This paper explores the development of professional identity as a relationship between professional and personal aspects of life. The focus is on student and novice professional psychologists' and political scientists' processes of professional identity formation in their transition from higher education to working life. Drawing on Wenger's theory of nexus of multimembership (1998), the findings indicate that professional identity is a dynamic relationship between different life spheres rather than an isolated phenomenon only taking place at the university or in the work context. The analysis yielded three different forms of professional identity, non-differentiated identity, compartmentalised identity and integrated identity, which exemplify different negotiated relationships between professional, personal and private life spheres. The findings show that these three forms of professional identities are sequential, from an individual focus to more relational and integrated ways of reasoning about one's profession. It is through the negotiations between personal and socially derived imperatives that identity formation progresses throughout working lives.

BackgroundThe debriefing phase is an important feature of simulation activities for learning. This study applies a sociomaterial perspective on debriefing in interprofessional simulation with medical and nursing students. Sociomaterial perspectives are increasingly being used in order to understand professional practice and learning in new ways, conceptualising professional practice as being embodied, relational and situated in sociomaterial relations. The aim of the study is to explore how debriefing is carried out as a practice supporting students’ interprofessional learning.MethodsEighteen debriefing sessions following interprofessional full-scale manikin-based simulation with nursing and medical students from two different universities were video-recorded and analysed collaboratively by a team of researchers, applying a structured scheme for constant comparative analysis.ResultsThe findings show how debriefing is intertwined with, and shaped by social and material relationships. Two patterns of enacting debriefing emerged. Debriefing as algorithm was enacted as a protocol-based, closed inquiry approach. Debriefing as laissez-faire was enacted as a loosely structured collegial conversation with an open inquiry approach.ConclusionThe findings indicate that neither an imposed structure of the debriefing, nor the lack of structure assured interprofessional collaboration to emerge as a salient topic for reflection, even though that was an explicit learning objective for the simulation.

A central part of Swedish vocational teachers' work concerns their students' work-based learning (WBL). The focus of this article is the character of the relational work carried out by teachers of vocational education and training (VET) concerning WBL. The qualitative study is based on 15 interviews with teachers on the upper-secondary level Child and Recreation, Building and Construction, and Handicraft programmes. The study is based on a situated learning perspective, and uses the concepts of community of practice, broker and boundary crossing. The findings highlight three central aspects of VET teachers' relational work with WBL: recruiting workplaces for WBL, matchmaking between students and workplaces, and 'firefighting' to prevent and deal with problems that occur during WBL periods. The study contributes to the understanding of the work of VET teachers, as they cross the blurred boundaries between school and working life and strive to create a good learning environment for all students during WBL periods.

This qualitative and longitudinal study focuses on graduate employment and the development of graduate employment paths. The aim of this article is to explore the present professional trajectory from higher education to working life, with particular reference to graduates from two different study programmes at Linkö ping University in Sweden: Political Science and Psychology. More specifically, the article focuses on how graduates construe their professional trajectories in terms of their envisaged future work as senior students, and later as novice and early-career professionals with 18 and 34 months of work life experience. The results indicate that graduates' professional identities and vision of their future work change over time. The set of categories, depicting the graduates' vision and experiences of their professional trajectories, do not seem to follow a specific temporal and logical progression in their career. Rather, they appear in different order and at different points in time after graduation. The results, instead, endorse the discourse of lifelong learning and the need for flexibility and employability on the labour market.

Simulation exercises are becoming more common as an educational feature of the undergraduate training of health professionals. Not all students participate in these activities, but are assigned as observers of the actual simulation. This article presents a study that explored how social-material arrangements for observation of interprofessional collaboration in a simulated situation are enacted and how these observations are thematised and made relevant for learning. The empirical data consisted of 18 standardised video recordings of medical and nursing students observing their peer students simulate. Practice theory is used to show how observation is embodied, relational, and situated in social-material relations. The findings show two emerging ways of enacting observation-proximate observation and distant observation. The enactments are characterised by different socio-material arrangements concerning the location where the simulation took place and its material set-up as well as embodied "doings" and "relatings" between the observing students and instructors. The observing students are participating in a passive, normative position as an audience and as judges of what is correct professional behaviour.