Using Bourdieu to explore graduate attributes in two online Master’s programmes

Abstract

Within the expansion of postgraduate educational qualifications for health professionals, graduate attributes have become important markers of outcomes and value. However, it is not clear how or when graduate attributes develop, or how they are applied in professional practice after graduation. We interviewed 17 graduates from two online Master’s programmes to explore their perceptions of how postgraduate study had influenced their practice and professional identity. Our thematic analysis produced three main themes (academic voice, infectious curiosity, and expanding worldview) which reflected changes in the participants’ confidence, attitude, perspective, and agency across professional and academic settings. We then conducted a secondary phase of analysis using Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’, ‘capital’, and ‘habitus’. While graduate attributes have been conceptualised as the context-independent acquisition of traits that can be employed by individuals, Bourdieu’s framework highlights their relational qualities: they are caught up in the cultural history and context of the student/professional, the reputation of the awarding institution, and the graduate’s location within a network of professional peers.

A Postdigital Exploration of Online Postgraduate Learning in Healthcare Professionals: A Horizontal Conception

“…Part-time online learning and the movement of students between settings that this allows does the same for professional and academic settings, developing students' identities as educators through dialogue (Thorpe and Edmunds 2011), pedagogical space and performativity. Recent work with online students (Aitken et al 2019) specifically noted that the discipline required to produce assessments on a range of topics at regular intervals was a transformative experience amongst postgraduate students. However, this focus on assessment that fails to recognize that the whole learning experience is a formative one.…”

Ecological Teaching Evaluation vs the Datafication of Quality: Understanding Education with, and Around, Data

“…As Biesta (2005: 60) cautions, marketing-led depictions of learning as 'easy, attractive, exciting' are problematic because frustration, resistance, and challenge are key elements of education. Meaningful satisfaction, for us, comes with persistence and resolution, and students may not understand many of the benefits of their studying until well after the programme has ended (Aitken et al 2019;Aitken 2020,this issue). Transactional framings obscure the possibility that the purpose of education is not to deliver any pre-conceived knowledge but to explore possibilities and perspectives, and that students coming to understand their own wants and needs might be an important part of the educational process.…”

“…Overuse of outcome measures suggests that the benefits of education can be pre-determined, and creates an unrealistic distribution of responsibility, where teachers, programmes or institutions are held accountable for the relational contributions of the students. As we have argued, it can be difficult or impossible for students to predict in advance what they need to learn (see also Aitken et al 2019). Further, by ignoring the educational process, outcome measures are confounded by the student's effort, approach to learning and performance, strategies for success, and numerous variables such as socioeconomic and demographic variables, as well as health, family support, etc.…”

“…If education is not bounded in terms of technologies and structures, neither is it bounded in time. The diverse effects of educational programmes are complex and may not become clear until well after graduation, if ever (Aitken et al 2019). Therefore, the timing of evaluation matters, yet it is very difficult to know when it is most appropriate to evaluate.…”

“…Universities also have a responsibility to contribute to the production of new knowledge, and to equip students to take the lead in dealing with the considerable societal challenges before us (Naidoo and Williams 2015). Considering educational value, not only in terms of economic, but also cultural and social capital (Bourdieu 1986) allows a broader set of viable goals that align with long-term, and lesseasily measured, social needs (see, for example, Aitken et al 2019).…”