Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism: teacher and nurse identities in flux Towards an uncertain politics of professionalism: teacher and nurse identities in flux 'Few professionals talk as much about being professionals as those whose professional stature is in doubt.' (F. Katz, in A. Etzioni The semi-professions and their organisation. Teachers, nurses, social workers 1969.)Our first purpose is to look at the epistemological, methodological and narrative strategies whereby 'professionalism' is currently conceptualised. We will try to show that the professional -as 'teacher' or 'nurse' -is an indefensibly unitary construct.There is no such thing as 'a teacher', and the notion of 'nurses' or 'teachers' is already too much of a generalisation. Similarly, we will hope to complicate the nature of 'professionalism', arguing that the analytical moves by which professionals are typified, staged, and judged betray a rather simple moral bias, chopping good from bad in unhelpfully crude ways.

This paper offers a discussion of team-working in mental health. It is based upon a 2-year study funded by the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting. The authors advocate that team-working should be studied situationally. The paper begins therefore by highlighting contextual tensions and paradoxes that create potential problems for effective team-working. It is argued that team-working is better caught as opposed to being taught. This involves a layered reading of vignettes and case studies, as well as 'hands on' experiences of team-working. Such an approach foregrounds for inspection the complexities and dilemmas of policy, models of practice and team-working patterns. As a result, the students build their own evidence-base, which is not built on the ideal (or optimal) but is located in the real everyday habitus of individuals in healthcare settings. This, the authors feel, is more likely to shift terms such as team-working, partnerships and so on, from merely remaining a healthy rhetoric.

This article traces how the language of the authors’ students jolted them into questioning their teaching of qualitative research. The authors discuss many of the inherent difficulties in trying to learn how to be a qualitative researcher as well as how to teach for qualitative research within a technical and academic structure. The authors argue that academic control of research has tamed desire and removed reality from everyday experience into a classroom conceived of and assessed by the maxims of modernity. Mindful of these constraints, the authors believe that there are things that can be done to disrupt the effects of disciplinary power, emphasizing an emotional engagement involving desire, passion, and eros when teaching and learning for qualitative research.

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Action research is growing in popularity as an approach to research in the nursing profession. Action research seeks to engage practitioners collaboratively into taking action to improve their situation; therefore, one could argue it is ideally suited to nursing since it is a practice-based profession. This paper examines how the action research process, which is underpinned by self-reflection, has the potential to develop practitioners both professionally and personally. A nurse tutor's experience of engaging in action research for the first time is outlined. The paper includes extracts from the tutor's diary to provide an insight into how she experienced, in particular, self-reflection as part of her learning about action research. Her experience was initially painful, but over a few months it became pleasurable as she discovered the joy in initiating positive changes in her work as well as in herself.

This paper had its genesis in a national project, sponsored by the English National Board for Nursing, Midwifery and Health Visiting, to explore team working within mental health practice. The project extended over a 2-year period and utilized various methods of data collection. However, this paper focused on data, from the national survey and informal interviews (based in eight regions), that addressed specific issues within the practitioner group. Of the 800 questionnaires sent out 26% were returned. Fifty-three percent of the returns were from practitioners, 14% user/carers and 33% educationalists. Our focus was that of the practitioners. This group had a response rate of 50% (i.e. 50% of the surveys sent out to practitioners were returned). A content analysis of 100 interviews was used to triangulate the data. Whilst the original brief was to explore team working the survey also highlighted data that indicated a common understanding of what mental health practitioners do and what they say they do and that, although there was a commonality of vocabulary, different practices existed between and within regions. This is the focus of this paper. We argue, from our findings, that different practice is a result of 'habitus'. Whilst practitioners reported that they subscribe to a national agreement of meaning, there is a rhetoric-reality gap: that which is said to be done is not what is, in fact, practised. At the local level we argue that working within the habitus (educationally) can address the rhetoric-reality gap. However, we recommend further studies in order to explore how working within the habitus can address this matter across regions.