support is the
way in which familial relationships, professional concerns and leisure
times were mixed together and could be accessed simultaneously.
The conversation at Gary’s dinner table concerned teaching and the
friend whose house he was looking after had a wall of teaching refer-
ences for him to borrow.
Gary’s own very proactive role in accessing the support provided
by his friends is demonstrated in the following extracts in which he
described his telephone calls after work and the house that he was
looking after for a friend. The way in which Gary represented his
many telephone calls may offer some insight into his ability to sur-
round himself with sustaining friendships. In his depiction of the
telephone calls, Gary showed that he had taken the initiative by
ringing up one of his friends. However, far from dominating the inter-
actions, he asked the individuals he rang to give an account of their
own teaching day first, initiating a mutual exchange of the day’s
stories about teaching. Hence, the support was reciprocal.

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Gary: Other friends at uni, who—like—you ring up—
I’ll speak to someone every night—it doesn’t
matter who it is—I ring people and go: How did
you go today? What happened? So, we all bounce
ideas off each other, so they’ve all been great.
...
   I’m actually house-sitting a friend’s house at
the moment she has a huge library which is the
size of two of those walls and she goes like—
‘Yep—please feel free’—so (laughs) —that’s been
handy, really handy!

Like Gary, Suresh, Agnes and many other students, Ophelia also
relied on the friends she had made at university.

Ophelia: ‘It’s just like-minded people who are experiencing the


same sorts of difficulties’
In her case, the students were bonded by their common experience of
being mature-age students at university.

Ophelia: Well, I guess the most supportive people would


be the other mature-age students that are also
doing the course with me.
   ... there’s probably four or five. I mean, there
are a lot of students, but there’s probably an
intimate group of four or five of us that are
supportive of each other, in that we know what
it’s like to have a family, we know what it’s like to
work, we know what it’s like to do full-time uni.,
and sometimes, we just use each other as a
shoulder to cry on and say, It’s too hard this week
or I’m too tired, how can I get motivated to do
whatever? From that perspective, it’s been great,
and I think it’s just like-minded people that are
experiencing the same sort of difficulties
perhaps, and they’re just supportive in that way.

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David: ‘How was your Maths lesson? How was your English lesson?’
David, another young male in his very early twenties, was, like Didi,
supported by a girlfriend. David portrayed the relationship as a recip-
rocal one, stressing that he also offered her support when she strug-
gled with lesson planning. It should be noted that David’s assessment
of their chats as ‘very, very important’ was at least partly explained by
the absence of two other forms of potential support. Unlike many of
the students, David was not able to work with the other student from
University A who was on the same teaching placement with him. His
family, while supportive in many other ways, could not be looked to
for professional advice, because the work that brought in most of the
family’s income was very different from that of teaching.

JR: Did any other students go out to Secondary


College A with you?
David: There was one other student.
JR: From?
David: From University A. He was doing Psychology and
I didn’t actually know him so—and he was
always doing prep. so—he wasn’t very—I had a
lot of help from my girlfriend—she’s doing
teaching as well. I don’t get any help from my
family and—like my brother, he’s doing first year
Psych.—quite a full load.
JR: Why doesn’t your Dad approve of teaching?
David: Ah, because he’s a truck driver—he’s a labourer—
so, physical work—type of thing …
JR: ... Your girlfriend—is she doing teaching—
primary or secondary [teacher training]?
David: Both.
JR: ... So tell me more now about her kind of
support—she helps with the actual lessons? —if
you want to chat something over with her, or—?
David: Yeah—if we—sometimes what happens is like—
’cos we go on placement at the same time, and ...
JR: So you telephone?
David: It’s very, very important we just chat. Like I’m, in
a way, I’m good at planning and she’s in a

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struggle with planning, also she’s got to do an
English lesson, like with whoever has her. I
actually help her with English lessons, plan it,
prepare it, and then she can deliver it, hopefully,
or else I do, and then I get her to check—just
look at it—more emotional support for me—I
just hang out or coffee, or something like that—
just more like emotional: How did it go?—
something like that—How was your Maths
lesson? How was your English lesson?—whereas I
help her with all her planning.

Even though he was a local student who had been born in


Australia, David’s experience was similar to that of the majority of the
international students interviewed in that the advice of family mem-
bers could not be accessed. In the initial analyses of the interview
transcripts, the ‘distance’ of parental figures, either geographically or
professionally, did not seem particularly important, because univer-
sity-aged students can be seen to have lives that are relatively inde-
pendent of their families. However, the experiences of the students
who described the many ways in which they drew on the support and
advice of family members in similar professional fields made the
researcher deeply aware of how valuable such experiences could be.
After the students with many familial resources had been interviewed,
the students without ready access to such riches seemed both more
resourceful, and yet more vulnerable, when compared with the stu-
dents who could call up such support. The latter group could do so
without any embarrassment, feelings of inadequacy, or the need to
reciprocate with similar support because the difficulties they faced
were already understood as ‘coming with the territory’ of the chosen
profession.

Salient, accessible, expert intimates


Seven of the students, Mark, Ophelia, Gary, Arthur, Sobash, Ines and
Ravi, described the ways in which the connections their family had
with the same field of work provided various kinds of support during
the placement. Although all students reported drawing on the
support of family members, the nature of the support varied quite

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dramatically. Some students had access to day-to-day support during
the placement while other students used memories of advice or pro-
fessional ways of being to give them greater insight into the nature of
the role they were taking on.

Mark: ‘We can be just sitting and we can go: How did that go?’
Mark made demands on his closest relationship for support. Although
Mark’s wife, a nurse, was not in exactly the same professional area,
Mark made a strong connection between the professions of teaching,
nursing and two other welfare-oriented professional roles that he had
played. Like Didi and David, Mark had already had access to ongoing
support that continued during the teaching practicum and would
continue on beyond it. All three men seemed to be aware of the con-
tribution that their very supportive female partners made to their
professional lives. Mark described the times when he and his wife sat
down to talk in some detail. There was great warmth in his voice as he
spoke about these sustaining interactions. As he spoke, he seemed to
realise the crucial nature of the interactions about which he was
talking. He linked the kind of mutually supportive conversation that
he had with his wife with his ability to leave problems behind and
move forwards in an optimistic way in institutional settings.

Mark: I’m very lucky—my wife is a nurse. She’s actually


doing her Masters in midwifery at the moment.
So she’s studying as well. So I guess that Nurse-
[he gives his profession here] scenario— ... I’m in
the industry and people say, It’s funny how many
nurses and [people in his profession] marry! But
I guess it’s because they both work in high-stress
areas with family trauma and that sort of thing:
lots of serious illness or serious injury. And I
think that acknowledging the work that each of
them do is a very strong support. I’ve always had
that with my wife. Doesn’t matter what it is,
we’ve always been able to sit and talk. And that’s
very much an individual thing ... I’m very
fortunate and very thankful that I have that kind
of relationship.

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JR: When does that happen? At dinner? Or after
work?
Mark: Any time! We can be just sitting and we can go,
How did that go? Or how did work go? You were
going to this today—how did it go? And it’s not
just one way—it’s both ways. I could say Oh! I’ve
had a great day at school … how was your day?
And we may go onto something that she feels it
necessary to talk about. She’s doing a lot of work
with Vietnamese mothers at the moment. She’s
been trying to learn a bit about Vietnamese
language or more about their culture, or
particularly their customs ... A knowledgeable
person. These are things that my wife is putting a
lot of effort into. And she’ll say, I actually tried
this. I put this into practice and it went really
well. We’ll just talk about things. And it’s good to
have that, because if you do have a bad day
you’re not bottling it up inside. It’s not
developing into something bigger than it is. You
just get it out when it needs to be discussed and
then move on.

Gary: ‘My Mum’s been great ... Try this—this works, that works’
Gary, a student who was training to be a primary teacher, had a
mother and a brother who were both actively involved in his chosen
profession. In the interview, he introduced comments about his
mother’s teaching style by saying, ‘My mother’s been teaching for
thirty-four years’. Although he had worked in other fields, Gary stated
that his mother had always seen him as a potentially gifted primary
teacher: ‘Do primary teaching, do primary teaching, because you’re
good with kids’. The interview made it obvious that Gary enjoyed var-
ious levels of family support. On a general level, his choice of profes-
sion was validated by the lived commitment of family members to
that profession. On a more specific, practicum-oriented level, he was
able to obtain ‘some fantastic lesson plans’ and advice on the difficult
topic of classroom management from his mother. His brother had
offered ‘a wealth of knowledge’ as well.

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Gary described the support offered by his professional family in
the following extract, which begins with a comment about the mutu-
ally supportive, reciprocal relationship he had with another student-
teacher, Joanna, who had been posted to the same school:

Gary: [Joanna], who’s my—Even though we’ve been in


separate classrooms, [she’s] another person in
the school in exactly the same position as you—
To come in and say, How did it go?, and have a
bit of a chin wag to her ... and if you’re a bit upset
about something and say, this happened and
that happened, and vice versa—it’s good to hear
someone else’s problems because you know
you’re not ... My Mum’s been great—she teaches
at Halley’s School—the five/six grade—she’s
come up with some fantastic lesson plans for
me: Try this—this works, that works. And even,
how you like, um, control the kids when they
start to get a bit rowdy. My brother as well—he
teaches over at Rocklea School, which is vastly
different from here.
...
   He’s got a three/four class in this huge
school—and he’s been great as well. They’ve
actually made an Early Years video in his
classroom he’s going so well with it. So, he’s been
a wealth of knowledge, as well.

The phrase ‘a wealth of knowledge’ sums up Gary’s ability to


access work-related expertise within the warmth of his family. The
extracts above show that he was placed in a school with someone
from the same university class and therefore had a ‘friendly’ peer to
interact with at work, but he was also given a great deal of support by
experienced family members.

Ophelia: ‘She would say, Yep, you’re on the right track, but …’
The significance of family expertise was so great that Ophelia accessed
the advice, good will and assistance provided by her sister even

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though they lived far apart and therefore saw each other ‘very rarely’.
They used email, faxes and the telephone to great effect when Ophelia
started her course in Education and then in more diffuse, confidence-
boosting ways. Ophelia’s interview was very interesting because, while
describing her relationship with her sister, she was also documenting
the decreasing role played by supporting people outside the work-
place as the trainees’ own skills increased and their confidence grew.
At the beginning, Ophelia found, like Didi, David and Gary, that she
could reveal the gaps in her expertise to an intimate person, in her
case a family member, and obtain emotional support in return. This
was seen to be a very precious resource even after the greatest need
for it had passed.

JR: So I’m really interested in how people ask for


support. With, say, your sister, how did you
actually negotiate that support?
Ophelia: OK. Well, basically she lives in Black Rock and I
live in Emerald, so we’re not close. It was just a
matter of picking up the phone and saying, Hey,
how does this sound?
JR: So you did it on the phone—read it out? So then
how did she do the proofreading—post her the
essay?—fax it to her?
Ophelia: No, I emailed it to her—and then—
JR: At her school?
Ophelia: No, no, no—and then, she had a look and she
would say, Yep, you’re on the right track, but
you’ve left off—
JR: A few commas ...
Ophelia: —and then ... she gave me feedback, I would re-
write different parts of it or whatever ... and
that’s just one thing.
JR: So do you think her being a teacher has—is that
a support in some way or not—just her being a
teacher?
Ophelia: Yes—she’s been through the uni. thing herself,
although it was a very long time ago, but she’s
very supportive of me in that, basically for me,

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it’s a change of career, and I’m no spring chicken,
and so she’s supportive on that, in that she will
help me in any way that she can.
JR: ... How often would you ring her—and how often
would you see her?
Ophelia: Oh, OK. Well, I very rarely see her. I may have
seen her three times since March this year.
Probably initially, I may have spoken two or
three times on the telephone—
JR: Is that a week?
Ophelia: Yes—a week. That’s when I started and—you
know—emailed her—there was an exchange of
emails back and forth—maybe a couple of
emails a week initially. But now, really the only
time I ring her now is if it’s her daughter’s
birthday or my daughter’s birthday: What are we
going to do? Will we get together? So, it’s sort of
dropped—because my confidence has grown, I
don’t feel I need to use her as a crutch or a
confidence boost.

Other students drew on their family members in less direct ways


than those described by Gary and Ophelia, but the presence of these
family members as a source of professional models was felt very
strongly.

Arthur: ‘See one, do one, teach one’


Arthur stressed the family’s intense, long-term commitment to a single
profession involving service to others, saying proudly, ‘I come from a
family of nurses’. In order to explain both his confidence and his com-
petence—the hospital he had undertaken his clinical in had just offered
him a full-time job—Arthur made the following comment:

Arthur: I come from a family of nurses—my parents and


grandparents were nurses so I have a wealth of
experience behind me, not to mention a lot of
knowledge base from my family.

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He then responded to a question about the impact of the family’s
support and gave an account of the way in which an aphorism of his
father’s had been of direct use even on the day of the interview. Arthur
was able to describe his father’s experience and insight and their
direct influence on his professional life.

JR: Say you were giving some advice to someone


who was not quite as confident as you and who
hasn’t had that fantastic background and family
as you have—advice about how to make the
most of a Clinical, what would you say?
Arthur: Actually, about twenty minutes ago I was just
talking to a girl who was saying she didn’t really
enjoy it because she wasn’t feeling confident
enough in her ability. I’ve been brought up with
the notion of: See one, do one, teach one. I think
that’s an invaluable philosophy to have. I asked
her, What aren’t you confident in doing? And she
said, Certain little areas. And I said, I’m more
than willing to go upstairs to the labs and we can
go through it together. She said she didn’t feel
comfortable in taking blood.
   That’s fine. You realise that person’s going to
be in a bit of pain while you’re [doing] it. That’s
fine—people don’t like to do that sort of thing.
But then again it’s a nursing duty so you have to
do it. Those sort of things can be … by the same
token there are other areas … like when you’re
taking blood, the first thing you can do is
redirect that person’s attention so you can make
a thing about something else and not bring out
the needle that’s going into their arm or the pain
is going to be … almost non-existent. Depending
on how much that person concentrates on
something else. So See one, do one, teach one is
always something I’ve done and I try and pass
that on because I think it’s good.
JR: And who told you that little thing?

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Arthur My father taught me that. Only ... they told me
not to use it. It’s not a great money-spinning
field. But I’ve always wanted to be a nurse ever
since I was through primary I think …
JR: So tell me just what you mean by See one, do one,
teach one.
Arthur Let’s just say you’re removing a catheter: you see
someone do it; you watch what they do; you try
and do one—you get that right; and then you’re
able to teach it to someone else. I wouldn’t say
that’s right with everything ... But generally with
things like basic care or anything other than
shoving things into veins or something—I think
it’s really a good philosophy.

While Arthur emphasised that his family’s commitment to


nursing and his father’s guiding principles had assisted him, both
Ravi and Ines felt that their father’s insider knowledge of the corporate
world had helped them take up placements in very demanding
environments. Ines’s father had provided her with various professional
images that had enabled her to learn how to fit into the roles
demanded of her office’s multinational corporate culture. In her
interview, Ines commented on the part her father had played in
helping her achieve the confidence she desired, making a vivid
contrast between the ease she felt and the difficulties one of her
friends had had in coming to terms with similar corporate demands.

Ines: ‘The same industry’


Ines: I’ve grown up with my Dad being in the same
industry and seeing him go to work and I
actually helped him out a couple of times so I
was a bit more prepared than someone who was
used to wearing jeans to uni. and all of a sudden
having to wear a suit. It wasn’t like that for me.

The perception that the accessibility and quality of support played a


very significant role during the work placement was shared by nearly
all the students interviewed. However, even when students seemed to

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be able to obtain very similar levels or types of support, a rather
different appreciation of the situation emerged once individual
students’ situations were looked at more closely. Hence, while both
Mark and Pete had supportive families, Mark’s wife understood his
work from a professional point of view. This made Mark’s family
situation much more similar to that of Gary. Although Gary was single
and had a very different family life to Mark with his three children,
Gary had access to his mother’s professional experience just as Mark
had access to his wife’s.
Hence, while Pete’s and Mark’s ability to access help from home
seemed similar, it was not. Perhaps because of the presence of pro-
fessionally aware family members, Mark’s teaching placement and
his success during it were much more similar to those of the younger
Gary than they were to Pete, also married, whose professional models
were very different to the role he was taking up as a teacher.
In the same way, the ability of the international students to obtain
informed family support seemed to differ from each other to a very
great extent. Hence, Sobash spoke of the aunt who had lived in Australia
for many years and of his cousins who felt at home in Australia. Ravi
mentioned his sisters, both of whom were studying in Australia, one
enrolled in a very similar course. Keiko, on the other hand, seemed
more isolated. Her main Japanese-speaking contacts had come about
as a result of her part-time job in an expensive, business-oriented,
Japanese restaurant. She lived in rented accommodation and had little
access to academic, professional or personal support during her
teaching round. The lack of supplementary support of any kind further
exacerbated her dependence on the supervisor and meant that when
her supervisor was away due to illness, Keiko was fully exposed to the
demands of her new work situation without the intervening buffer
zone of professional or familial support.
It became obvious during the interviews that factors that might
be thought to be separate from work and the workplace had a very
direct impact on the success or otherwise of the student’s work place-
ment. Hence, the success of the placements was enhanced by factors
that were not always directly controlled by the workplace itself. This
insight has special implications for people with little access to support
other than that offered by the workplace supervisor. Several interna-
tional students, many of whom had undertaken their workplace

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training away from their homes and families in a language other than
their mother tongue, talked about situations that were very difficult,
but told no matching tale of offered support or assistance that was
identified and accessed either at, or away from, the workplace.
The significant impact that people and resources other than the
supervisor had on the student’s experience of the placement, means
that these other ‘forms’ of support need to be recognised and taken
into account, in particular by those who relate most directly to the
student in the workplace, most obviously, the supervising personnel.
The students’ stories made it possible to see that the presence of one
type or source of support was simply not enough for many students.
The students needed to be able to identify, access and draw upon
several different kinds of support according to their individual situa-
tions, situations whose problematic or surprising features only
became fully apparent when the student had begun to carry out the
assigned tasks.
It seems possible that what was true of the students in this group
may well be true of many people in transitional circumstances. Thus,
while the availability and quality of existing forms of support need to
be maintained, there also needs to be an equal emphasis on the ways
in which more varied kinds of assistance can be identified as such
and then accessed. A variety of different support networks and the
perception that there are various ways in which support can be
obtained allows people to undertake difficult journeys towards
greater knowledge, skills and understanding while maintaining an
all-important sense of control or agency.

Bourdieu’s concept: having a ‘feel for the game’


One final point is worth noting. Throughout this discussion, it has
been implied that the students and the supervisors have been inter-
acting as the rational actors that Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992b, pp. 125–6) rejects as inaccurate images of social beings and
their activities. Hence, it is important to theorise Gary’s seemingly
admirable rapport with his supervisor, the principal of the school, his
mother and brother (who it will be remembered, were both teachers),
his friends and the university mentor. In Bourdieu’s terms, Gary had a
‘feel for the game’ (1990, p. 66), a term that Bourdieu draws from sport
in order to describe the relationship between the habitus and a field.

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Bourdieu argues that it is experience—‘the practical mastery of ...
specific regularities’—that undergirds the ‘almost miraculous’ (p. 66)
ability to anticipate the future while looking at the present state of
play in any game. Bourdieu argues that having a feel for the game pro-
duces the effect of consensual validation, thereby reinforcing the rel-
evant group’s belief in the game—in this case, teaching—and its
‘fetishes’ (p. 66)—in this case, all the deeply inscribed practices and
interactions that make up the complex web of meanings that are pro-
duced by everyday life in schools.
Seen from Bourdieu’s (1990) perspective, Gary already has a
‘native membership’ (p. 66) of the field. Not only can he predict what
the day will bring as if he were already on staff, but, to him, every-
thing that happens in his supervisor’s classroom seems ‘sensible’, that
is, ‘full of sense and objectively directed in a judicious direction’ (p.
66). The supervisor’s decisions, his view of the children, his attention
to spelling and his commitment to his own study after school, are not
even commented on. Gary is, by the time the interview takes place,
already ‘caught up in the game’ (p. 67). However, as has already been
stated, it seems that the basis of the two men’s rapport is one of
mutual trust, so it is more than possible that if Gary had been given
an uncommitted supervising teacher or had been offered his
practicum in a poorly organised school, then his response would
have been quite different. His ‘native membership’ would have ena-
bled him to take up a much more critical view of his situation and the
supervisor’s competence, although it is doubtful whether he would
have articulated these reservations as his feel for the game would
have alerted him to the tendency that people have to resist critique of
this kind from people in junior positions.
Hence, when Gary’s mother said to him that he was good with
children and should consider teaching, she was completing rather
than initiating a process that Bourdieu (1990) identifies with the word
‘vocation’ (p. 67). To use Bourdieu’s analogy, rather than learning the
job as a foreign language, Gary has learned it as the mother tongue.
Rather than being seen as an ‘arbitrary’ (p. 67) construction with its
own rules and exercises, Gary describes learning to teach as one who
has entered the game early. While he describes various narratives
about the ‘game’ in the interview, he does not question fundamental
aspects of the field. In Bourdieu’s words, Gary takes for granted

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all that is tacitly granted through his investment in the field
and his interest in its very existence and perpetuation and
in everything that is played for in it, and his unawareness of
the unthought presuppositions that the game produces
and endlessly reproduces, thereby reproducing the
conditions of its own perpetuation. (p. 67)

In a crucial sense, then, Gary’s practicum is not an induction,


but a continuation of a long process. While other students talked a
great deal about their clothes, he paused when asked how he pre-
sented himself at school. Hence, his ‘taking-for-granted of the world’
(Bourdieu, 1990, p. 67) of teaching has become ‘a state of the body’
(p. 67). Gary can already be seen as ‘belonging to the field’ (p. 68).

Salient, accessible peers, friends and partners; salient,


expert, professional families
As has been shown, the importance of a variety of supporting systems
seems to be borne out by the experiences of Gary and Ophelia in
particular. These students experienced rich and satisfying practicum
experiences at both a personal and a professional level. While the
length of their teaching rounds, their very benign school setting and
their prior work experiences certainly contributed greatly to both
students’ ability to demonstrate admirable confidence and expertise
during their practicums, they were also championed by a host of
significant others outside the workplace—family members, skilled
mentors and understanding friends—who acted as professional
models, practical helpers and sympathetic listeners during the work
placement. The presence of such wonderfully supportive networks
contributed greatly to the students’ well-being and their ability to
learn during their workplace practicums, and made an inestimable
contribution to their growth as competent and committed
professionals.

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Chapter 5
The Centrality of Placements

Throughout this book, the word ‘placements’ has been used as a


generic term to refer to the short-term clinicals or practicums that
were organised by the relevant university and to the more extended
semester- or year-long programs negotiated between university
departments, employers and students on the basis of an interview
and/or the students’ ability to take part in a significant workplace
project. Although the use of such a generic term may be thought too
broad by those who wish to examine just one type of workplace com-
ponent, the word ‘placement’ makes it possible to distinguish between
the programs explored in this book and the very different workplace
programs that are now becoming more common. These are the pro-
grams that are wholly negotiated between employees, employers and
universities so that the learning and the assessment procedures are
negotiated as well as the ‘the level and the title of the award’ (Hughes,
2003, p. 18).
The themes that emerged from the fifty interviews differed
sharply, the first focusing on a key period of time, the second on a key
relationship inside the workplace and the third on a key process—
that of gaining access to further resources and support as their need
was ascertained by the student concerned. In each chapter, interpre-
tive discussions focused on the three overarching themes of identity,

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resources and support, and learning. The discussions in this chapter
re-visit and answer the major problems that were posed at the begin-
ning of the interviews.
The students’ accounts of their placements varied greatly. Their
accounts of the resources and support they had received, negotiated
and created for use during the initial period of their placements also
varied greatly. What was surprising about the students’ accounts was
that these varied as much within groups as they did between groups.
Students’ experiences of the placement in general, and of the oppor-
tunities provided for learning and the resources and support given to
make that learning more effective, depended on a complex inter-
weaving of many different factors. Some factors had their origin in
the situation at hand and some in the students’ own strategies and
already-existing pool of resources and support.
In research projects such as this one where the emphasis has
been on the narrativised experiences of a group of people, summa-
ries of the kind required in a final chapter run the risk of blurring the
very distinctions that contribute to the value of such studies. Alvesson
(2002) makes the point that ‘the variation and plurality of voices in
any empirical material’ (p. 129) should be preserved. In the main part
of the book, Alvesson’s advice has been followed by including extracts
from the transcripts. In this chapter, the overview statements have
been written carefully so that each finding can be traced directly back
to the narratives of the students in the original transcripts.

The first question


The first question sought to focus on the aim of ‘understanding’ the
students’ experiences and was therefore framed in very broad terms.
The question was based on one posed by Miles and Huberman (1994,
p. 7) in their overview of qualitative research.

• What do the narratives reveal about the ways in which both the
local and the international students come to understand, learn,
account for, take action and manage their day-to-day situation
during the workplace components of their programs?

The transcripts showed that the students regarded their place-


ments as offering a variety of situations and opportunities in which

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they would have a chance to demonstrate both their already existing
capabilities and their commitment to achieving the best possible
result for themselves and their supervisor or employer during the
placement.
If students defined the placement as an experience of challenge
and opportunity, they also reported feeling stress, anxiety and a sense
of being different in their workplaces. Their anxiety had three sources.
Firstly, students who expressed anxiety also expressed a lack of confi-
dence in their own ability to present a self that was seen positively in
such an environment or to carry out certain tasks in ways that others
regarded as satisfactory or even better. Secondly, students expressed
anxiety about the relationship between the work placement and
assessment. This anxiety was generated by informal, interpersonal
evaluations and formal, university-accredited assessments. Finally,
several students, both local and international, expressed anxiety
regarding their ability to speak or write in ways that the workplace
either required explicitly or took for granted.
Students often talked about their ‘difficulties’ rather than their
‘stress’, although the two are often related. Although each of the three
students (Keiko, Sobash and Mai) who had reported significant diffi-
culties during their placement were international, other international
students—for example, Suresh, Quoc and Agnes—had reported man-
aging placements that were equally challenging in ways that showed
resilience and an astute management of existing resources as well as,
in Suresh’s case, the ability to create new resources. A study by
Robertson, Line, Jones and Thomas (2000) showed that when thirty-
eight international students were asked about difficulties related to
their learning environments, many students cited language-related
difficulties as the ‘dominant perceived problem’ (p. 94). However, a
local student also said that her English had been tested by her experi-
ences during teaching rounds.
In their interviews, three of the international students who
addressed the question of language proficiency in detail said that
their English was not adequate relative to the demands of their work-
place. However, language issues, whether general or specific to a
workplace or situation, were not always a source of anxiety, but could
also be seen as posing the kind of short-term problems that arise in
any new situation. Some international students commented on the

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linguistic difficulties they had when meeting a specific task such as
writing a very formal business letter. The students reported that such
needs were fulfilled with a little extra support or the type of model-
ling required for other new tasks. Other groups of students, both local
and international, did not comment on the issue of English language
proficiency during their interview. These findings are interesting and
need to be looked at in further detail. As McNamara (2001) has
pointed out, any strategies designed to explore or test people’s lin-
guistic competence in a given setting are beset with difficulties related
to issues of power, knowledge and control. This means that any
attempt to establish ‘proficiency for purposes of communication’ (p.
9) can also be used to exclude certain individuals on the basis of iden-
tity and group membership.
Local and international students expressed satisfaction either
during, or at the end of, narratives in which they recounted experi-
ences in which they had been seen positively or had accomplished
something that they found difficult. A few students reported that they
had been able to make a significant contribution to their workplace
during their placement. It was not possible to generalise about these
students though their competence was such that several had been
offered employment by the conclusion of their placement. The work-
related challenges that these students described were more
demanding, and the strategies they had used to overcome their diffi-
culties more creative, than had been expected by the researcher.
These students reported giving many extra hours to their job both at
the workplace and in other settings. Their positive response to being
given challenging work and the negative response of students to
being given routine work supports research by Hart (1991) that found
that new graduates appreciated the opportunity to take part in sig-
nificant activities.
Many of the students interviewed expressed dissatisfaction if
the support they had expected to receive was not available or if they
had been marginalised by either lack of participation in the wider life
of the workplace or in the relative insignificance of the tasks they
were given to carry out. Students who expressed anxiety about their
ability to manage wanted the person or people who had been desig-
nated to support them in the carrying out of certain tasks to manage
a given situation in such a way that the student’s lack of expertise

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would seem less obvious to, or have fewer consequences for, other
participants or onlookers. The role played by onlookers was also
mentioned in a study by Robertson, Line, Jones and Thomas (2000)
when it was reported that some international students stated that
they lacked confidence ‘to speak in front of’ (p. 95) local students in
classes at their university. However, much of the work on the issues of
‘face’ and ‘politeness’ has emphasised that threats to face can be felt
by people in a great range of situations (Brown & Levinson, 1987;
Watts, 2003). Research that explores such issues without looking at a
broad sample runs the risks explored by Said (1978) and discussed in
Chapter 1.

The second question


The second question focused on the ways in which the students made
use of various kinds of resources and support during their placement.
This question assumed greater importance after the first six inter-
views had been conducted.

• In what ways did the students define, perceive, access and make
use of different types of ‘resources’ and ‘support’ during their
placements?

The answers to this question were surprising, interesting and


complex. Although the question had been posed in such a way that it
implied that the student would obtain certain resources and kinds of
support, many students recounted experiences in which gaining
access to resources had been difficult. Even when resources and sup-
port were available, the situation was not necessarily straightforward
when seen from the student’s point of view. Although welcomed,
resources that were given, but had not been asked for, had a some-
what directive aspect. Thus, while James was very positive about his
chance to participate in the company’s triathlon, the intensive
training and clothing that he was given ensured his continued com-
mitment to the program. These activities offered him a certain iden-
tity that, if he had other responsibilities, he may not have wanted.
The giving and gaining of resources and support was somewhat more
complex than had been anticipated when the interviews were first
negotiated with the students.

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Many students were unprepared for either the type of resource
or support they would need during their placements or the impera-
tive nature of their need for extra resources. The students’ lack of
preparation or anticipation could not be attributed to the university
involved in the students’ professional preparation. Rather, the inter-
views suggested that the full impact of the workplace’s demands
could only be felt, perceived and assessed by the students once they
were within the workplace context. A study by Watson, Johnson and
Billett (2003) also explores students in terms of ‘familiarity’ with (p.
4), and ‘preparedness’ for (p. 5), the university environments they are
about to enter. Both this exploration and comments made by Hughes
(2003) regarding recent developments in work-based learning in
England show that the specificity of contexts is such that part of any
students’ preparation is a focus on the ways in which existing knowl-
edge, understandings and skills may have to be re-shaped in order to
accommodate both the linguistic demands and the professional
requirements of any new situation.
Hence, in the first period of the placement, many students
revealed that they had only perceived the full extent of their need for
certain resources and support once they arrived at the workplace.
David, for example, a local student-teacher, had been alerted to the
dress requirements of schools by university staff involved in Education
programs. Acting on the basis of general advice regarding dress, David
had bought new shirts and pants to wear during his teaching
practicum. However, once in the workplace, he found that he was
unprepared for the professional persona demanded of him by the
Geography teacher whose student-teacher he had become. In trying
to meet her demands, David felt that he was not only being asked to
give up his comfortable sports clothes, but was also being pushed to
inhabit a demanding discipline area. This required intensive lesson
preparation and a very different professional persona than had been
indicated by the pre-teaching round talks. David had followed the
advice given regarding resources, but had no idea that the advice
given would only hint at ways in which a more formal set of
clothes might mesh with a new view of the professional world and
his place in it.
Many students found that, because their university programs
had been oriented towards preparing them for the workplace, they

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had not anticipated that a more specialised, detailed or specific
version of the knowledge, understandings or skills would be required
by the workplace. Hence, Mark had expected to dress neatly, but
was also required to wear a tie; Sobash had covered Taxation in his
courses, but needed to know about Australian Tax Laws in great
detail. Sobash also needed a greater proficiency in spoken English
than he had expected to have. Tania, Zita and Josh knew that their
projects would involve the use of the latest information technology,
but had not expected to find the unfamiliar software so challenging
to learn.
If their existing resources were re-defined and found wanting to
a lesser or greater extent by the students interviewed, the ways in
which these resources were supplemented also varied from one stu-
dent to another. In some workplaces, the incoming students were
given a great many resources and many different kinds of social sup-
port as soon as they arrived. These students participated in wel-
coming greetings and gatherings and were given ‘gifts’ that enabled
them to understand and cope with the demands of their workplace.
Some students were also assigned integrating tasks or were involved
in significant projects that the company or workplace was committed
to completing according to a deadline or need. The level of support
offered decreased only when students became proficient and
increased again when new or particularly difficult challenges were
faced, as was the case for Terence and Emily.
The seven students interviewed at Company A expressed satis-
faction with the level of resourcing they had received although they
expressed their satisfaction in a variety of ways. They talked at length
about the welcomes they had been given, the quality of their supervi-
sion, their pleasant, physical surroundings, their access to technolog-
ical resources, the time given to them by friendly colleagues, and
their opportunities to initiate and maintain workplace friendships.
Each student had an individual supervisor who oversaw their work-
place project, but other people such as the Human Resources man-
ager had also taken a keen interest in their welfare. Some of the
students had contact with staff at their universities as well. Given the
positive responses of all seven students to their placement at
Company A, the researcher thought that the level of resources given
might vary according to the type of workplace, but once again the

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situation was found to be different from the hunches the researcher
had articulated in the early days of compiling material for this book.
At another large company, Company B, the situation was dif-
ferent again in that the students’ narratives contrasted sharply with
each other and no generalisation about the quality of the experience
offered by the company could be made. Students at Company B had
mixed responses to their supervision, their physical surroundings,
their status and the opportunities they had to make friends at work.
One local, female student, Tania, talked at length in her interview
about her perception that it had taken her a long period of time to
feel comfortable in her workplace. One of the international students,
Sobash, also talked about his placement in terms of the length of time
that it had taken him to feel at ease in his workplace, a smaller com-
pany than Company A or Company B. Although he stated in the inter-
view that he felt comfortable in his surroundings, his opening
narrative highlighted his ongoing feelings of separation from the eve-
ryday life of the workplace.
The interviews reaffirmed the significance of the mentor, super-
visor or manager as a key resource. Almost every student talked about
this person with some students talking about little else during the
interview. The students reported that the presence, commitment,
attitude and mentoring strategies of the supervising person had a
great impact on the students’ experiences of learning as well as on
their perception of the whole experience. When viewed from the van-
tage point of the interviews with the students, the situation can be
summed up by Zeichner’s (1990) summary statement that one of the
main ‘obstacles to teacher learning’ (p. 107) was the ‘uneven quality’
(p. 108) of supervision. All students, whether local and international,
mature age or younger, on short-term or more extended placements,
were able to talk about their supervision with clarity. It was possible
to elicit descriptive criteria pertaining to the adequacy of the supervi-
sion offered with great ease, although the work that was carried out
on this issue was not presented in the final discussion.
The students’ perceptions of the quality of their supervision
centred around the two key issues of time and trust. Some students
praised one or more of their supervisors for their ‘committed pres-
ence’ or ‘enabling trust’, these phrases representing major concepts
elaborated on previously. Many of the students who reported that

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their supervisors had given them a great deal of time were also the
students who had felt able to manage important aspects of their pro-
fessional roles. However, other students kept their opinions and
observations to themselves, the more able students also displaying
the ‘strategic silence’ that had at first seemed to characterise students
whose stories constructed them as having been uncomfortable or
lacking in expertise during the period of the placement. At times, the
student would have liked to have spoken about an issue of concern,
but was afraid to do so due to the impact this might have on their
relationship with the supervisor.
The interviews revealed, as had MacDonald (1993) in her study
of stress and coping, that the relationship with supervisory personnel
caused a range of problems including lack of time for reflective super-
vision or follow-up discussions. Those who were situated in compa-
nies or businesses reported inadequate access to the supervisor less
often than students placed in primary or secondary schools or hospi-
tals. However, the stark nature of this conclusion was moderated by
the students in some schools who reported that their relationship
with their supervisor had been a positive one.
A small number of students experienced unfriendliness or
abruptness from their supervisors. Mai, for example, commented
that her supervisor’s responses were unpredictable: ‘Sometimes she
is very nice to me and sometimes just totally ignores me’. She also
stated that the supervisor showed open disregard, failing to welcome
her and reprimanding her in front of the pupils: ‘Stop! Stop what
you’re doing right now!’. Three other students also reported that a
member of staff had displayed unfriendly behaviour towards them.
Robertson, Line, Jones and Thomas (2000) found that international
students had perceived that some lecturers lacked experience and
were ‘unfriendly’ (p. 94) as well. However, the students did not report
that they had encountered the overt hostility, stereotyping or exclu-
sion that had been experienced by overseas-trained doctors in an
important Australian study conducted by Kidd and Braun in 1992.
When the demands of the workplace could not be met with the
human or material resources provided by a specific workplace, stu-
dents told of various successful efforts to acquire their own resources
and support. They did this in a number of ways. Firstly, they used the
readily accessed technological resources that most were adept at

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identifying and using. Secondly, they made use of the friendly advice
or the greater expertise of certain ‘salient accessible competent peers’
within the workplace. Finally, they were supported by networks of
family members, friends and partners. These gave various levels and
kinds of support, but some students could access the assistance of
family members or partners who had expertise in the professional
areas that the students were entering through their work placements.
While the extent to which students relied on accessible human
networks surprised the researcher, their ready accessing of other net-
works based on various kinds of information and communication
technology was not surprising given the extent to which use of these
resources has become part of people’s lives. Students used various
kinds of technology to access information as the need arose. Usually,
the need was very specific, task-related and instrumental.
Information and communication technologies were defined
and accessed in ways that contrasted with the ways in which interac-
tions with friends and family were described. Many different kinds
of resources and advice were given freely to the students by people
who had familial relationships with the students, or knew them
well. The three main kinds of support mentioned were: help with eve-
ryday tasks such as driving a child to school, help with specific work-
related tasks such as lesson-planning, and a more general, but
crucially important, ‘professional’ empathy that was based on an
insider’s appreciation of the demands of the position the student was
taking up.
The professional empathy described by many students was
demonstrated during discussions that allowed the students to add to
their understanding of the professional role and did not simply meet
their immediate need for certain information. In these interactions,
wider issues such as the demands of school life or the inequity of a
teacher’s actions were discussed. Such discussions often took place
amidst other pleasant social activities such as talking on the tele-
phone (Ophelia), eating dinner (Gary), swapping stories about the
day (Mike), and interacting with friends (Ines). The gender implica-
tions of these forms of support were also noted. Several male stu-
dents including David, Didi, James, Mike and Gary said in their
interviews that they had been supported by a girlfriend, mother or
wife. Each of these interactions was described very positively—the

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students’ narratives suggesting that they enjoyed taking part in these
work-related interactions with partners, friends and family mem-
bers.

Perceptions of ‘having’ and ‘lacking’


The students’ narratives suggested that they were aware of being vis-
ible to others in their immediate workplace environment. Their
awareness of the perceptions of others was rooted in whether or not
the students were seen as ‘having’ or ‘lacking’. The awareness of others
and the students’ explicit references to ‘eyes’ and ‘looking’ showed
that the evaluating, objectifying ‘gaze’ that both Goffman (1961) and
Foucault (1991) have commented on from their very different theo-
retical perspectives is an important aspect of a newcomer’s responses
to a new environment and can be used as a way of indicating the
sense of difference and being different that was commented on by
many students.
Hence, in Chapter 2 where the focus was on the ‘setting’ (Billett,
1995, p. 21) of the students’ work and learning, students saw them-
selves, and felt that they were seen by others, to ‘have’ or ‘lack’ in a
variety of ways. Support given to students in company settings often
consisted of the students being given a great range of resources.
Students were given advice, equipment, invitations to social gather-
ings and extra training. Other students, however, had to either rely on
the advice, insider information and modelling offered by salient com-
petent peers or else procure resources of their own.
In Chapter 3, the concepts of both resources and support were
given further definition and meaning. In the students’ narratives
about their supervision and their supervisors, the spoken interac-
tions, time and embodied presence of the supervising company
mentor, teacher or clinical nurse were mentioned most often. It was
found that the students’ access to these resources varied. Some stu-
dents, such as Suresh and Gary, were able to access their supervisor
constantly because they were researching or teaching with that
supervisor in a co-operative manner. These students were able to
participate in conversations of many different kinds, while others
were either ignored or mentored in ways that seemed inappropriate
to adult learners given the context and the demands being made on
the student.

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In Chapter 4, the ways in which students had been able to trans-
form existing resources or add to them with newly created resources
were examined in some detail. It was found that students relied on
both newly formed peer groups and familial networks that had
existed prior to the work placement. This meant that the students
who had families and friends from within the professional area
that the student was entering were greatly advantaged because they
could gain precise, appropriate and well-timed support from such
networks.

The third question


The third question explored the ways in which the insights that had
emerged from the data could be interpreted theoretically. Various lit-
eratures were mined in relation to resources and support, learning
and identity.

• Which theoretical perspectives seem to offer the most appropriate


interpretive ‘frames’ for exploring the students’ accounts of their
placements and the ways in which they acquired, negotiated or
deployed resources and support during their placements?

Sharp and Green (1975), writing from within the sociology of


education, suggested some decades ago that ‘thought about particular
empirical problems might help to clarify one’s conceptualization of
the philosophical problematics’ (p. 23). This was true of the interviews
as a whole. Although this writer has not been able to bridge the prob-
lematic theoretical divide between the individual agent and ‘the total
pattern of the material and ideological environment’ (pp. 7–8) that
structure that individual’s opportunities, it has now been appreciated
that Bourdieu’s efforts to reach an understanding of the ways in which
people see art galleries or experience their lives in academia are not
based simply on an interest in people’s experiences, but also involve a
thoroughgoing analysis of some of the contextual factors that enable
the interviews to be seen within a larger network of social, economic
and political considerations. Not surprisingly given these comments,
the discussion turns to the ways in which resources have been seen in
Bourdieu’s work and the ways in which these insights and categorisa-
tions might be applied to the issues raised in this discussion.

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Re-framing the placement experience
Instead of those involved in organising the workplace components of
university programs either assuming or hoping that ‘experience
equals educative experience’ (Zeichner, 1996, p. 107), work place-
ments, clinicals and teaching practicums of all kinds can be regarded
as fundamentally transitional periods, which, for many of the stu-
dents who take part in them, never lose their temporary ‘feel’. To see
the work placement in this way is also to emphasise a more actively
social view of the students’ experiences. These experiences can be
seen in the light of Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b) insights
when he reminds people who are interested in groups of individuals
that,

it is knowledge of the field itself in which they evolve that


allows us best to grasp the roots of their singularity, their
point of view or position (in a field) from which their
particular vision of the world (and of the field itself ) is
constructed. (p. 107)

Bourdieu (1992) has given an important section in one of his


writings under the heading ‘Thinking Relationally’ (p. 224). If the
placements are thought of as fundamentally transitional experiences,
and the students are thought of in relation to these experiences of
transition, then the resources they require and the learners they must
become during those experiences take on new meanings in relation
to the changing situations the students must inhabit and try to
manage.

Re-framing resources and support


The data showed that resources and support cannot be defined in
simple (or simplistic) terms as the material objects and helpful people
that are made available to students on their entry into the workplace.
Rather, the resources and the support should be seen as part of a
complex set of interpreted phenomena and negotiated networks in
any workplace. Both contribute to the way in which the students
are ‘produced’ by the situation. In accordance with Dugdale’s (1999)
analysis of bureaucratic meetings, the resources, both material
and human, construct for students certain identities. Although the

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students’ identities are also produced in the many conversations that
take place in any situation, as theorists such as Davies and Harré
(1990) and Usher (1997) claim, the objects that surround the students
and their relationships with these, will also ‘catapult’ (Dugdale, 1999,
p. 119) the students into a range of identities that are not simply their
own creations.
These arguments can be linked with Bourdieu’s ideas on the
various forms of capital. Attention to the major forms of capital iden-
tified by Bourdieu—‘economic, social, cultural, symbolic’ (Bourdieu
& Wacquant, 1992b, p. 98)—can contribute to our understanding of
the differences between the students’ experiences. Symbolic capital,
in particular, plays a crucial role in influencing the extent to which
some students can negotiate their positions in the ‘field’ or ‘game’ of
the workplace. The central insight that this book seems to support is
that all capital can only be considered in relation to a field so that its
value ‘hinges on the existence of a game, of a field in which this com-
petency can be employed’ (p. 98).
The students’ narratives, then, are most adequately interpreted
in the light of the following insight of Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant,
1992b):

a species of capital is what is efficacious in a given field,


both as a weapon and as a stake of struggle, that which
allows its possessors to wield a power, an influence, and
thus to exist, in the field under consideration ... In empiri-
cal work, it is the one and the same thing to determine
what the field is ... and to determine what species of capital
are active in it, within what limits, and so on. (p. 98)

Rather than perceiving resources as add-ons, it is more appro-


priate to think of resources in terms of essential gifts that exist in
highly specific and deeply understood networks of reciprocity. As Yan
(1996) has shown in his study of gift exchanges in a Chinese village,
gift-giving includes involvement in cycles of reciprocity and the
building of, and benefiting from, participation in hundreds of inti-
mately calculated networks. His description of the meaning of the
Chinese word ‘gift’ gives much of the highly social sense of the word
that has been imported into the notions of resources and support as

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a result of the fifty interviews. In an important section of the second
chapter of the book that was published as a result of his study, Yan
describes the etymology of the word ‘gift’. The last sentence of the fol-
lowing extract offers the reader another central insight.

The term for gift in Chinese is liwu, a word composed of


two characters. The first character li means rituals, proper-
ties, and ceremonial expressions of ethical ideals such as
filial loyalty and obedience ... The second character wu
means material things. It is interesting that, etymologically,
the Chinese term indicates that a gift is more than a mate-
rial present—it carries cultural rules, priorities and also
involves ritual. So, wu without li is just a thing, not a gift.
Villagers in Xiiaja are fully aware of the complex connota-
tions of this word. In the practice of daily life, they often
abbreviate the word simply using li, emphasizing the
cultural codes rather than the material aspects of the gift.
(p. 44)

In the same way that wu without li is just a thing, not a gift,


resources and support can only be understood if they are seen within
the networks of reciprocity that are set up and then continually nego-
tiated within a workplace. As this process get underway, the student
is constructed according to various evaluative frameworks pertaining
to expertise, specific interpersonal skills and even ways of dressing.
By such means, the student begins to ‘exist’ within the workplace, to
consolidate a knowable identity.

Re-framing the learner


Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992a) analysis also indicates the
ways in which individual students can be linked with the situations in
which they must take on a ‘social role’ (Goffman, 1959, p. 27) or
inhabit certain discursively constructed ‘positions’ (Davies & Harré,
1990, p. 44). In a very clear explication of the ways in which he sees
‘individuals’, Bourdieu has explained that people as individuals exist
in relation to the field in which they are constructed and in which
they must act. Individuals, then,

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exist as agents—and not as biological individuals, actors, or
subjects—who are socially constituted as active and acting
in the field under consideration by the fact that they pos-
sess the necessary properties to be effective, to produce
effects, in this field. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p. 107)

The data has shown that Bourdieu’s (1990) emphasis on the ‘reg-
ulated improvisations’ (p. 57) of the social world seems to depict with
accuracy the situation of the students as they both try to control, and
yet are constituted by, the new places they are learning within. In
such situations, the image of the independent learner seems inade-
quate. Firstly, as Leach (2001) has pointed out, learners are often
directed to be independent when they might wish to participate in
richer interactions and have access to more adequate resourcing.
Secondly, learners cannot be seen as ahistorical individuals. Rather,
the historicity, the ‘this-ness’ of any situation, is not simply the detail,
but rather the essence. A learner without a ‘generalized social con-
text’ (Halliday, 1979, p. 122) and a ‘learning context’ (Candy, 1991, p.
412) is an image without social meaning. Thirdly, the people who
appear to have most independence, autonomy or agency are those
who are the ‘bearers of capitals’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p.
108). As the different kinds of capital are not always easy to perceive,
the bearers are often seen to have won the position in the field they
have entered when they have the position they occupy ‘by virtue of
their endowment ... in capital’ (p. 108). These students have the prac-
tices, the language, even the bodily dispositions that make ‘their tra-
jectory’ (p. 108) in a certain field seem their right.
Hence, approaches to adult learning that have at their heart
images of individuated, active selves need to replace such images
with other, more social, or socially situated, images of identity and
learning. These have to offer a detailed account of the complex ways
in which resources of all kinds (including that most complex of
resources, language) do not simply ‘influence’ the learner’s ability to
achieve certain goals, but actually work to constitute his or her rela-
tionship with the game and its stakes, to forge the identity of the
learner within a field. The theories that seem most adequate to this
task are those that emphasise the interpreted nature of all experience
(Ricoeur, 1991a, 1991b), the discursive positioning of subjectivities

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(Davies & Harré, 1990), and the relationship between ‘actor’, field and
various kinds of capital (Bourdieu, 2001).
We are now in a position to add to the images of learners and
learning already discussed. In the following section, the images of
learners as sojourners, potential colleagues and ‘voices’ have been
added to the images already explored.

The learners as sojourners


The first image emphasises that learners on any placement have a
special relationship to the duration of the experience and that both
their position and their relationship to available resources and sup-
port can only be understood in relation to the transitory nature of the
experience. During the placement, the student learners are sojourners.
This word accurately describes both the brevity of their contact with
the workplaces and the rather uncertain nature of the learning
achieved during these important, but ultimately transitional, periods
of professional preparation. The image of the sojourner captures
something of the ambiguity of the relationships entered into and
helps us to understand the ‘uneven quality of practicum supervision’
(Zeichner, 1996, p. 108).
This image of the learner as a sojourner also develops our
understanding of the ways in which some students are regarded quite
differently in their field, that ‘space of play’ (Wacquant, 1992, p. 19)
that social actors enter in order to take up various positions. The
image is particularly appropriate in that it draws attention to the
ways in which the learning undertaken during placements can be
characterised as ‘hit-and-miss’. In an enlightening lecture, Kasper
(2003) summarised the findings of several studies of students who
had learned a second language while taking part in short-term ‘Study
Abroad’ programs in a range of countries. The studies cited suggested
that the sojourning students’ learning of the target languages was, in
Kasper’s words, ‘mixed’ (p. 3). Some students were able to learn
quickly and successfully. However, other students learned to interact
inappropriately, demonstrating an over-reliance on colloquial lan-
guage. A third group of students learned very little at all.
If the student is seen as a sojourner and the work placement as a
potentially very demanding period of transition, then Gruba and
Sondergaard’s (2002) comment made at a conference on transition

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issues, that their interest and activities in the area of transition had
been stimulated by their desire to ‘raise awareness of the challenges
individuals face when confronted with new, unfamiliar environ-
ments’ (p. 45), seems at once obvious and fundamentally important.
In order to understand the processes and outcomes of transi-
tional periods, the stressful effects of transitions in general and uni-
versity-based transitions have been described (Jones & Frydenberg,
2000) and major transition issues identified (Rhoden & Feldtmann,
2002). These can include social isolation and the lack of awareness,
appropriate expectations or adequate preparation. On the basis of
the many studies that have been carried out in Australia over the last
decade, it is now possible to link some of the difficulties faced by new
university students to issues such as a relatively low level of ‘prepar-
edness’ as well as factors ‘inside’ the university (Watson, Johnson &
Billett, 2003, p. 1).
Many writers have described programs that have used the
research information gained to drive forward new programs for stu-
dents entering university for the first time. Some of the strategies
mentioned at a conference on these issues were explicit discussion of
difficulties that may arise (Rhoden & Feldtmann, 2002), organised
mentoring (Posthill, Callaghan & Thies, 2002) and peer-based study
groups (Jones, 2002). Such strategies are also needed to make the
transition to an unfamiliar workplace less painful and more quickly
productive, so that novice professionals can solve problems and learn
effectively from their relatively brief interval at work.

The learners as novices or junior colleagues


The image of the sojourner is not the only image that is important to
an understanding of the placement. Nor is it a matter of simply pre-
paring students more adequately because the preparation often takes
place in contexts other than those in which the new learning must
take place. The second image relates the learners’ experiences to their
varying levels of expertise. It is argued that Benner’s (1984) insights
into the various levels of expertise demonstrated by the nursing staff
she was researching can also be used to describe the students inter-
viewed. In her inspiring study of the responses of graduates and
expert nurses to the same situations, Benner distinguished five
different levels of expertise ranging from novices and advanced

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beginners to experts. While some of the students depicted themselves
as uncertain, inexpert, silent novices, others described themselves as
having had sufficient expertise to carry out tasks competently and to
manage difficult, or even very challenging, situations. The latter group
of students was able to be seen as advanced beginners.
When Benner’s (1984) categories are further explicated in terms
of Bourdieu’s (1992) ideas, it can be appreciated that students like
Gary, Ophelia, Mike and Suresh were able to demonstrate high levels
of expertise because, in Bourdieu’s terms, they had, or could obtain,
‘forms of specific capital’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p. 108). These
forms of capital allowed the students to take up their positions in the
field of the workplace with greater ease than other students. Another
striking feature of the narratives of the advanced beginners or ‘junior
colleagues’ was that these students had given advice and practical
support to other students during their placements. Prominent among
such narrators was Arthur.
The interview transcripts showed that the students who have
been called ‘junior colleagues’ in this book were appreciated, sup-
ported and praised in many different ways during their work place-
ments. They were also given the all-important resources of time and
trust. Other students were never able to marshal the resources neces-
sary to present themselves as junior colleagues, but were forced to
remain as sojourning novices.
One of the main ways in which the novice and the junior col-
league differed was in their ability to negotiate a situation in such a
way that they benefited quite directly from the changes that were
made. Junior colleagues such as Gary and Suresh were able to build a
dynamic and valuable trust with the supervisor that was based on
levels of reciprocity and role-sharing that the novices, for example,
Sobash and Tania, simply could not attain. The novice was a transi-
tory addition to the situation. From this it can be seen that when
there is no great demonstration of already existing capital in the form
of expertise, the necessary ingredients of time and trust are negoti-
ated with difficulty. Time and trust are not bestowed freely if these
cannot be transformed into a mutually beneficial relationship.
In this context, Goffman’s (1959) ideas are also important
because, in emphasising how the self can be ‘presented’, he also
shows that resources that may be thought of as ‘extras’ are central to

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the ability of any ‘self’ to make an acceptable ‘presentation’ and nego-
tiate a successful transition to a new situation whether it be crofters
to hotel keepers, students to trainee teachers, or trainee engineers to
fully fledged professionals. In all cases, the border between the two
states is of great significance. In many cases, these ‘borders’ will be
composed of various kinds of workplace discourses, so, once again,
language is a crucially important resource.
Thus, rather than being perceived as newcomers or, more wor-
ryingly, as outsiders whose lack of expertise places them at odds with
the workplace community, the student who can quickly become a
‘junior colleague’ will be the one who can make the most active use
of the resources offered, and who, paradoxically, will attract further
resources as time goes on. Other students will always be seen as
sojourners, people who come and go and are never admitted to the
ways of speaking, acting and negotiating that characterise the work-
place community.

The learners as ‘voices’


The students often lacked a voice—defined here in Hymes’s (1996)
terms, as ‘the freedom to have one’s voice heard’ (p. 64)—especially at
the beginning of their placements. While their lack of power or effi-
cacy in the initial phase of the placement is understandable, in the
case of certain students, the perception that they were without any
real control over their situation and had very little agency throughout
the placement, characterised the whole experience. Keiko remarked
in summary that her teaching round could have been improved, while
Tania was looking forward to moving on. Neither student had been
able to voice her dissatisfaction with the placement. As Belenky,
Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule (1986) found in their exploration of
women’s views of knowledge and reality, some students stated that
trusting conversations or other kinds of speaking were difficult or
even impossible to achieve in certain situations.
However, interestingly, some students were able to speak.
Several students, for example, James, Emily and Terence, talked about
times when they were given public settings in which they were both
enabled, and able, to express complex views in interviews or meet-
ings. In these situations, the students were given ‘an opportunity to
speak’ and a chance to ‘become subjects in the construction of their

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identities’ (Giroux, 1993, p. 136). However, the interviews and meet-
ings were not created by the learner as agent, but were opportunities
both forged by the workplace and taken up by the students con-
cerned. Workplace personnel and students co-operated to make such
interactions work to their mutual benefit.
Many different writings have used the metaphor of ‘voice’ to talk
about the empowered self. Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger and Tarule
(1986) and Hymes (1996) offer examples of the ways in which the
concept has been used or is useful in research, while Keane (2001)
and Alvesson (2002) discuss the meaning of ‘voice’ from linguistic,
cultural and postmodern perspectives. Each of the writers cited is
interested in the ways in which the concept of voice can be equated
with the position of a person or group. Hence, in each piece of writing,
the emancipatory connotations of having a voice are delineated in a
variety of ways.
Lave and Wenger (1991) have suggested in a subtitle that ‘legiti-
mate peripheral participation’ is a possible role for learners. However,
if a student is perceived as a novice rather than as a junior colleague,
and is given few opportunities to speak, it is possible for the place-
ment experience to become one of marginalisation rather than the
opportunity for the kind of limited, but supportive, participation that
can be suggested by the use of the term ‘scaffolding’ in which spoken
interaction is a vital part of the learning experience. This insight is
highlighted in an article by Hart (1999) in which she imagines learning
as ‘[g]iving voice’ (p. 1). Importantly, the interviews with the students
revealed that those who had more resources also had greater access
to a voice unless further opportunities for participative speaking were
organised by workplace mentors.
The negotiations concerning resources and support are so sig-
nificant in any transitional period that it is now argued that the word
‘sponsorship’, used in an important early study by Sharp and Green
(1975, p. 132) to capture the highly differentiated way in which some
students in the classrooms they studied were given special approval
by the teacher, is in fact the closest description of the way in which
certain students among those interviewed seem to have been treated.
However, while the word ‘sponsorship’ captures the active promotion
of certain students, it does not convey the way in which the students
were able to make the most of every opportunity because they

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approached each new situation with some of the key proficiencies,
whether small or large, already at their fingertips or within their
ambit.
Therefore, it is now time to adjust Sharp and Green’s (1975)
notion of sponsorship in an important way because their study
focuses on the dyad of the teacher and the pupil. Bourdieu’s (2001)
work, in particular his central concept of habitus—‘this kind of prac-
tical sense for what is to be done in a given situation ... a “feel” for the
game’ (p. 25)—shows that what appears to be a sponsorship should
be seen as a more complex set of givings, takings, negotiations and
relations, to use a word that Bourdieu (1992, p. 228) often empha-
sises, rather than a relationship between two highly individuated
subjects. The ‘sponsorship’ of certain students happens within a net-
work of human relationships and material resources, none of which
can be accessed in the same way by all newcomers.

The fourth question


The fourth question directed attention to the benefits that could be
derived from the insights gained for stakeholders, in particular, for
the students who had contributed their experiences and their voices
to the interviews. Many contemporary writers, for example, hooks
(1996), have questioned the grounds on which one person can speak
for another group, especially a group whose experiences and interests
are characterised by ‘difference and Otherness’ (p. 113). While this
position has obvious merit, it can be argued that the interviews gath-
ered up the perceptions of a group whose accounts were treated with
respect and that the ideas offered are of significant interest.

• Do the interviews suggest ways in which those involved in higher


education can redefine or improve work placements in order to
make these more effective contexts for students’ learning?

Resources and support


The terms ‘resources’ and ‘support’ need to be understood from the
potentially very different perspectives of various stakeholders involved
in any ‘supporting’ or ‘resourcing’ contexts. Research must always be
concerned with documenting the perceptions and experiences of
individual stakeholding groups and that these should not be blended

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or compiled in order to reach a composite understanding of any given
situation because, as Bourdieu (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b) has
emphasised, they often represent different positions within networks
of negotiations concerning resources.

Recommendations
This book has presented the placement experience from the point of
view of the student. Hence, the recommendations that have been
offered are intended to open up further ‘spaces’ for students during
their work placements. However, because only fifty students were
interviewed before this book was written and because the implemen-
tation of recommendations always involves many different stake-
holders, the following recommendations are offered tentatively in
spite of their rather direct style. It should be noted that none of the
recommendations requires large-scale funding or drastic changes to
existing programs, rather a change of focus, of purpose, a change in
the fundamental framing of the task at hand—that of preparing
people to make the most of their short-term experiences in profes-
sional workplaces.
The following recommendations complement those offered by
Martin (1997), but have been written with the students and their
workplace supervisors, mentors and managers as the main focus,
whereas Martin’s recommendations had university staff as the pri-
mary audience. Some recommendations pose dilemmas that need
further investigation. The work of Bourdieu encourages us to recog-
nise that seemingly independent social actors are never completely
free to pursue their own goals. Certain opportunities must lie in wait
for the learner so that positive ‘positions’ exist prior to the learner’s
arrival in the workplace.
The recommendations have also been designed to complement
the insights presented in a study by Dagher, D’Netto and Sohal (1998)
regarding the extent to which the Australian manufacturing industry
has recognised the need for, and implemented, ‘diversity practices’
(p. 177) in workplaces. In their report, the writers commented that,
‘The literature considers workforce diversity as an enormous chal-
lenge that requires cross-cultural understanding in a constructive
and creative manner, through establishing a cooperative, harmo-
nious, and productive working environment’ (p. 189). This is a huge

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issue, one that needs to be addressed by many different individuals
and organisations, including universities.

Recommendation 1
The students require welcoming, integrating greetings and gather-
ings. The welcoming strategies set up for each new group of students
should be planned ahead, so that workplace personnel can commit
appropriate time to them. Any planned activities also need to involve
various levels of formality. Certain welcoming tasks can involve the
students themselves. Any activities that take place before the place-
ment should be seen as part of the welcoming phase and should also
be well planned. These activities are important because they famil-
iarise the student with the workplace as well as offering the students
opportunities to meet the salient accessible competent peers that can
contribute so much to the students’ workplace learning. Friendly
greetings, friendliness and the ‘friendly manner’ that George referred
to were mentioned positively with great frequency by the students
interviewed. Friendliness can both welcome and empower.

Recommendation 2
The students need to be given a variety of opportunities to speak and
to be heard. However, for those in the workplaces concerned, such
interactions involve entering dialogues with students who will not
always speak with either the ease or the authority of insiders or
experts. If the students can be given opportunities to speak in many
different ways and in many different contexts, they will be more able
to identify and acquire the resources support they require or would
like to have. The students’ requirements in terms of resources and
levels of support will vary. Some flexibility should characterise the
placement arrangements if possible and students should have oppor-
tunities to make their needs known. A student who, like Wilma, has
heavy responsibilities outside the workplace may need to negotiate a
shorter working week and a slightly longer placement. A student, like
Sobash, who needs support in order to discuss aspects of the place-
ment with the employer-supervisor, may request further visits from a
university-based visitor.

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Recommendation 3
The many different strategies designed to enhance workplace men-
toring that exist in the various literatures on placements and organi-
sational learning should be identified and expanded to meet the very
specific needs of situations and learners. As the students’ narratives
demonstrated, the interactions between mentor and mentee are com-
plex and bring together many different issues related to identity,
learning, resources, voice and power. The issues of ‘voicelessness’ and
the perceived lack of power articulated by students were further exac-
erbated by the role of the supervisor as assessor or examiner. This is a
difficult problem to resolve as in many workplaces there is only a cer-
tain number of supervisory staff and these have to supervise the stu-
dents while carrying out certain critical tasks in hospitals, schools and
other workplaces. However, some students had very few opportuni-
ties to talk to experienced people other than their supervisors. Other
mentors may be accessed more easily if a number of people are intro-
duced to the student during the welcoming phase. As Candy (1991)
has pointed out, ‘the quality of the personal relationships established’
(p. 200) will be crucial to the success of the learning undertaken.

Recommendation 4
Students need to be given opportunities to explore both the limita-
tions and the great richness of workplace learning in their university
classes. It is obvious that the placement experience has many chal-
lenging aspects. Such a perception supports those of Martin (1997). In
her investigation of the effectiveness of work-based university educa-
tion, Martin made the highly significant point that the learning to be
achieved during placements had to be seen as ‘problematic’ (p. 77) by
academic staff. At first, this insight was not seen to be especially
significant. However, given the students’ accounts of their experi-
ences, it is now seen that if not only the academic staff, but also the
students concerned, see the placements from this perspective, the
students may be better prepared for the surprises and limitations of
workplace learning, and paradoxically, better equipped to participate
in its richness. Students also need to know about learners as sojourners
and novices so that they can become active networkers as quickly as
possible.

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Recommendation 5
Students need to be given opportunities to re-position themselves in
relation to their existing resources while at the university and during
the crucial pre-placement visits to the workplace. It has been stressed
throughout this work that students will almost certainly need further,
more context-specific resources once in the workplace. They will need
to position themselves as,

• the manager, accessor and user of existing resources


• the manager, accessor and user of new resources
• the transformer of both existing and new resources.

Such images, which have been based on a variety of roles envis-


aged by Freebody (1992) in relation to emerging readers, allow the
student to escape images of the learner as the receiver of resources
framed as ‘information’. Using the ideas presented above, the student
in the workplace can be seen as a resource evaluator, a resource
accessor and a resource transformer.

Recommendation 6
Students will need to be given opportunities to define existing and
potential resources more broadly than may have been the case in the
past. What is most interesting is that experiences that were perceived
as unimportant beforehand will become more important in the new
situation. In his interview, Martin who in the previous Christmas hol-
idays had accompanied his brother on a door-to-door job selling
household security systems, narrated an account of such a transfor-
mation. Martin could not have predicted at the time that he would
later see this experience as a vitally important one because the com-
munication skills he had learned during the summer ‘really helped’
during his work placement with Company B.

Recommendation 7
Students need to be given opportunities to develop a greater aware-
ness of the resource networks within which they are located. The stu-
dent needs to explore and reflect on the placement in a way that takes
up the social situation as much as it does the experience of the indi-
vidual learner. In this context, an article by Morrison (1996) suggests

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that ‘the reflective practitioner’ (Schön, 1983) needs to reflect on the
‘setting’ as well as the ‘self’ (Morrison, 1996, p. 325). These sugges-
tions cannot be taken up at length here. What needs to be addressed
is the present focus on the learner as agent. More emphasis needs to
be given to the learner as a researcher of a new ‘field’ (Bourdieu &
Wacquant, 1992b, p. 108)—the unfamiliar workplace. Both place-
ment-oriented educators and students need to develop the skills nec-
essary to understand the complex situation of the sojourning learner
more adequately.

Recommendation 8
Students, university staff and workplace personnel need to build up a
variety of strategies to ensure that students have access to salient
competent peers. It is clear that peers are a key resource. As peers are
often competent rather than expert, their help can be understood
more easily and asked for more often by the students during their
placements. All institutions should be concerned with building up the
students’ professional networks and should see this as part of their
role. The building of peer-based networks is especially important for
students who are not as resource-rich as others.

Recommendation 9
Appropriate, situation-specific networking strategies need to be iden-
tified, encouraged and reflected upon. The interviews suggest that
some of the most confident students had access to many different
kinds of networks—ones based on information technology and
extended family relationships, as well as peers. Hence, another impor-
tant role that can be played by the universities who oversee the pro-
fessional education and training lies in their ability to build strong
networks of students before they enter the workplace. These networks
need to be based on both information technology and human
resources. Human networks cannot be fostered artificially, but have
to grow out of the activities that students undertake in seminars and
beyond. This seems to be one of the many strengths of problem-based
learning. As the learning is group-based, students are offered the
opportunity to participate in co-operative activities and can therefore
build networks before they enter unfamiliar workplaces. It may also
be possible to place students who have fewer resources in workplaces
with peers that they already know.

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Recommendation 10
Further attention should be given to the complex issues related to the
demands placed on certain students by the highly specialised lan-
guage of workplaces. The short transcript of a shift handover in an
Australian hospital included in Mawer (1999, p. 100) demonstrates
that the language used by experienced professionals can be an eso-
teric blend of colloquialisms, professionally based acronyms and
context-bound views of the job at hand.
In the students’ transcripts, two local students, as well as several
of the international students, commented on their lack of confidence
concerning their own spoken proficiency in certain workplace situa-
tions. While most universities offer support in the area of English as a
Second Language and learning and communication skills, such
assistance cannot be accessed readily in the workplace. As many
workplaces plan to offer English language courses, but do not imple-
ment such plans even for continuing employees (Dagher, D’Netto &
Sohal, 1998), it is only rarely that sojourning students can access pro-
grams that will support their need for highly specific professionally
oriented language. While the quality of the supervision provided is
critical here, this cannot always be determined before the placement
begins. As peer interaction will offer informal opportunities for lan-
guage learning, this is one avenue that can be explored. However, as
Volet and Ang’s (1998) study of culturally mixed groups at university
found that students preferred to work with other students from ‘sim-
ilar’ cultural backgrounds (p. 18), it cannot be assumed that peers in
the workplace will always be as helpful as Andy was to Sobash.

Final reflections
Hess (2001) has pointed out that researchers who have a perspective
influenced by feminism or cultural studies often separate the effort to
understand the informants’ perspectives from a second research
phase in which those perspectives are re-interpreted using ‘social sci-
entific analysis’ (p. 237). Such a method was adopted in relation to the
interviews conducted so that the concepts that emerged from the
transcripts were scrutinised using key ideas formulated by Bourdieu
and other writers. Throughout the discussion, it has been argued that
Bourdieu’s rich and diverse thought can be used to illuminate the
situation of students during the workplace components of their uni-
versity programs. This strategy also made it possible to situate the

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exploration in the ongoing discussion concerning the relationship
between the ways in which selves are constituted by contradictory
and changing discourses (Davies & Harré, 1990) and also by the ‘eco-
nomic and social conditions’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992b, p. 130, fn.
84) which social actors produce.
At its inception, the investigation seemed to be similar to the
ones that Sharp and Green (1975) had criticised so vehemently. In
their discussion of the tendency of researchers to explore educational
contexts using methods that had been influenced by ‘the phenome-
nological sociology of Alfred Shutz’ (p. 12), Sharp and Green argued
that it was simply not adequate to use concepts based on phenome-
nological sociology. Hence, in the present discussion, while the per-
spective of each social actor was considered to be central to the quest
for understanding, it was never forgotten that certain factors might
‘structure the opportunities for action’ (Sharp & Green, 1975, p. 6) in
ways that were significant even if not readily perceived, or able to be
articulated, by the participants themselves. However, if the data collec-
tion rested solely on the perceptions of the social actors, how were
those other important factors to be grasped or ‘understood’ by others?
The focus on resources and support provided a way of seeing
both the worlds of the students from their points of view and a
broader perspective at the same time. When the topic of resources
was made a focus of the book, it seemed that it was possible to under-
stand the students’ experiences ‘as the product of both symbolic con-
text and material circumstances’ (Sharp & Green, 1975, p. 6). Such a
strategy made it possible to move forward from the insights gener-
ated by theorists such as Berger and Luckmann (1967) who had
focused on the symbolic constructions of social actors to the more
complex insights generated by Habermas (1984) and Bourdieu who
have, in their different ways, struggled to give an account of the social
world that takes in more than ‘the creative power of individuals in
acting in and transforming the world’ (Sharp & Green, 1975, p. 23).
A final issue may merit some further investigation. It was made
clear in some interviews that several students who wished to obtain a
work placement in Australia could not do so. Workplaces have limita-
tions as places for learning. However, they also have a multitude of
strengths. It is important that all students have an opportunity to
participate in the workplace component of their program in Australia.

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Once on the placement, all students should have an opportunity to
learn in a positive culture, undertake appropriate tasks, and have
access to specialist language support as well as a wide variety of
human and technological networks.
In some programs of study, several students, both local and
international, talked about the interviewing process that determined
whether or not they would obtain a place in a specific workplace.
Their interviews show that, once again, certain students were able to
negotiate from a position of strength while other students were not
able to cross certain borders. The following account was narrated by
James, one of three students who were interested in participating in a
project for Company C, a large electronics company, as part of the
workplace component of their university program.

We went to an interview for that project [related to sophis-


ticated communications technology], with Company C and
they showed us what they’re doing, because we didn’t know
everything about the project and that’s why we had the
interview—to know more about it and see if they liked us
and would take us on.

In the end, James and his friends decided to decline Company


C’s offer and all later carried out the workplace components of their
programs with Company A. However, James reported on the inter-
view very positively, commenting, ‘They were very, very kind—they
gave us a choice of whether or not we wanted to do it ... because they
also wanted people to be happy doing the project’ .
In direct contrast to James’s experiences, Didi, an international
student, commented that some students could not even reach the
interview stage of the process. He commented, ‘If we got an interview
and then lose out after the interview, then fine. But [some of the stu-
dents] don’t even get an interview’. Didi elaborated on the situation
in the following way:

And when we came to the supervisor and asked, What’s


happening here? ... Are the marks not good enough? And
they explained it was because the company wanted to
employ someone who could stay in Australia when they

The Centrality of Placements 183

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graduated. That’s what they think. That eventually we will
go back to our own country. They sort of just don’t select us.
Which I think is not fair for us. We come to Australia to
study. But some of us want to stay here of course! Otherwise
what would we come for? We pay a lot of money. At the end
we can’t stay here—we have to go back to our own country.
So what is the point of coming? No point at all. (Didi, p. 9)

With these final voices, this exploration of fifty interviews with


students on their work placements draws to a close. Although chosen
to highlight possible directions for future research, these extracts
summarise the main argument of the book, which is that learning is
as much about identity as expertise and that belonging and becoming
within workplaces, their professional networks, languages and dis-
courses can be either happy or hazardous processes according to the
changes being asked of the learner.
It has also been argued—and demonstrated—that the resources
and support that learners can acquire, negotiate and transform
during any period of transition and learning will vitally affect the out-
comes of the experience, but will not always be able to be predicted
beforehand. Therefore, an important part of any learner’s prepara-
tion is the insight that he or she will never be completely prepared by
one context for the challenges posed in another.
Hence, it is the responsibility of those in higher education to
ensure that those deemed ready to make certain border crossings
have acquired the ability to achieve a perspective on the potential
and the limitations of work placements and the learner positions that
these may require. Learners also need to have rehearsed the various
voices that the students interviewed re-created while narrating their
own efforts to create new resources in specific workplaces.
This work has outlined the relationships between one group of
learners and the support and resources that they acquired, negotiated
and transformed during their work placements. It is hoped that
learners in their various identities will pursue the resources and the
support they require with greater vigour and a greater sense that these
are their right rather than their privilege while simultaneously realising
that all social actors have to position themselves within an interpreted
material and human world that always pre-dates their own becoming.

184 Learning to Work

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Index

agents, learners as resources and support for, 40–2


ambiguities in role of, 95–9 teaching practice in context of, 40,
Bourdieu’s perspective on, 59–64, 41–2
96–9, 166, 168–70 workplaces as setting for, 39–40
facets of assessment
autonomy and active learning, anxiety about, 156
31–4 by assessors, 113, 178
independence, 30–1 audience
problem solving, 34–5 for learners as performers, 43–4
self-direction, 27–30, 32, 60 at workplace social functions,
relevance of training materials to, 74
32–4 expectations of, 44
resources and support for, 35–6, humiliation by, 49
151 learners themselves as, 98
stresses faced by, 29–30 relationship of learner with, 46
understanding broader context of, role as resource, 48
165–6, 168–70, 180 sustaining performance for,
‘voice’ as indicator of, 17, 173–4 47–8
anxiety, feelings of, 156
apprentices, learners as, 3, 36–42 becoming, concept of see identity in
coaching in practical skills for, 36, workplace; learner as potential
38–9 belonging, acquiring sense of, 65–99
contrasted with experienced as a key issue in current study, 6–7
professionals, 36–9 identified by students, 66, 69
historical perspective on, 39–40 Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of,
nursing practice in context of, 36, 96–9
40 ‘difference’ as precursor to, 67–8, 98
reflective practice for, 36–41 gender issues in, 93, 94–5

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means of, 67–99 committed presence, 18
directed by workplace, 92, 95–9 demonstrated by supervisor, 111,
gifts as, 67, 78–80, 86, 93, 95, 97, 117, 161
99 value of, 125–6
greetings as, 67–72, 86, 93, 95, 97 community, learners as new
induction procedures, 67–80, members of, 51–4, 60
92–3, 95, 97 acceptance of, 173
initial tasks, 86–92, 94, 97–8 cultural aspects of, 51–3
significance of dress as, 70–2, language, 50, 53, 54, 126
80–6, 94, 96, 97, 99 importance of practical learning
workplace gatherings as, 67, for, 39–40
73–8, 86, 93, 97 initiation of, 67–99
pre-existing advantage in, 151–3 importance of names in, 79
student agency in, 85–6, 92, 95–9 resources and support for, 53–4
variable success in, 85–6, 92, 93, vulnerability of, 87
94–5, 98, 184 see also culture
see also identity in workplace culture
border crossers, learners as, 54–9 corporate, 149
challenges and opportunities for, definition of, 95
55 dress as marker of, 71–2, 85–6
hazards faced by, 55–7 entry into new, 49–50, 95, 97–9
initial experiences of, 66 workplace seen as, 51–4, 63
interview process as barrier for, role of language in, 53
183–4 see also community, learners as
language as important resource new members of
for, 173
problematic prospects for, 57–8 difference, identification of
resources and support for, 58–9 between Australia and home
sense of loss experienced by, 56–7 country, 4
work placements in context of, 58 between university and
Bourdieu, Pierre workplace, 16, 67–8, 98, 156
centrality of ideas of, 7, 18, between workplace and
165–70, 181–2 previous settings, 16, 67–8, 98,
concepts applicable to work 156, 164
placements, 59–64 ethical issues, 111–12
‘a feel for the game’, 151–3, 175 gendered workplace norms, 93
‘capital’, 63–4, 167, 172 in preliminary interviews, 22
‘field’, 63–4, 166–70 levels of expertise, 35, 41, 171–2
‘habitus’, 61–2, 63, 96–9, 151–2, personal and professional
175 persona, 124–5
‘practice’, 60–2 dress, significance of, 70–2, 80–6, 94,
preconstructed categories, 96, 97, 98, 159–60
overcoming, 10, 15, 16
interpretation of text, 10–11, 15, electronic resources see
17, 18, 23 technological resources
empowerment strategies of
clinicals see nursing training supervisors, 114–26

208 Index

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commitment to task, 114–17, social identity as aid to, 50
125–6 struggle with, 9, 81–4, 92, 97, 98
trust, 116, 119–26 transition to, 53–9, 166
professionalism, 124–5 difficulties in, 54, 56–8
recognition of ability, 119–26 see also belonging, acquiring
respect for opinions, 120–4 sense of; role in workplace,
enabling trust, 18, 125–6, 161 learning
epiphanies, 8 induction procedures
creating sense of belonging, 69
family support gatherings as component of, 73–8
effect of lack of, 150–1 gifts as component of, 78–80
international students’ access to, greetings as component of, 68–72
150–1 inadequacies in, 95
types of support obtained from, initial tasks as component of,
142–50 86–90
see also resources available to lack of consultation with students
students; support networks in, 92
perceived importance of, 68
gender issues initial phase of placement, 65–99,
make up of workplace, 93 100
problems in categorisation of, 17 challenges faced by students,
raised in other research, 12, 13, 17 65–7, 98–9
support networks, 163 learning to become competent,
66–7, 86–92
‘habitus,’ concept of, 61–3, 96–9, learning to belong, 65–86
151, 175 dress issues in, 70–2, 80–6, 97
gender issues in, 93, 94–5
identity in workplace, 65–99 induction procedures, 67–80,
as a key theme of current project, 92–3, 95, 97–8
64, 154–7, 165, 184 gatherings, 73–8
changing, as teacher, 28 gifts, 78–80
creation of, 43 greetings, 67–72
broader context of, 168–70 language issues in, 72, 93
co-operative role in, 173–4 negative experiences in, 70–2,
lack of equipment for, 48–9 81–4, 90–2, 93
naming as aspect of, 78–9 positive experiences in, 68–9,
provision of assistance in, 86, 73–81, 87–90, 93
166–8 resources provided in, 78–80
role of mentor in, 178 significance of, 94–9
degree of control over, 96 Bourdieu’s concepts applied to,
dress as aspect of, 70–2, 80–4, 97 96–9
forced acquisition of, 49, 92 students’ perceptions of
formulation of concept of, 21–3 difference in, 67–8, 98
not articulated in student tasks assigned in, 86–91
interviews, 68 international students
readiness to accept, 66 as component of students
rejection of, 6 interviewed, 4, 21

Index 209

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barriers to obtaining placements as means of learning, 27
by, 182–4 modelled by mentor, 39
degree of family support for, 142, professional, 39, 126, 156–7, 181,
150 183
difficulties experienced by, 102–6, need for assistance in
107–9 acquiring, 181, 183
evaluation of supervisors by, ‘lighthouse’ narratives, 7–9
104–9, 161–2 significance of, 8–9
friends as support for, 134–6, 138 literature survey
language proficiency of, 104, key images of learning, 23–64
134–6, 156–7, 181 organisational structure of, 23–5
other studies of, 21 phases in, 22
reassessment of assumptions theoretical bases of narrative
regarding, 21 interpretation, 7–18
response to challenges by, 156–7
self-confidence of, 158, 161 novices, learners as, 171–3
interpretation of text author’s interest in, 6
theoretical approaches to, 7–18 Benner’s perceptions of, 7, 35,
interviewees, background of, 4 171–2
challenges for, 46, 65–6
job interviews contrasted to junior colleagues,
job requirements not specified at, 1 172–3, 174
key questions underlying, 6–7 degree of trust in, 125–6
junior colleagues, learners as, 171–3 differentiation of experienced
professionals from, 36–9, 41–2
key concepts effect of induction procedures
identity, 154 on, 92
learning, 154–5 lack of studies of, 20
resources and support, 154–5, means of supporting, 38–42
158–65 need for articulation of role of,
accessing in workplace, 160–3, 105–6
164–5 preparation for students as, 178
accessing outside workplace, prior experience of, 3
163–4, 165 recognition of limitations by,
differing perceptions of, 175–6 135–6
initial perception of need for, nursing training
158–60 basis for assignment of tasks in,
90–1
language reflective practice in, 34, 36, 41
issues for international students, supervision of, 101–2, 106–9,
4, 72, 150–1, 156–7 119–21
difficulties with, 72, 132, 134–6, descriptors used for, 101–2
156–7, 181 inadequacies in, 106–9
as capital, 169 use of trust in, 119–21
as discourse, theories of, 13
as means of access to group or peer support
field, 50, 52–4, 126, 152, 173 friends, 133–42

210 Index

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types of support obtained from, as border crossers, 58–9
133, 135, 137, 138–42 as junior colleagues, 172–3
sources of, 129–42 as new community members,
workplace colleagues, 129–33 53–4
characteristics of, 133 as performers, 48–51
types of support obtained from, as potential, 26–7
129, 132–3 as sojourners, 170
people as resources see resources as ‘voices’, 174–5
available to students; support central significance of, 2–3, 25, 64,
networks 150–3, 154–5, 182
performers, learners as, 42–51 differing perspectives of, 175–6
difficulties faced by, 44, 46–7 effect of lack of, 5–6, 22, 108–9,
problems with concept of, 50–1 159–60, 164
resources and support for, 48–51 gifts as, 78–80, 158, 160, 167–8
use of language by, 50 in the workplace, 3, 5
see also role at work, learning opportunity to negotiate, 177
pilot interviews, 21–2 outside work, 3, 5
usefulness of, 22 people as, 3, 5, 35–6, 40, 48, 128–9,
potential, learners as, 25–7 180
process of ‘becoming’ for, 25–6 family members, 142–50, 153,
resources and support for, 26–7 163–4
‘scaffolding’ to support, 26 friends, 133–42, 153, 163–4
workmates, 129–33, 153, 163
recommendations for change, pre-existing, 2, 133, 156, 160, 165,
175–81 179
adaptation to individual needs, provided by supervisors, 126,
177 161–2, 164
identification of resources, 179–80 technological, 2–3, 129, 162–3,
language support, 181 180
networking skills, 180 theoretical perspectives on,
preparation for placements, 178–9 165–70
provision of mentors, 178 use in self-directed learning, 27–8,
welcoming strategies, 177 29, 30–1, 35–6, 60–1
reflective practice, 36–41 usefulness in practice, 32–4
approach to adult learning, 24 variation in, 155, 158–65
aspect of agenic learning, 27 viewing learners in relation to, 25
coaching novices in, 38–9, 40 see also supervisors; support
considering context of, 179–80 networks
strategies for developing, 38–41 role at work, learning
two types of, 37–8 alternative theorisation of, 39
use in nursing training, 34, 41 author’s experience of, 1–2
advantages of, 36 broader context of, 168–70
use in teacher training, 20, 33, challenging nature of, 98–9, 124–5
41–2 conceptualisation in dramatic
resources available to students terms, 42–9
as agents, 35–6 limitations of, 42, 43, 44, 50–1
as apprentices, 40–2 contemporary approach to, 3

Index 211

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difficulties in, 1–2, 44, 46–7, 56, strategies valued by students in,
81–4 112–26, 161
conflicting roles, 81–4 commitment to task, 107–9,
lack of guidance, 104–9 116–17, 125–6
framing questions regarding, 6 ethical approach to work,
Goffman’s ideas on, 42–9 111–12
images used in discussion of, explicit leadership and support,
24–59, 170–5 105–8
learner as performer, 42–51 language modelling, 104
interaction with supervisor in, trust and empowerment,
125–6, 161–2, 172–3 114–26
lack of definition in, 73–4 teaching practice, 101–6, 108–11,
relevance of dress to, 85–6 113–14, 117–19, 124–5
requirements for, 47–8 theoretical context of, 117, 119,
resources and support in, 48–50, 121–4, 125–6
97 unsatisfactory experience of,
significance of language, 50 102–14
student as active agent in, 95–6 supervisors
workplace as audience for, 43–4, as assessors, 113, 178
46–9, 74, 86–7, 157–8 crucial role of, 5, 39, 161–2
see also belonging, acquiring disagreement with, 109–14
sense of; identity in workplace effect of absence of, 103–9, 150
expectations of students by, 127
Said, Edward, influence on current factors impacting on effectiveness
project of views of, 18, 21, 158 of, 103, 109, 116–17, 128
scaffolding greetings as task of, 68
interactive learning through, 26–7, student expectations of, 112,
59, 174 114–15
see also resources and support; terminology used for, 101–2
supervision of trainees variable access to, 162
sojourners, learners as, 170–1 see also supervision of trainees
characteristics of, 170 support networks, 127–53
outsider status of, 173 reasons for accessing, 127–8
raising student awareness of, significance of, 151–3
178 types of
transition issues for, 171 family members, 142–51
sponsorship, validity of concept of, friends, 133–42
174–5 work colleagues, 129–33
strategic silence, 18, 112–14, 117 see also resources available to
stress, ability to handle, 127 students
supervision of trainees, 100–26
descriptive terms used by teaching practice
students, 101–2 critical evaluation of, 20
nursing practice, 101, 106–9, 112, peer coaching, 20
119–21 reflective practice, 20
positive experience of, 114–25 issues faced by students, 70–2,
significant factors in, 125–6 81–6

212 Index

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appropriate dress, 70–2, 81–6 learner as performer, 42–51
interaction with other staff, learner as potential, 25–7
70–1, 72 usefulness of, 24–5
professional manner, 81–4 lighthouse narratives, 8–9
supervision of, 101–6, 107–14, selection of concepts, 22–3
117–19, 124–5 transition
descriptors used by students experience of loss in, 56–7
for, 101–2 previous studies of, 21
positive experience of, 117–19, problematic aspects of, 57–8
124–5 risk of marginalisation in, 54–6
strategies employed in, 119, to independence, encouraging, 29
124–5 to new role, pressures of, 48–9
unsatisfactory experience of, transition to work
102–6, 107–14 complex demands of, 2
technological resources, 2–3, 129, resources to cope with, 2, 5
162–3, 180 support networks to assist with,
theoretical issues in this project, 7–18 2–3
data organisation and analysis, eased by familiarity, 49, 54
9–10 image of border crossing applied
epiphanies, 8 to, 58–9, 172–3
interpretation of narratives, image of sojourner applied to,
10–14, 22–3 170–1
comparison, 13, 15–16 need for support networks in, 128,
critical discourse analysis, 151
12–14 recognising placements as, 166
feminist perspectives, 12, 13 understanding challenges of,
grounded theory, 16–17 45–6, 65
protective governing, 16–17, 18 use of resources to support, 173,
step-by-step approach, 12, 14 174, 184
voice, 17 trusting dialogue, 18, 121–4
whole text, 11–12, 14–15, 16 trusting revelations, 18, 124–5
key images of learning, 23–64 trusting space, 18, 119–20, 123
Bourdieu’s perspective on,
59–64 voices, learners as, 173–5
learner as agent, 27–36
learner as apprentice, 36–42 welcoming strategies see induction
learner as border crosser, 54–9 procedures
learner as new community
member, 51–4

Index 213

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