Conference Programme 09 - Print (v2)

Learning for a Complex World
Learning to be Professional through a Life-wide Curriculum
University of Surrey, Guildford

Tuesday 31st March & Wednesday 1st April 2009
Conference Programme
Conference Committee
Professor Norman Jackson - Director of SCEPTrE

Clare Dowding - SCEPTrE Centre Manager and Project Co-ordinator
Professor David Povey - Associate Dean, Learning and Teaching for Health & Medical Sciences
Dr Peter Alcott - School of Management
Russell Law - SCEPTrE Fellows Co-ordinator
Nicola Avery - ELearning Advisor, ELearning Unit
Mrs Jeanette Holt - Careers Advisor
Mrs Helen Sterne - Student Personal Learning and Study Hub (SPLASH)
Kathy Jones - University of Surrey Student Union (USSU)
Jessica Lo - SCEPTrE Team Placement Student
Susan Wood - Conference Administrator
Supporting Organisations & Networks
Work Integrated Learning Network
Programme designed by Susan Wood and Jessica Lo
2
Contents
Page
Welcome from Chris Snowden, Vice Chancellor, University of Surrey 4
A Message from Professor Paul Ramsden, CEO HE Academy 5
Foreword - Professor Norman Jackson, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey 6
Conference overview 10
Conference Learning Experience 11
A quiet space 12
Entertainment 12
Registration Information: 14
• Registration desk 14
• Campus catering facilities 14
• Guildford 15
Floor plans 16
SCEPTrE External Fellowships 2009-2010 17
Work Integrated Learning Network 17
Programme & Abstracts
Papers and Workshops 22

Papers and Workshops—Timetable 24
3
Welcome from Professor Christopher Snowden,

Vice-Chancellor, University of Surrey
I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you who have come together to
share your ideas, experiences and practices so that we can improve our ways of
working and the higher educational experiences of our students. This conference
is setting out to connect two questions which are very important to us at Surrey
and to educators all over the world: ‘How do we help and enable our students to
learn to be professional?’ and ‘How can we encourage learners to utilise their life
experiences in this enterprise?’
These are important concepts because they engage with a core purpose of higher education – to
prepare people for the complexities they will encounter in challenging professional lives. They are
particularly important at a time of global instability when what seemed like normal patterns of
progression into a career have, for many students, been severely disrupted. Preparing these students so
that they can find their way in a turbulent world is a particular challenge and moral purpose for us all at
this time.
The wealth of perspectives offered by participants in this conference programme is testament to the
worthiness of the ideas and the high level of commitment and engagement that institutions are making to
tackling these complex but educationally important issues.
In July of last year the University of Surrey published its first Student Experience Strategy in which we
set out a vision for a more complete education. We are inspired by a vision of a higher education
experience that recognises that students are engaged in learning in all aspects of their lives throughout
their time at Surrey. It is this ‘whole life’ learning that enables students to develop their unique identity,
their subject, professional knowledge and skills and the means that will enable them to achieve their full
potential and be successful throughout their lives.
Our vision of ‘whole life’ learning embraces the ideas of ‘life-long learning’, ‘life-wide-learning’ and
‘personal wellbeing’ and encompasses formal and informal learning in the classroom, on work
placement, in paid or unpaid work, in extra-curricular settings and other aspects of life. It connects and
embeds academic and professional development within the disciplinary curriculum whilst encouraging
and enabling students to make use of the wide range of developmental opportunities offered by the
university and the wider world. It sees the professional training experience and the opportunity it
provides to work in an appropriate professional environment as a key component of learner development
and we are committed to endeavouring to provide every undergraduate student with the opportunity to
engage in work placement experiences. Our vision of learning encourages students to actively
participate in all the opportunities for learning that life has to offer and seeks to recognize and value
learning gained through experience outside the academic curriculum. Our commitment to this vision is
manifested in our recent decision to develop and evaluate a Surrey Award to enable the University to
publicly recognise the learning gained from experiences outside the formal curriculum.
I am delighted that the University of Surrey is creating a forum for professional interaction and
conversation on these important matters and I hope that the conference will stimulate new ideas and
result in new relationships, fostering the best possible student experience.
Professor Christopher M. Snowden FRS, FREng

Vice-Chancellor, University of Surrey.
March 2009
4
A Message from Professor Paul Ramsden,

CEO Higher Education Academy
Paul Ramsden joined the Academy in August 2004 as its first Chief
Executive. His career has combined an academic record in the field of
teaching, learning and policy studies in higher education with
experience in university management and leadership. His books,
‘Learning to Teach in Higher Education’ and ‘Learning to Lead in Higher
Education’, are among the classic texts on higher education teaching
and management.
The title of this conference, Learning for a Complex World, encapsulates a recurring theme in
discussions that informed my recent contribution to the Secretary of State’s higher education debate.
That submission, on the future of teaching and the student experience, points to the need to ‘ extend
our students, whether they study in traditional or less traditional ways, enabling them to find resources of
courage, resilience and empathy that traverse national boundaries’. It sets out ideas for how the student
experience might develop to provide ‘graduates who are educated to the standard which the future
economy and well-being of our nation demands. That standard must enable them to embrace
complexity, climate change, different forms of citizenship, and different ways of understanding
individuality and cooperation’.
These ideas accord with the University of Surrey’s Student Experience Strategy, founded as it is on the
‘vision of a complete education that prepares people for the challenges and uncertainties of their future
lives’. The conference is timely as it comes just as the Secretary of State is finalising the ‘framework’ he
will publish in response to the higher education debate.
This conference concentrates on learning to be a professional. This is a term that conjures up many
positive attributes – the OED thesaurus alternatives include ‘accomplished’, ‘skilful’, ‘fine’, ‘able’, and
‘deft’. While the conference looks at ways of making sure students can both describe themselves and be
described in these terms, they are equally as important for the academic staff. The quality of teaching,
curriculum and assessment which a student encounters during his or her years in higher education can
affect the course of a whole lifetime.
The role of the Higher Education Academy is to work with institutions, discipline groups and individual
academics on each of these aspects of the student experience. The word ‘professional’ appears in one
of the earliest significant pieces of work we did, the development on behalf of the sector of a
Professional Standards Framework for staff engaged in teaching and supporting student learning.
In wishing participants a successful conference, I would give particular attention to one of its aims: ‘The
conference encourages collaboration between staff and students’. My view is strongly that higher
education must be based on teamwork, in which students are treated as partners with academics in
learning. This has implications for the way we reform curriculum and assessment; the career paths and
professional development of academic staff; and above all for quality arrangements.
A very traditional view of the university is that it is a place where both teachers and students are there
for the sake of learning, engaged together in a search for solutions to incompletely-solved problems. The
proposals I have made to government for ensuring the quality of our future graduates will only work with
a firm grasp of the principle that higher education should be an engaged partnership between students
and those who provide higher education. Only then will we be able to offer a student experience that
prepares students for a more complex and challenging world.
5
Foreword
Living and learning in a turbulent world
This is the third of our learning for a complex world conferences and the
first time we have tried to link two themes at the heart of SCEPTrE’s
educational mission namely, the ideas of ‘learning to be professional’
and the ‘curriculum and life experiences’ that can best help learners
achieve their professional goal.
A few years ago, just before our first conference which focused on the theme of productive enquiry, I
came across the well known ‘Shift Happens’ video, which highlights the fact that we are preparing our
students for a lifetime of uncertainty, change, challenge and emergent or self-created opportunity. The
sticky message in the video is that higher education is helping learners prepare for a world where
change is exponential: we are preparing them for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that have
not yet been invented, in order to solve problems that we don’t know are problems yet.
We have only to observe the current economic situation to see how true these words are and we might
now add that we are preparing our students for jobs that no longer exist. Somehow graduating students
worldwide are going to have to cope with a world were opportunity for employment or work placement
has dramatically shrunk overnight. The first jobs students thought they stood a good chance of getting
are just not there anymore. Somehow, they are going to have to find a very different pathway into their
chosen professional worlds to the one that they imagined less than a year ago. They will have to be
more resourceful than their predecessors and they will need considerable personal agency and fortitude
to secure their own future.
But these difficult first-step challenges are merely the introduction to professional lives that will be full of
change. You have only to look at what has happened in the NHS in the last 10 years to see the amount
of change in every dimension of professional life. The majority of our students will have not one but
several careers, they will have to change organizations, roles and identities many times and be part of
new organisations that they help create or existing organisations that they help to transform. Many will
have to invent their own businesses in order to earn an income and or create and juggle a portfolio of
jobs requiring them to maintain several identities simultaneously. Preparing our students for a lifetime of
working, learning and living in ever more uncertain and unpredictable worlds that have yet to be
revealed is one of the greatest responsibilities and challenges confronting universities all over the world.
Thinking about such things raises different questions to the ones we normally consider when we talk
about employability which tend to focus on what we know and understand now, rather than the sorts of
skills, attitudes and personal agency that will enable our students to prosper in an indeterminate and
unknowable future. In this context the role of universities and professional educators becomes one of
searching for and finding better and more effective ways of supporting the development of human
agency (Bandura 2001)1 .
Agency is linked to engagement with the situations an individual encounters or chooses to be in when
performing a professional role. Engagement is not a set of techniques or mechanical procedures, but
rather a way of dynamic being, in which the individual employs and associates their knowledge, skills
and dispositions in flexible ways in some action to achieve a desired outcome2. There is purposefulness
which is implicit towards the emergent wholer; the relatedness of the parts and the emergence of
wholeness are one process. The process of engagement involves the integral, tacit, and non-linear
aspects of perception, and the result of the engaging process could be ‘a quantum jump’ that can never
be predicted.
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Stephen Billet’s contribution to our conference3 will help us think about the curricular, pedagogic and epis-
temological implications for developing the agency necessary to be an effective professional. At the heart
of this personal agency is the will to learn (Barnett 2005)4 and if your goal is to pursue a professional ca-
reer then at the heart of being is the will to become a professional in your chosen field. This is what Ron
calls in his abstract, ‘a professional will, a will to carry one forward into and through a very lengthy and an
arduous process of professional formation and professional development’ (Barnett 2009)5.
The wicked problem we share

Our students’ problem is our problem. The global turbulence we are experiencing is a ‘wicked problem’6,
by that I mean that what emerges from all the technical, informational, social, political, economic and cul-
tural complexity is a problem so complex that it cannot be solved through rational, linear thinking because
the problem and our understanding of it evolve as new possible solutions are invented and implemented.
Wicked problems always occur in a social context: the wickedness of the problem reflects the diversity of
views among the stakeholders on the nature of the problem and the ways it needs to be tackled.
For higher education, preparing people for the complexities of this world is a ‘wicked problem’ and the
higher education experience created by teachers, students and institutions is the evolving solution to the
problem. There is no right or wrong answer. We have to continually learn how to do it by building on what
works and trying new approaches. We also have to create social learning processes that enable people
who care about the problem enough to work together to pool their knowledge resources and creative
imaginations to solve it to craft possible solutions from the many possibilities. Problem wickedness de-
mands tools and methods that create shared understanding and shared commitment and this conference
is our attempt to do this.
What does being professional mean?

Having positioned the conference in the strategic context of engaging with the wicked problem that unites
all higher education, and placed the ideas of will and personal agency at the heart of the learning enter-
prise, we need to focus more pragmatically on the two ideas that underlie our conference.
The first of our ideas is formed around the concept of learning to be professional, but before we can learn
to be professional we need to have some idea about what being professional means. Michael Eraut
(1994)7 explores what this means in his book on developing professional knowledge and competence and
more recently in research on how professionals learn to be professional during the early stages of their
careers (Eraut 2007)8. Clearly different disciplinary fields provide a different context for being professional
– the professional actions and concerns of a doctor are very different to those of an engineer or lawyer.
But there is also a generic dimension to being professional that transcends discipline specific contexts:
both dimensions most be nurtured through the educative enterprise. We are not born with the attributes
that make us an effective and successful professional we have to learn and cultivate them, and turn them
into habits. In this conference we are interested in exploring questions like – what are the things that make
us professional and how do we develop the insights, capabilities and agencies that make us effective and
successful professionals? What can we learn about the way the habits of being professional are developed
in different educational /professional domains that can be adapted to other domains? What sort of experi-
ences enable learners to gain meaningful insights into what being professional entails? The conference
provides an opportunity for sharing diverse and rich perspectives about these questions.
7
Why a life-wide curriculum?

We need to move beyond the obvious that learning to be professional only requires the integration of an
academic and a professionally oriented practice-rich curriculum, to explore the opportunities for learning
to be professional that a life-wide curriculum9 offers. We are particularly interested in finding out from
others how insights, capabilities and agencies that contribute to excellent professional performance can
be gleaned from the diverse range of experiences that life has to offer and how this can be recognized
within the higher education educative process.
I’d like to try to illustrate this common sense proposition by simply referring to the everyday life of one of
our students. Andra is a 21 year old level 1 student from Romania studying Business Management at
the University of Surrey. We know her well in SCEPTrE for the way she has got involved in working with
us. She is a good example of the sort of student who exploits every opportunity she has for participating
fully and actively in enterprises from which valuable personal and professional development can be
gained outside as well as inside the academic
curriculum.
Andra has created a digital story about her life as a student and you can experience it through the con-
ference wiki http://learningtobeprofessional.pbwiki.com. So what does Andra’s life-wide learning picture
reveal. It shows us that she leads a very busy life that requires her to organize and manage her time, to
juggle many competing demands, requirements, opportunities, study, work and pleasure. She has to
think with sufficient complexity to manage her life. It shows us that she is stretching and challenging her-
self to do new things and taking a certain amount of risk by putting herself in new situations with people
she hasn’t met before. She enjoys using technology and makes good use of social software like Face-
book and wikis. She enjoys exploiting opportunities to be creative: she has participated in voluntary en-
terprises where she has worked in a team to provide a service – effectively creating things that did not
exist before and adding social and cultural value to the lives of others. She has experienced what it is
like to be involved in the formation of a new organization (the CoLab student enterprise).
Her jam-packed everyday life shows us that she is having to communicate with many different people in
many different situations and contexts, in her case in a language and culture that is not her own.
Through this she is mastering the subtleties and nuisances of English culture. She is a global citizen a
cultural translator mixing with members of her community and learning from their diverse cultural back-
grounds. In this complex communication process she is forming many relationships and many different
types of relationship. Her whole life is geared to relationship building, nurturing and sustaining these.
She is learning huge amounts simply from the way she conducts and engages with her life and I defy
anyone to say that these things are not essential to being a productive, effective and successful profes-
sional.
But more than this, Andra uses her life to foster who she wants to be. She is the expression of her life-
wide experiences and enterprises and her will to be who she wants to be (Barnett 2004). She is an ex-
cellent example of a student who comprehensively engages with the world and the opportunities it af-
fords her to learn and develop herself. The unique way she engages with and expresses her life and the
way that this is developing her self-belief provides us with all the reason we need to embrace the idea of
a life-wide curriculum: a curriculum that comprehensively nurtures the growth of her will to be the person
she wants to be.
While Andra is exceptional in her level of engagement, she illuminates well the potential for the complex
forms of learning, personal and professional development that can be gained through a life-wide curricu-
lum. Recognizing and valuing such learning But how do we recognize and value such uniquely individual
experiential knowing in a university curriculum that values discipline-based propositional and conceptual
knowledge above everything and academic credit and the honours degree are the only forms of recogni-
tion worth having. As always in a massively inventive and creative system there are pioneers who show
others the way.
8
A number of institutions, notably the University of York (which led the way), University of Exeter, Liver-
pool John Moores University and the University of Reading, have developed and implementation frame-
works for awarding credit, certificates or significant awards for learning gained outside the formal curricu-
lum.
Frameworks that recognise and value learning from life-wide experiences have the potential to encour-
age students and staff to develop broader conceptions of learning and recognise that valuable learning
is gained from a wide range of formal and informal experiences. By valuing learning in this way we can
encourage learners to reflect on their experiences and develop the metacognitive capacities that are so
important to becoming an agentic professional. An Awards Framework would also encourage learners to
participate in experiences outside the formal curriculum for their own intrinsic value. It might also help
address the difficult issue of students’ creative development10: there are many more opportunities for
self-motivated creativity outside formal education than there are within.
In a conference that promotes the life-wide concept of learning we need to understand: what are the
most facilitative frameworks for encouraging, supporting and recognizing learning gained in environ-
ments that academics and institutions can’t control? How do we persuade and educate colleagues, stu-
dents and their parents, and employers to recognize the value of such frameworks and the learning they
promote? What are the most cost effective ways of supporting, evaluating and recognizing such learn-
ing? Robert Partridge, who has pioneered the use of such frameworks at the University of York will help
us engage with these sorts of question11.
Our learning enterprise

The wealth of perspectives being brought together through 60 volunteered and invited contributions en-
sures a high level of engagement with the central themes of the conference. Our conference wiki pro-
vides us with a means of building and connecting knowledge resources before, during and after the con-
ference and there are also a number of processes designed into the conference to facilitate sharing of
personal knowledge. We look forward to many interesting and useful conversations and the new ideas
that will emerge from our social interaction.
References
1 Bandura A ( 2001 ) Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 52:1-26
2 Ya-hui S (2008) Assessing Graduate Attributes for Employability in the Context of Lifelong Learning: The holistic approach 34th
International Association for Educational Assessment (IAEA) Annual Conference was held in
Cambridge, England
http://www.iaea2008.cambridgeassessment.org.uk/ca/digitalAssets/164891_Su.pdf
3 Billett S (2009) Learning to be an agentic professional: Conceptions, curriculum, pedagogy and personal
epistemologies. Abstract Learning to be Professional through a Life-Wide Curriculum
4 Barnett R (2004) A Will to Learn: being a student in the age of uncertainty. Buckingham: Open University Press, McGraw Hill
Education.
5 Barnett R (2009) Willing to be a professional. Abstract Learning to be Professional through a Life-wide Curriculum conference
University of Surrey
6 Rittel, Horst and Melvin Webber (1973) Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences 4, Elsevier Scientific Pub-
lishing, Amsterdam, pp. 155-159.
7 Eraut, M (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence Routledge-Falmer Abingdon and New York
8 Eraut M (2007) Learning from Other People in the Workplace, Oxford Review of Education, 33 (4), 403-422
9 Jackson N J (2008) A Life-Wide Curriculum: Enriching a traditional WIL scheme through new approaches to
experience-based learning http://learningtobeprofessional.pbwiki.com/Life-wide+curriculum
10 Jackson N J (2008) Tackling the Wicked Problem of Creativity in Higher Education.
http://surreycreativeacademy.pbwiki.com/Resources
11 Partridge R (2009) Facilitating and Recognising Life-Wide Learning: the ‘York Award’. Abstract Learning to be Professional
through a Life-wide Curriculum conference University of Surrey
9
Conference overview
Tuesday March 31st AC Building
10.00-11.15 Registration SCEPTrE reception 01/AC01

11.30-12.45 Opening plenary session
Professor Nigel Seaton Deputy Vice-Chancellor
Professor Norman Jackson SCEPTrE Director
Professor Ron Barnett keynote speaker
12.50-13.50 Finger buffet lunch Wates House
14.00-14.55 Parallel sessions
15.00– 15.55 Parallel sessions
16.00 Coffee break: 01AC02 & foyer AC03
16.40-17.35 Parallel sessions
WATES HOUSE
19.00 Reception Kai Janson, SCEPTrE Musician in Residence

19.30 Hot buffet conference dinner
Continued musical entertainment and Wates House Bar (until 11pm)
Wednesday April 1st AC Building
07.00 Breakfast in ‘Seasons Restaurant’

08.00-8.55 International Dialogue with colleagues in Australia via AGN video con-
ference suite 01AC02 (continental breakfast)
09.00 – 09.55 Parallel sessions
10.05 – 11.00 Keynote ‘Improving the quality of work placements’
Professor Michael Eraut
11.00 – 11.30 Coffee break 01/AC02 and AC03 foyer
11.35 – 12.30 Parallel sessions
12.35 – 13.30 Finger buffet lunch Wates House
13.40- 14.35 Parallel sessions
14.45-15.45 Final plenary session – what have we learnt about learning to be pro-
fessional through a life-wide curriculum?
15.45 Tea/coffee 01/AC02
10
Conference Learning Experience
People learn through the conference experience in different ways. We experience the formal programme
of presentations and participate in workshops, study posters, pick up handouts and other materials, have
many informal conversations in coffee breaks, over lunch or dinner and in bars. Sometimes the most
interesting things we learn are entirely by chance. Our enterprise is what John Dewey would have called
productive inquiry – ‘finding out the things we need to find out in order to do the things we need to do’.
We want to enrich these valuable ways of learning through three storytelling processes that we will sup-
port during the conference.
Storytelling
We learn important things through stories. Our wisdom and experiential knowing is embedded in the sto-
ries we tell about ourselves. Stories invest our lives with meaning, they develop and express our creativ-
ity. We organise information in story form. It is how we make sense of the world around us and it is how
we communicate that understanding to one another. We want to encourage storytelling about the central
themes that the conference is intending to address namely how participants have come to understand
what being professional means.
1. Personal stories about being professional

Prior to the conferences we would like you to tell a story about an incident or event in your life through
which you gained important insights into the meaning of being professional. Through this process we
hope to connect people and their lives and reveal some important propositional knowledge about being
professional which is embedded in our personal knowledge. Russ Law (SCEPTrE) will be compiling and
synthesising the stories and we will make them available through the wiki.
2. Digital Storytelling : opportunity to find out how to make one during the conference
Digital storytelling is a method of capturing reflections and thoughts through a combination of visual and
oral processes. They are a powerful aid to the reflective and analytical process that enables us to learn
through experience. The emphasis is on the narrative, rather than the digital processes employed to
‘capture’ the story. Digital stories can take a variety of forms, but at their simplest level they consist of a
series of still images – perhaps 6-8 separate images – linked by a voice-over narration of about 2-3 min-
utes (the equivalent of about 250-300 words). Good examples of digital stories can be viewed on the
BBC Capture Wales site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/capturewales/. Digital storytelling is fast becoming an
important tool in higher education to aid reflection to draw out deeper meanings from rich experiences.
During the conference Martin Jenkins and Phil Gravestock will provide an ongoing coaching service to
help conference participants construct their own digital stories, perhaps based on their personal stories
of learning what being professional means.
Book an appointment with Martin or Phil in the digital storytelling base room on the second floor
of the AC Building 03/AC02.
11
Phil Gravestock is Head of Learning Enhancement & Technology Support at the University of Glouces-
tershire. Phil’s interest in storytelling began with the use of storytelling to assist students to reflect on
their learning during fieldwork. Subsequently, Phil was introduced to digital storytelling by a colleague
who had worked on the BBC Capture Wales project, which resulted in the Higher Education Academy/
JISC-funded Pathfinder project ‘Enhancing Students’ Learning Experiences Through the Use of Digital
Storytelling’.
Martin Jenkins is Academic Manager of the Centre for Active Learning at the University of Gloucester-
shire. Introducing new students to digital storytelling during their university induction, as a means of en-
couraging reflection and engagement, was the start of Martin’s journey with this approach. He has sub-
sequently worked with colleagues from across the University helping them to use digital storytelling in a
range of educational contexts.
3. Visual Dialogue : telling stories through self-created pic-

tures
Visual Dialogue is a process in which pictures are used to encour-
age people to speak more specifically and personally about their
work, their thoughts and feelings and their imaginative ideas. This
naturally promotes sharing of experience which is the key to de-
veloping better and deeper shared understandings. Turning con-
versations about complex abstract ideas into pictures is a way of
searching for and sharing meanings. SCEPTrE has used visual
dialogue to represent what it is trying to do. Our walls are covered
in images which symbolically represent our struggle to compre-
hend the ideas that lie at the heart of our educational mission ‘learning for a complex world’ and more
recently the idea of a ‘life-wide curriculum’. The pictures are not intended to provide a systematic and
rational explanation of an idea: rather they are intended to convey in a symbolic way a sense of the pos-
sible meanings, relationships, activities, effects and emotions embedded in the ideas. During the confer-
ence Julian Burton (Delta7 Consultancy and SCEPTrE Associate), assisted by Caitlin Walker (Training
Attention Ltd. and Liverpool John Moores University) who specialises in the use of metaphors in storytel-
ling, will provide an ongoing coaching service to help conference participants construct their own visuali-
sations and metaphorical expressions of being professional.
Book an appointment with Julian and Caitlin in the Visual Dialogue base room on the second
floor of the AC Building 01/AC02.
Julian Burton started Delta 7 in 1998, and worked for several years working as a graphic facilitator for
business leaders. With a background in medical illustration, he found huge demand for his ability to rep-
resent complex information in simple visual form. Over time he developed an interest in change, particu-
larly the role of conversation as a process of meaning making and transformation. This led to the crea-
tion of Visual Dialogue. Delta7 has implemented Visual Dialogue in well over a hundred organisations
across the public, private and third sectors.
Caitlin Walker graduated in Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in 1993 and began
modelling teaching methodology while at SOAS, volunteering intermediary classes to translate informa-
tion presented at lectures into different learning styles for the students. She currently elicits 'metaphors'
to make clear sense of complex information in business and in educational contexts and the co-designs
'systemic' sustainable change programmes for organisations and for individuals. Her clients include: the
police, the NHS, Boots People Point, various businesses, Secondary and University contexts and many
more.
12
A quiet space
Conferences can be very busy places so we are offering you a

place where you can find a bit of peace and quiet away from all
the hubbub in ‘SPLASH’ (Student Personal Learning and Study
Hub) which is located on the third floor of the library. To gain
access to this peaceful place simply go to the reception desk at
the library entrance and give your name. The space contains
comfy chairs and a Reflective POD which supports the personal
and professional development of students on part time pro-
grammes at the London College of Fashion (see Alison James
abstract 23).
Entertainment
Kai Jansen
Kai is a talented musician, singer/song writer/poet. You can hear some of his music
on his website. Kai will be providing a musical contribution to our conference re-
ception and dinner and who knows what might happen beyond this?
h t t p: / /w w w. k a i jan se n. c o .u k /
Closer than a tear

A birthday is a strange affair, which some will love or fear,
The hopes and dreams come round again and some may stop off here,
And when all celebrations cease, the wine and every beer,
Will leave a stale reminder of the old and passed on year,
And if these have not fulfilled your time, the question poses near,
Just why we humans count the time at all seems strangely queer,
For in this moment now, behold the thing that you hold dear,
As all that we can ever have is closer than a tear…
K Jansen 2002
Guildford School of Acting
A vibrant mini dance festival from level 2

musical theatre students from Guildford
School of Acting.
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Registration Information
Registration Desk Audio Visuals

Student technologists will be on hand
The Registration Desk is located on the during both days to help presenters with
Ground Floor of the AC building; any technical needs.
SCEPTrE’s main reception. On arrival you
will be given a name badge and a folder Alterations in Programme
containing all of the conference The Conference Committee reserves the
information and conference programme. right to make such alterations to the
programme as circumstances.
The opening hours for the registration Car Parking

desk are as follows: Car park permits have been issued to all
delegates, residential and day visitors.
Tuesday 31st March 10.00am-12.00pm Please display them clearly through the
windscreen. Parking is available in the
main car park on campus.
A floor plan of the venues being used at
the conference can be found on page 16
Non-smoking policy
Breakfast on Wednesday 1st April will be Smoking is not permitted in any of the
served in Seasons Restaurant for conference venues. Outside smoking
residential delegates. All lunches and the areas are available.
conference dinner will be provide in Wates
House.
Campus Catering Facilities
A traditional licensed bar and

a beer garden are also part Starbucks - Beverages.
of the Wates House Beans. Baristas.
experience. Offering a variety of shot &
cold snacks.
(9am-9.30pm Mon to Weds /
9am-11pm Thurs to Fri) food Monday to Friday 8am until
available 12-2pm then bar 10pm.
snacks
It offers a full range of Lakeside Restaurant -

coffees and also a selection offering a contemporary,
of beans. Enjoy a take-away brasserie style dining
coffee or an ice cold Frappe. experience incorporating
many global flavours to
(8am - 4pm) reflect the international
status of the University of
Surrey.
Offering a full range of Monday to Friday with

snacks and freshly made lunches served between 12
sandwiches and 2pm.
Visit our made to order
baquette bar
Cooked breakfast is Conference dining only
available untill 11am
14
(8am-2.30pm)
14
Guildford
Guildford, just ten minutes walk away, is a bustling, historic town with medieval
buildings and a cobbled high street. Guildford is one of the top shopping centres
outside of London offering specialist food, music, designer label shops, traditional
street markets, modern shopping malls and boutiques to ensure no shortage of
choice. Nightlife is lively with three night clubs, over 25 pubs and bars and restaurants
to suit every taste and budget. There is a major regional theatre within the town, The
Yvonne Arnaud offering plays, shows, opera and ballet. The Spectrum Leisure
Centres offers excellent swimming, ice-skating, athletics, basketball and ten-pin
bowling facilities to complement the University's own sports facilities.
Campus Map
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15
Floor Plans STAIRS
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RECEPTION
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TOILETS
Tea & Coffee

Station Floor 2
01AC02
RECEPTION 02AC02
LIFT 01AC01
Lecture
Theatre
STAIRS
03AC02 AC LEVEL 02
02AC01
Lecture
Theatre
TOILETS
01AC03 02AC03 03AC03 04AC03

LIFT
STAIRS
05AC03
AC LEVEL 03
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Tea & Coffee

Station Floor 3
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STAIRS
16
SCEPTrE Fellowships 2009-10
The Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education is offering up to seven Fellowships
each worth £3000 to educational professionals who are willing to work collaboratively with SCEPTrE to
promote the development of student learning experiences that seek to combine and integrate learning from
academic, work and other life experiences.
Pedagogic objectives
• Research – knowledge and understanding for better practice: To advance understanding of how
and what students learn while they are on placement and discover the most effective ways of helping
them learn and recognize and record what they have learnt.
• Practice improvement: To encourage the development and spread of practices that are most effective
in helping students prepare for placement, support and encourage them while they are on placement,
and help them integrate what they have learnt when they return from placement.
• Curriculum development that encourages professional and personal development from the
whole of life: To encourage and support curriculum innovation that seeks to enhance students’
professional and personal development and integrate learning and problem working from discipline
study, work, the co-curriculum and other contexts where important life-skills can be developed.
To apply for a Fellowship you must be based in a higher education institution in the UK or overseas.
Funding must be used to support a project aimed at further developing the curriculum or students' experiences in
line with the pedagogic objectives outlined above. Funding can also be used to support study visits or short
secondments to the SCEPTrE Centre, and/or participation in conferences in order to disseminate the results of a
project. There is an expectation that External Fellows will be part of the SCEPTrE Fellowship community and that
they will share the results of their pedagogic development work with the wider community through SCEPTrE’s
wikis and conferences.
Fellowship policy and application form

http://sceptrefellows.pbwiki.com/
If you would like to discuss a proposal please contact [email protected]
Closing date April 24th 2009
Work Integrated Learning Network (UK)

A network for people who are interested in promoting learning through curricular and other experiences that com-
bine and integrate experience, study, work and learning in university, work and other contexts.
To find out more visit:

Wiki : http://workintegratedlearning.pbwiki.com/
Mail list : http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/WORKINTEGRATEDLEARNINGUK.html
"Work Integrated Learning combines professional work experience with classroom study in many forms to include:
internships, study abroad, co-operative education, clinical rotations community service and student teach-
ing" WACE. The ideals of WIL are to integrate learning in academic and work environments but the ways in which
academic, work and other social/experiential contexts are combined, the levels of engagement and participation in
work-relevant situations and the levels of integration and connectivity, are quite varied. While this diversity makes it
difficult to explain what WIL means, the rich opportunities for learning that WIL affords can lead to inspiring
17
Invited Speakers
RON BARNETT is Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of

Education in London. He is a world authority on the conceptual
understanding of the university. He has published extensively on higher
education research, policy and practice and has acted as consultant for
most of the leading national bodies in higher education, including the English
and Scottish Funding Councils. He currently serves on a number of major
education committees and is Chair of the Society for Research in Higher
Education. His many books include Realizing the University in an age of
supercomplexity (2000) and the prize-winning Beyond all Reason: Living
with Ideology in the University (2003). His most recent work is Engaging the
Curriculum in Higher Education (with Kelly Coate, 2005). His book, A will to
Learn: being a student in an age of uncertainty (2007), provides the
inspiration for his keynote contribution at the start of the conference.
MICHAEL ERAUT is Professor of Education at the Sussex Institute of the

University of Sussex. Michael is a world in the field of professional learning
and how professionals learn in work place settings. His pioneering research
has found that most learning occurs informally during normal working
processes and that there is considerable scope for recognising and
enhancing such learning. Professor Eraut’s books include the highly
acclaimed Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence. SCEPTrE
is fortunate to have Michael as its Senior Research Advisor. His SCEPTrE
work is focused on recontextualising the research-based knowledge he has
gained through his work on how professional’s learn through work and
helping us gain deeper insights into how we might improve our students
experiences of learning in their professional training year.
STEPHEN BILLETT is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the

School of Education and Professional Studies at Griffith University,
Brisbane, Australia. Stephen has worked as a vocational educator,
educational administrator, teacher educator, professional development
practitioner and policy developer within the Australian vocational education
system and as a teacher and researcher at Griffith University. Since 1992,
he has researched learning through and for work and has published widely
in the fields of vocational learning, workplace learning and conceptual
accounts of learning for vocational purposes. His sole authored books
include Learning through work: Strategies for effective practice (Allen and
Unwin 2001); Work, change and workers (Springer 2006) and edited books
Work, Subjectivity and Learning (Springer, 2006) Emerging Perspectives of
Work and Learning (Sense 2008). Stephen currently holds an Australian Teaching and Learning
Fellowship that focuses on the development of agentic learners in higher education through the
integration of experiences in university and practice settings in the fields of nursing, physiotherapy,
social work and midwifery. His contribution to the conference will focus on the development of agentic
professionals.
18
URSULA LUCAS is Professor of Accountancy Education at University of

the West of England. She is a National Teaching Fellow, professional
accountant and educational researcher and a Senior Fellow of the Higher
Education Academy. Acknowledged internationally and recognised for her
outstanding achievement and contribution to teaching of and research into
accounting education, Ursula’s work is driven by her belief that the
development of learning and teaching expertise should be championed
within both higher education and professional training. Ursula’s contribution
to our conference focuses on reflection as a key personal agency for
learning to be a professional.
KAREN EVANS is Professor of Education (Lifelong Learning) at the

Institute of Education, University of London. At the Institute of Education she
was Head of the School of Lifelong Education and International
Development from 2001 to 2005, and is currently co-director of Centre for
Excellence in Work-Based learning for Education Professionals. Karen’s
research interests are learning in life and work transitions, and learning in,
for and through the workplace. She has directed 15 major studies of
learning and the world of work in Britain and internationally, funded by the
ESRC, charitable institutions (including the Leverhulme Trust), the London
Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Anglo-German Foundation,
the European Commission and a range of Government agencies. Karen's
most recent ESRC TLRP project ‘Putting knowledge to work: Integrating
work-based and subject-based knowledge in intermediate-level
qualifications and workforce upskilling’, has developed a conceptual framework and methodology for
analysing the way curricular that are designed to support the integration of learning in work and the
classroom are designed. The challenge is to extend this methodology from the specific curriculum
contexts in which the methodology was developed to more typical WIL scenarios in higher education.
PAUL MAHARG is Professor of Law, Co-Director of Legal Practice Courses,

and Director of the innovative Learning Technologies Development Unit in
CPLS at the University of Strathclyde. He has published widely in the fields
of legal education and professional learning design. His specialisms include
interdisciplinary educational design, and the use of ICT at all levels of legal
education. He recently participated in a 2 year JISC-funded interdisciplinary
project involving law, architecture, social work and management science to
develop an open source simulation environment SIMPLE (Simulated
Professional Learning Environment), which is designed to enhance student
and professional’s learning within and across professions. In his contribution
to the conference on the theme of ‘Social software, professional
relationships and democratic professionalism' drawing on the experience
gained through this project. Paul blogs at http://zeugma.typepad.com and
you can find out more about his educational philosophy and practice through
his influential book 'Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching
the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century', Ashgate Publishing, 324pp. www.transforming.org.uk
19
PHIL McCASH works as a Lecturer and Course Director for the postgraduate Certificate/ Diploma and
MA in Career Education, Information and Guidance in Higher Education: a joint University of Reading
and AGCAS qualification. He has been involved in teaching and researching Career Studies in higher
education for the past ten years. Phil authored the Career Studies Handbook: career development
learning in practice published in the Higher Education Academy’s Learning and Employability series.
ROBERT PARTRIDGE is Director of the Careers Service at the University of York. He led the
development of the York Award and has successfully managed it since it began in 1998. The York
Award is a skills and personal development programme for undergraduate students, which aims to
prepare them for the world of work. In 2008 Robert was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in the
'Learning Support Staff' category, encourages students to be inventive in the ways in which they use
their time at university, promoting the concept of a learning environment which is unconstrained by
classroom walls. He has a great interest in student volunteering and believes that higher education
should promote active citizenship. He is using his NTF award to encourage academic staff to offer
community-based research projects to final-year undergraduate students, helping them to develop a
greater understanding of their subject and its application in the real world.
COLIN BEARD is a Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Organisation &

Management, Sheffield Hallam University. He is an expert practitioner in
designing and facilitating experiential learning, completing a doctorate in this
fiield and co-authoring a key text in the field ‘Beard, C. and Wilson, J. (2006)
Experiential Learning: A Best Practice Handbook for Educators and Trainers,
(2nd Ed.) (London, Kogan Page)’. His expertise is recognised in a National
Teaching Fellowship Awarded by the Higher Education Academy.Colin is
working with SCEPTrE to help develop a more experiential higher education
curriculum.
20
PAULO LOPES earned his B.A. in Economics and Ph.D. in Psychology from
Yale University. He is Senior Lecturer at the University of Surrey, in England,
where he teaches social psychology focusing on emotions, interpersonal in-
teraction, and conflict. At the Catholic University of Portugal, he teaches MBA
classes and executive seminars on emotional intelligence and managing peo-
ple, as well as on creativity and innovation. His research focuses on the de-
velopment of interpersonal and emotional skills in adulthood, and he has pub-
lished more than 15 journal articles and book chapters on these topics. In his
earlier career, he worked in business and journalism. He wrote for leading
Portuguese newspapers, the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal,
and co-directed an award-winning documentary film. Paulo is a SCEPTrE
Fellow and his work is aimed at improving students’ preparedness for the
interpersonal and emotional challenges that face them in the real world work environment.
FRED BUINING Based in the Netherlands, Fred’s international consultancy

‘Fredwerk’ helps organizations to change by discovering and harnessing their
creative potential. His clients include both multinationals and small
enterprises. He is working with the University of Surrey to help staff and
students develop the skills to facilitate group creative thinking. Fred is an
expert professional facilitator he has helped SCEPTrE develop Creative
Academy.
21
Papers & Workshop—Index

Name Paper Title Abstract
No.
Peter Alcott Learning in the workplace: how can we help students reflect on their experiences? 1
Helen Allan Negotiating supernumerary status: a new twist in the hidden curriculum in nursing? 2
Ron Barnett The will to be a professional: how a life-wide curriculum might encourage important features of will 3
John Baxtor and Learning to be a professional in an academic context; preparing for professional training in Engineering 4
Penny Burden
Colin Beard Just three steps? A simple practical technique for improving students’ understanding of ‘experiential knowing’ 5
Margaret Berrie Shaping the new professional for a complex world 6
Nigel Biggs and Enterprise Academy : learning to be enterprising; a key agency for life 7
others
Nigel Biggs Life-wide enterprise in action in a University environment 8
Stephen Billett Learning to be an agentic professional: conceptions, curriculum, pedagogy and personal epistemologies 9
Lindy Blair Developing professional qualities in levels 1 & 2 of undergraduate study 10
Fred Buining Developing creative agency: helping learners think like designers for problem solving in complex professional worlds 11
Carrie Cable and Developing a questioning approach: the experiences of some students following a foundation degree in Early Years at 12
others the Open University
Sarah Campbell Learning to cope with immersive experiences: a life-wide perspective 13
Janko Calic Developing an Engineering professional through collaborative enquiry 14
Barry Cooper and Personal journeys across regulatory tramlines: dilemmas of professional learning in social work 15
Maggie Pickering
Clare Dowding and CoLab– Learning how organizations work through student-based enterprise 16
Norman Jackson
Michael Eraut Improving the quality of work placements 17
Karen Evans Seven principles for putting knowledge to work: exploring their potential for the 'sandwich placement model' of work 18
integrated learning.
Catharine Grob Widening access to professional language through enhanced podcasting. From cabbage to C.A.B.G? 19
Jackie Haigh Using a web-based personal learning system in the transition from student to health practitioner 20
Jackie Haigh and Using eportfiolio action planning tools to support learning in clinical practice 21
Jan Porter
Roger Harrison and Becoming a professional in the childrens’ workforce 22
Ann Pegg
Alison James Fashion futures and “Legs 11”: how a reflective pod is supporting the personal and professional development of 23
students on part time programmes at the London College of Fashion
Martin Jenkins and The value of digital story telling in learning to be professional 24
Phil Gravestock
Tracy Johnson Developing students’ professional skills using PDP and self-coaching techniques 25
Mary Ann Kernan Use of the PDP process and an e-portfolio tool to support professional & career development learning activities 26
and Rae Karimjee
Arti Kumer Developing students’ professional behaviours using assessment centre approaches 27
Nicola Langton PDP, careers and professional bodies – a meeting of the ways? 28
Anne Lee What lies in store for the PhD student? PDP, competencies, attributes and professionalism 29
Jane Leng Exploration of the value of digital story telling as an aid to reflection and transfer of tacit practice knowledge 30
22
22
Paulo Lopes Managing challenging interpersonal situations: how can we help students prepare for the experiences 31
they may encounter in the workplace?
Ursula Lucas Reflection: a key personal agency for learning to be professional 32
Paul Maharg 'Associated thought’: social software, professional relationships and democratic professionalism 33
Arthur Male Experiments in knowledge creation: experiencing the voices of evolution, revolution, and resolution in 34
academe
Johnny Martin Learning to understand business finance 35
Stephen May Developing the professional skills of the “Veterinary Team” 36
Phillip McCash Career development learning through a life-wide curriculum 37

Jenny Moon Academic assertiveness – putting professional principles into practice in the student experience 38
Paula Nottingham Valuing work-based learning pedagogical expertise 39
Judith Oliver From inwardly gazing to outwardly reflecting: the changing nature of student police officer education 40
Robert Partridge Facilitating and recognising life-wide learning:: the ’York Award’ 41
Deborah Peach Learning to be professional– an international dialogue. Creating high quality, relevant and meaningful 42
work integrated learning experiences across disciplines
Jan Porter and Liz Whitney Tell us what you really think! Putting service users at the centre of healthcare student assessment. 43
Lori Riley Learning to be professional: a synthesis of student stories of their professional training year 44
Tony Sumner The power of e-flection: using digital storytelling to facilitate reflective assessment of junior doctors’ 45
experiences in training
Sue Thompson Developing leading learners, learning to lead 46
and others
Bland Tomkinson A curriculum for coping with complexity 47
and others
Paul Tosey ‘Unlocking creativity: developing a methodology to help students understand how they are creative?’ 48
Angeliki Triantafyllaki Work-related learning and the development of creativity: finding one’s voice in small-group collaborative 49
activity
Simon Usherwood Using negotiation-based learning as an element of a life-wide curriculum 50
Vasso Vydelingum and others Cultural Academy: an innovative approach to developing culturally aware professionals 51
Tony Wailey and Constructing a professional story 52

Susana Sambade
Caitlin Walker and When you’re being most professional, you’re like what? Connecting professional work-skills, the person 53
Sarah Nixon and the curriculum through PDP
Paul Walker and Jenny Marie Postgraduate research training courses as professional development? 54
Barbara Walsh and Clean feedback – the bedrock for developing professionalism? 55
Nancy Doyle
Lisa Webb and Supporting creative practice, enterprise and professional development through PDP 56
Jacqui Bleetman
Kevin Wells and Problem-based learning for Labs: re-engaging students with design and professional development 57
Janko Calic
Roy Williams Interactive and collaborative reflective practice 58
Jenny Willis Can we really asses professionalism? an examination of the learning objectives for the professional 59
experience (WIL) at the University of Surrey
Anthea Wilson Creating cohesion in a world of fragments : the experience of nurse mentors 60
23
Papers & Workshop —Timetable
Tuesday 31st March 2009
Time Session Room
11.30-12.45 Conference Introduction and keynote talk Ron Barnett ‘Willing to be professional’ (3) 02/AC01
2-3pm INVITED CONTRIUTION 9 Stephen Billett, Learning to be an agentic professional: conceptions, curriculum, pedagogy and 02/AC02
personal epistemologies
2-3pm WORKSHOP 5 Colin Beard Just three steps? A simple practical technique for improving students’ understanding of ‘experiential 01/AC01
knowing’
2-2..25 2 Negotiating supernumerary status: a new twist in the hidden curriculum in nursing? Helen Allan 01/AC03
2-2..25 1 Learning in the Workplace: How can we help students reflect on their experiences? Peter Alcott 02/AC03
2-2..25 53 When you’re being most professional, you’re like what? Connecting professional work-skills, the person and the curriculum through 03/AC03
PDP Caitlin Walker and Sarah Nixon
2-2..25 21 Using ePortfolio action planning tools to support learning in clinical practice Jackie Haigh and Jan Porter 04/AC03
2-2..25 24 The value of digital storytelling in learning to be professional Martin Jenkins and Phil Gravestock 06/AC03
2.30-2.55 15 Personal journeys across regulatory tramlines: Dilemmas of professional learning in social work Barry Cooper & Maggie Pickering 01/AC03
2.30-2.55 12 Developing a questioning approach: the experiences of some students following a Foundation Degree in Early Years at the Open 02/AC03
University Carrie Cable, Gill Goodliff, Linda Miller
2.30-2.55 8 Life-wide enterprise in action in a university Nigel Biggs 03/AC03
2.30-2.55 19 Widening access to professional language through enhanced podcasting. From cabbage to C.A.B.G? Catharine Grob 04/AC03
2.30-2.55 45 The power of e-flection: using digital storytelling to facilitate reflective assessment of junior doctors’ experiences in training 06/AC03
Tony Sumner
3-4pm INVITED CONTRIBUTION 18 Karen Evans Putting Knowledge to Work:Recontextualising research findings to the Honours Degree - 02/AC02
sandwich placement model of work integrated learning
3-4pm WORKSHOP 11 Fred Buining Developing Creative Agency – helping learners think like designers for problem solving in 04/AC03
complex professional worlds
3-4pm Presentation and interactive discussion: 10 Developing professional qualities in levels 1 & 2 of undergraduate study Lindy Blair and 06/AC03
Anne Irving
3-3.25 55 Clean feedback – the bedrock for developing professionalism? Barbara Walsh and Nancy Doyle 01/AC03
3-3.25 22 Becoming a professional in the childrens’ workforce Roger Harrison and Ann Pegg 02/AC03
3-3.25 6 Shaping the new professional for a complex world Margaret Berrie 03/AC03
3.30-3.55 26 Use of the PDP process and an e-portfolio tool to support professional & career development learning activities Mary Ann Kernan 01/AC03
and Rae Karimjee
3.30-3.55 43 Tell us what you really think! Putting service users at the centre of healthcare student assessment. Jan Porter and Liz 02/AC03
Whitney
3.30-3.55 28 PDP, careers and professional bodies – a meeting of the ways? Nicola Langton 03/AC03
BREAK
4.40-5.40 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 33 Paul Maharg 'Associated thought’: social software, professional relationships and democratic profes- 02/AC02
sionalism
4.40-5.40 WORKSHOP 31 Paulo Lopes Managing challenging interpersonal situations: How can we help students prepare for the experiences 06/AC03
4.40-5.05 27 Developing students’ professional behaviours using Assessment Centre approaches Arti Kumer 01/AC03
4.40-5.05 35 Learning to understand business finance Johnny Martin 02/AC03
4.40-5.05 23 Fashion futures and “Legs 11”: how a reflective pod is supporting the personal and professional development of students on part 03/AC03
time programmes at the London College of Fashion Alison James
4.40-5.05 13 Developing an Engineering professional through collaborative enquiry Janko Calic 04/AC03
5.10-5.35 29 What lies in store for the PhD student? PDP, competencies, attributes and professionalism Anne Lee 01/AC03
5.10-5.35 34 Experiments in knowledge creation: Experiencing the voices of evolution, revolution, and resolution in academe 02/AC03
Arthur Male, Institute of Education
5.10-5.35 25 Developing students’ professional skills using PDP and self-coaching techniques Tracy Johnson 03/AC03
5.10-5.35 46 Developing leading learners, learning to lead Sue Thompson and others 04/AC03
24
24
Wednesday 1st April 2009
Time Session Room
8-8.55 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 42 Deborah Peach and colleagues in Australia An international dialogue – creating high quality work 01/AC02
integrated learning experiences across disciplines. Video conference – a continental breakfast will be available to participants in this
session.
9-9.55 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 32 Ursula Lucas Reflection: a key personal agency for learning to be professional 02/AC02
9-9.55 WORKSHOP 5 Colin Beard Just three steps? A simple practical technique for improving students’ understanding of ‘experiential 06/AC03
knowing’
9-9.25 36 Developing the professional skills of the “Veterinary Team” Stephen May 01/AC03
9-9.25 47 A curriculum for coping with complexity Bland Tomkinson, Helen Dobson, Rosemary Tomkinson, Charles Engel 02/AC03
9-9.25 60 Creating cohesion in a world of fragments: the experiences of nurse mentors Anthea Wilson 03/AC03
9-9.25 39 Valuing work-based learning pedagogical expertise Paula Nottingham, Birkbeck 04/AC03
9.30-9.55 40 From inwardly gazing to outwardly reflecting: The changing nature of student Police Officer education Judith Oliver 01/AC03
9.30-9.55 57 Problem-based learning for Engineering Labs: Re-engaging students with design and professional development Kevin Wells and 02/AC03
Janko Calic
9.30-9.55 30 Exploring the value of digital story telling as an aid to reflection and transfer of tacit practice knowledge Jane Leng 03/AC03
9.30-9.55 48 'Unlocking Creativity: developing a methodology to help students understand how they are creative?' Paul Tosey 04/AC03
10.05 – 11.00 INVITED CONTRIBUTION Professor Michael Eraut Improving the quality of work placements (17) 02/AC01
BREAK
11.35-12.30 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 37 Philip McCash – Career Development Learning through a life-wide curriculum 02/AC02
11.35-12.30 WORKSHOP 31 Paulo Lopes Managing challenging interpersonal situations: How can we help students prepare for the experiences 04/ac01
11.35-12.00 56 Supporting creative practice, enterprise and professional development through PDP Lisa Webb & Jacqui Bleetman 01/AC03
11.35-12.00 59 Can we really assess professionalism? An examination of the learning objectives for the professional experience (WIL) at the 02/AC03
University of Surrey Jenny Willis
11.35-12.00 38 Academic assertiveness – putting professional principles into practice in the student experience Jenny Moon 03/AC03
11.35 7 Enterprise Academy : learning to be enterprising; a key agency for life Nigel Biggs, Norman Jackson, & Osama Khan 06/AC03
12.05-12.30 20 Using a web-based personal learning system in the transition from student to health practitioner Jackie Haigh 01/AC03
12.05-12.30 4 Learning to be a professional in an academic context; preparing for Professional Training in Engineering John Baxter and Penny 02/AC03
Burden
12.05-12.30 50 Using negotiation-based learning as an element of a life-wide curriculum Simon Usherwood 03/AC03
12.05-12.30 16 CoLab – Learning how organisations work through student-based enterprise Clare Dowding and Noman Jackson 06/AC03
BREAK
13.40 –14.35 INVITED CONTRIBUTION 41 Robert Partridge Facilitating and recognising life-wide learning: the ‘York Award’ 02/AC02
13.40 –14.35 WORKSHOP 11 Fred Buining Developing Creative Agency – helping learners think like designers for problem solving in complex 04/AC03
professional worlds
13.40-14.05 51 Cultural Academy: An innovative approach to developing culturally aware professionals Vasso Vydelingum and others 01/AC03
13.40-14.05 44 Learning to be professional: A synthesis of student stories of their professional training year Lori Riley 02/AC03
13.40-14.05 52 Constructing a Professional Story : Tony Wailey and Susana Sambade 03/AC03
13.40-14.05 58 Interactive and collaborative reflective practice Roy Williams 06/AC03
14.05-14.30 49 Work-related learning and the development of creativity: finding one’s voice in small-group collaborative activity Angeliki 01/AC03
Triantafyllaki
14.05-14.30 14 Learning to cope with immersive experiences : a life-wide perspective Sarah Campbell 02/AC03
14.05-14.30 54 Postgraduate Research Training Courses as Professional Development? Paul Walker and Jenny Marie 03/AC03
14.40-15.45 What have we discovered about Learning to be Professional through a Life-Wide Curriculum? 02/AC01
25
Paper Presentations
1. LEARNING IN THE WORKPLACE: HOW CAN WE HELP STUDENTS REFLECT ON THEIR EXPERIENCES?
Peter Alcott, School of Management Faculty of Management and Law, University of Surrey
The University of Surrey professional training (PT) experience enables students to spend a year in professional work environment.
Developing capacity for reflection on everyday work experiences is key deriving the maximum benefit from the placement experience.
During a SCEPTrE Fellowship I evaluated the life-wide learning, self-development and creative thinking in problem solving that is
achievable by students undertaking professional training placements and the benefit to them of learning reflective practice in order to
understand how much they have learned. This learning is hugely valuable but is only recognised when it is drawn out of formative
reflective conversations during the tutors’ professional training visit.
Students undertaking a PT year often under estimate the level of social interaction that frontline roles in the service sector require, in
fact many are totally naive about what skills they need to develop in order to manage, sometimes awkward situations or respond to
apparently difficult people. They lack the ‘soft skills’ and also fail to understand the need to acquire these skills.
Students’ people relationship skills in the workplace environment are generally underdeveloped and often they fail to consider or to
reflect upon their own personality traits and how these can affect their workplace relationships. Reflection on the workplace mindset is
rarely considered, yet without a true understanding of company culture and organisational complexity it is difficult to function as a
team player.
There appears to be little awareness of the drivers that influence the organisational mindset, and many issues can be clouded by
misinterpretation, misinformation or hidden agendas. How can we bring about change and support our students through this often
very difficult learning curve that requires effective interaction between the student and other people they have to deal with in their
work?
A placement student who is faced by a negative personal experience will in most cases take it personally, react emotionally and look
for support from someone.
The support could come from a family member, in which case it may be an emotional response, a work colleague, who may have their
own agenda or their professional training tutor there to help the student learn from the experience in a creative and intelligent way.
This course of action and support is easy to suggest but sometimes more difficult to achieve. Constraints of time, ability and skill to
help, of being interested or even noticing that something is not quite right can all create difficulties for the visiting tutor.
The approach that I have adopted and developed to help me resolve many of these issues is what I term ‘the deep reflective
approach’ which is not to resolve the issue for the student but to enable the student to resolve the issue for themselves
My experience has been that you can’t dress this up – you have to analyse the problem as openly as possible – the student
themselves maybe their own worst enemy and to support my endeavours I have developed a Template for Inducing Reflection a
creative approach to problem resolution. The session will focus on the my use of this reflective tool with students in difficult relational
situations.
Key words: creative thinking, reflective practice, reflective tool, social interaction, organisational complexity, workplace mindsets.
2. NEGOTIATING SUPERNUMERARY STATUS: A NEW TWIST IN THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM IN NURSING?

Helen Allan, Centre for Research in Nursing & Midwifery Education, University of Surrey
In this paper, using data from a mixed methods study, I discuss student nurses’ experiences of negotiating the hidden curriculum in
clinical practice in the context of supernumerary status. Student nurses are no longer rostered into ward or placement staff numbers
per shift and their participation in patient care is expected to be supernumerary, that is, they are not to have any responsibility for
patient care. This change was introduced in the 1990s to address what many nurses saw as exploitation and unsafe practice in
student nurses’ clinical learning; poor learning ensued as a result of learning being in the back seat in comparison with workforce
demands in the clinical areas. The data for this project were collected in four sites using fieldwork in clinical practice as well as
interviews and an on-line survey. The sites were located in England and included clinical areas in NHS trusts as well as academic
settings in universities.
The findings suggest that student nurses are still expected by trained staff to work while they learn; and that on registration, they are
expected and they themselves expect to be competent to work immediately as registered nurses. These explanations are at odds with
those of academic nurses and lead to a lack of integration of theory and practice which shapes the hidden curriculum. We take the
hidden curriculum to be the “processes, pressures and constraints which fall outside…the formal curriculum, and which are often
unarticulated or unexplored” (Cribb & Bignold 1999) One way in which the hidden curriculum is imposed at the expense of the formal
curriculum in midwifery is through the use of ritual and routines such as doing observations which enable teachers or mentors to
establish a ‘regime’ (Bowles and Gintis, 1976). The hidden curriculum forms the context in which student nurses have to learn to
negotiate their status as supernumerary students in practice. Student nurses have to learn within a disintegrated learning system in
which opposing values exist. We suggest that this disintegration is not actually hidden but known and forms the paracurriculum
(Hargreaves 1980); that is, practice knowledge which runs alongside formal, university knowledge. It is well known practice knowledge
but unacknowledged in university; to paraphrase Hargreaves (1980:126) ‘From whom is the hidden curriculum hidden?’ But this
analysis merely leaves the unchallenged and the student stuck in the difficult position of negotiating supernumerary status and trying
to make sense of the disintegration of theory and practice.
Key words : hidden curriculum; supernumerary status; clinical learning; student nurses
26
Reference: Hargreaves D (1980) Power and the paracurriculum. In Finch A & Scrimshaw P (editors) Standards schooling and
education. Open University. p:126-137
Bowles B & Gintis H 1976 Schooling in Capitalist America. Lodnon: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Cribb A, Bignold S. (1999) Towards the reflexive medical school: the hidden curriculum and medical education research. Studies in
Higher Education. 24:195-209
3. WILLING TO BE PROFESSIONAL
Ron Barnett, Institute of Education, University of London
A pupil about to embark on her or his A levels may, in effect, be viewed as forming a decision about her or his professional
occupation, a process that may last for 15-20 years (through 6th form, undergraduate study and initial and subsequent professional
formation). Central to such a trajectory is the formation of a will; we may call it a ‘professional will’, a will to carry one forward into and
through a very lengthy and an arduous process of professional formation and professional development.
How might we understand this process of professional will formation? And how might we construe the challenges of higher education
here?
Will, we may say, is itself a complex, involving (1) both dispositions and qualities oriented towards (2) a cluster of forms of knowing
embedded in (3) a set of practices. On this view, the formation of a professional will is the formation of a habitus. That formulation is
complex enough and sets huge challenges the way of higher education. Which dispositions and qualities? What is the relationship
between dispositions and qualities: does either take precedence over the other? Which forms of knowing? Are they largely of
substance – of propositional knowledge – or are they of process, and ways of going on in the world? What is the difference between
knowledge and knowing? And which practices? Who is to determine the relevant practices?
However, even if we have answers to these questions, still we have not exhausted the matter before us for we must first acknowledge
the context of professionalism. And that specification is no mere technical task; it is itself contested. A number of readings are
possible: professionalism may be construed, for example, through (1) the theme of complexity, in which professionalism is a matter of
individuals acquiring self-responsibility adequate to a situation of utter contestability; (2) the theme of competency, in which
professionalism becomes that of delivering on pre-set standards; (3) the theme of entrepreneurialism, in which professionalism is that
of innovation in growing financially successful practices; (4) the theme of collaboration in which professionalism is seen as a groups
communally working out their own conditions, forms and standards of practice.
In short, the very context in which the professional will is to be formed is itself disputable; and is disputed. Is it, then, possible to say
anything of any substance about the process of the formation of the professional will?
A first reflection is that the formation of the professional will is liable to be a matter of bad faith. For it may be impossible in the
pedagogical situation for the teacher to be honest as to the challenges of what it is to be a professional. To be a professional is to live
in hope – of doing things well, of improving life, of doing things that are well though of. But all these matters are in dispute; and the
professional is liable to find him/ herself continually assailed by critique and challenge.
A second reflection is that there is a conundrum here. The will to be a professional is to be sustained over time. It projects itself into
the future. But the future is unknown. So what is the basis of such a will? It speaks of a future without a future; without a known
future. So what is the basis of such a will? Faith?
In short, the more we reflect on it, the more flimsy the basis of the formation of the professional will. And yet, without that will to be a
professional, the very formation of an individual’s professionalism is in jeopardy. Can a way forward through these difficulties facing
professional education be found?
4. LEARNING TO BE A PROFESSIONAL IN AN ACADEMIC CONTEXT; PREPARING FOR PROFESSIONAL TRAINING IN ENGINEERING

John Baxter and Penny Burden, Student Personal Learning and Study Hub, University of Surrey
Professional training (PT) is an obvious area of excellence in Surrey’s learning and teaching portfolio – it offers obvious and
transparent opportunities for undergraduates to learn to be professional in a workplace environment. Engineering disciplines, including
Chemical and Process Engineering (CPE) have long been at the forefront of PT developments within this institution. This paper is
based on the experience of the first author as Senior Tutor for PT in CPE between 2001 and 2005, and more recent reflection on
some wider educational issues. It concentrates on the notion of learning to be a professional within the “mainstream” academic activity
that both precedes and follows PT placement experience.
The paper highlights fundamental differences in pre-placement and post-placement academic activity. It shows that “learning to be a
professional” is much more obviously embedded in post-placement academic activity than it is pre-placement. The paper suggests
that academic preparation for placement (and, hence, the placement experience itself) might benefit from a stronger professional
ethos. It argues that many pre-placement learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and modes of assessment are, in some
ways, overly modest. It suggests that certain deep-set paradigms underpinning learning and teaching, such as strong curriculum
linearity and obvious content hierarchy, are arguably unnecessary and unhelpful. The paper offers examples of how changes in
approach might serve to better prepare students for the academic, technical and professional challenges of the PT placement. This
might both improve the placement experience itself and embed the notion of learning to be a professional more fully, and at an earlier
stage, than is typical for current practice.
Key words : professional, engineering, curriculum, training, preparation, placement
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5. JUST THREE STEPS? A SIMPLE PRACTICAL TECHNIQUE FOR IMPROVING STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF ‘EXPERIENTIAL KNOWING’
Colin Beard, National Teaching Fellow, Sheffield Business School, Sheffield Hallam University.
Working with the personal experiences (experiential knowing) of both participants and facilitator this workshop explores the
commonality of experienced events that can lead to the development of propositional knowing that in turn can develop a deeper
understanding of professional skills development.
The workshop aims to show how simple techniques can be used to help students understand the relationship between three forms of
knowing (propositional/theorising, experiential/face to face emersion, and practical knowing/skill) so that students are better able to
recognize and value their learning (experiential knowing) through the diverse experiences that life has to offer.
Educational principles for experiential knowing:
‘Higher’ education is about higher forms of knowing. However a hierarchical relationship exists between experiential knowing and
propositional knowing: propositional knowing has a higher status. This might not be the best way to portray the continual oscillation
between the inter-related ways of knowing and acting the world?
When dealing with professional skills development in say difficult situations or dealing with conflict, propositional knowing helps
learners to be aware of and work with some of the common stages (in this case portrayed as four or five main stages). Similar stages
are found for example in the essential steps to the development of assertiveness, or negotiating or in giving and receiving feedback or
in personal relationship issues. A scenario involving a real customer experience will be related to participants. Participants will be
invited to develop responding strategies. These strategies will then be compared for commonality and difference. The proposed
responses will be reduced to a number of stages or sequences and these will be charted using cards, as the main steps that will be
ultimately walked and talked about.
This experiential session uses spatial awareness and bodily kinaesthetic imprinting. The floor or a large desk space is used for the
creation of a four or five step modelling from the general stages of dealing with difficult customer issues, as created out of ‘real’
personal experiential stories. Using kinaesthetic reinforcement the steps are also walked along, and simultaneously talked through, to
embed the learning. The body is part of the remembering; it remembers the steps in a sequence in the space. This session also
explores the central tenet of experiential learning i.e. learning by 'doing the real thing': this ‘real thing’ can be broken down into many
sub elements of realness (e.g. the story, the real artefacts in a situation). These real things can all actively engage learners and
ensure that propositional knowing and modelling is meaningful and comes ‘alive’. Self-generated indigenous modelling or theorising
about professional ‘situations’ or experiences in this way is very useful for personal and professional development.
This workshop also has applications for PDP and reflection.
Handouts will be offered that detail these experiential strategies for teaching more complex subjects using similar approaches.
Invitation to experiment : Participants will be invited to participate in growing propositional knowing through their experience of the
conference through the conversational format of Twitter. This is an experiment: an attempt to test our ability to create a form of
‘propositional knowing’ about the conference experience, as heard or read through the multiple voices of many individual’s that
uniquely engage with the conference event as it unfolds. At hourly intervals short messages will be compiled into a twitter blog on the
conference Wiki.
Lets see what happens!
Key words: experiential knowing, twitter
6. SHAPING THE NEW PROFESSIONAL FOR A COMPLEX WORLD

Margaret Berrie, Work Learning Officer, Aiming University Learning @ Work Project, University of Glasgow
Aims: To introduce new work related learning experiences into traditionally non-vocational undergraduate programmes as part of a
strategic change project between three partner institutions: the University of Glasgow, Glasgow Caledonian University and St
Andrews University.
Method: Six Pilot Teams were established across the three partner institutions, in the subject areas of Bioscience, Business and
Management, History, Maths, Physics and Psychology. The AUL@W Project Team worked with academics from those Pilots to
develop a range of opportunities which would enable students to gain insights to, and experience of, real world contexts. These
ranged from non–traditional placements, integrated projects, volunteering opportunities and innovative collaborations, to informal
meetings with professionals from targeted sectors through careers talks and site visits. The experiences were evaluated as part of the
ongoing Project research which has included surveys, structured interviews, and focus groups with students, academic staff,
professionals, and HEI senior management. ‘Models of recognition’ and embedding guidelines are being developed to describe the
skills gained and qualities being developed on these life-wide learning journeys, and the students’ reflection on them, and how those
can be integrated with academic credit, Career Development Learning and PDP activities.
Findings: The Project’s exploration of sustainability has highlighted some concerns over the resourcing issues around the provision of
life-wide learning experiences and their potential impact on academic course content. Yet, where that impact is positive, academic
support, along with the positive feedback from students, and the enthusiastic engagement of professionals, demonstrates a growing
demand for real-world experiences, particularly those which are integrated with the curriculum, those which offer insights to the
professional world which would not otherwise be available, and those which encourage students to start shaping their own destiny and
professional identity experience, integrated, learning, reflection, real-world.
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Conclusions: In this final stage of the Project, the AUL@W Project Team is continuing to support ongoing and new pilot activity; to
consult with, and disseminate to, academic, professional and student representative partners, recommendations for strategic change
across the Scottish HE sector about the integration of sustainable life-wide learning experiences. It will look to inform current thinking
about, and policy for, the development of ‘graduate attributes’ – the foundation for the ‘new professional’ – through learning journey
narratives and a model for the integration and recognition of the key qualities, essential skills and personal agency needed for the
complex professional world
Key words: experience, integrated, learning, reflection, real-world
7. ENTERPRISE ACADEMY : LEARNING TO BE ENTERPRISING; A KEY AGENCY FOR LIFE

Nigel Biggs, Research and Enterprise Support, University of Surrey
Norman Jackson, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey
Osama Khan, Faculty of Management and Law, University of Surrey
Being enterprising does not only mean that you are interested in making money or setting up your own business. It also embodies a
set of dispositions, practical abilities and ways of thinking and behaving that are useful to be successful in any professional field.
The aim of the University of Surrey’s ‘life-wide enterprise’ project is to highlight and exploit the simple fact that being enterprising is an
essential agency for life: whether you are a doctor, a lawyer, in business, in education or public service there are times when you
need to be enterprising and opportunities for being enterprising are found in all aspects of life. We encourage and stimulate enterprise
through an Enterprise Academy and Summer School, competitions, prizes, paid work opportunities and students’ own self-determined
enterprises.
The paper will focus on our Enterprise Academy project which was piloted in 2008-09. Enterprise Academy is located in the co-
curriculum outside the formal academic programme. It comprises two pairs of 3hr workshops each interspersed with a team based
enterprise challenge. About 20-25 students volunteer to participate in each of the two process. The enterprise challenges include a
profit making enterprise and a social enterprise. The workshops facilitate planning and the evaluation of what has been learnt. We use
filming to record the enterprise activities and to help teams reflect on their experiences. We use our Learning through Experience
Certificate to recognize and value this important, informal and personal form of learning. We support the whole enterprise and
encourage story telling through wikis. The paper will describe our first Enterprise Academy and reflect on the challenges and
opportunities of this type of co-curricular experience.
Key words: enterprise, learning to be enterprising, life-wide enterprise, co-curriculum
8. LIFE-WIDE ENTERPRISE IN ACTION IN A UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENT

Nigel Biggs, Research and Enterprise Support, University of Surrey
Life-wide enterprise is all about learning through the experience of trying to be enterprising. We grow our personal knowledge about
what is involved in being enterprising through doing it and thinking about what we have done.
“Just do it” (an exhortation stolen by Nike) is the mantra of any leader, educator, mentor or facilitator of practical enterprise or
entrepreneurship. The role of the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (E-I-R) at the University of Surrey is to find enterprising students and
help them do just that.
This paper will describe the background and experiences over the last four years in trying to develop and embed enterprise across the
University of Surrey. It started with the Centre for Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Development (CEED) and its dedicated location,
the CEED POD.
The launch of the SET squared business incubation centre and the first business plan competition followed not far behind but then the
Professor of Entrepreneurship, who had championed enterprise, left the University and the CEED POD closed. The part-time
Enterprise in Residence role was then established and filled by an experienced entrepreneur (me!) who had much to learn about the
University environment.
Following a serendipitous meeting with SCEPTrE, a long term partnership has emerged closely linking academic and business
backgrounds to develop the concept of Life-Wide Enterprise within SCEPTrE's broader concept of a lifewide curriculum. This includes
the Enterprise (and Social Enterprise) Academy and the enterprising student organisation CoLab.
Also in conjunction with the University’s Department for Research & Enterprise Support, a wide variety of enterprise activities are
available including the Surrey Innovation Challenge ideas competition; the Business Enterprise Student Support Scheme, offering £5k
grants to start a business; a residential enterprise summer school; talks, clinics and one-to-one consultations; introductions to local
businesses and visits by entrepreneurs.
Ideas for the way ahead include a real University business run by successive teams of placement students. That really would be the
mantra of “Just do it” put into practice.
The paper will describe how these activities work in practice and will reflect on lessons learned and improvements that could be made.
Key words: enterprise, lifewide enterprise, placement, entrepreneur-in-residence, innovation, incubation
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9. LEARNING TO BE AN AGENTIC PROFESSIONAL: CONCEPTIONS, CURRICULUM, PEDAGOGY AND PERSONAL EPISTEMOLOGIES
Stephen Billett, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia

Individuals’ development for and during professional practice arises through a duality between personal and social contributions to
learning experiences, albeit also shaped by brute facts. These contributions comprise affordances and norms and forms of the social
and brute world beyond the individual, on the one hand, and individuals’ engagement with these contributions, on the other.
Importantly, the relations that comprises this duality are mediated by both the press of the social world (i.e. the degree by which it is
able to assert its suggestion) and individuals’ engagement with these suggestions, as shaped by how they are personally construed
and constructed (Billett 2006, 2008). Over the last two decades, much has been made of the contributions of the social world to
individuals’ learning in response to an earlier dominance of explanations from cognitive theory, which was premised heavily on
individual capacities alone. In particular, the emphasis on contributions of the immediate social world has been privileged in recent
times. This is evidenced in explanations offered by distributed cognition, communities of practice and activities systems. Yet, absent in
these accounts are human intentionality and consciousness (i.e. the cognitive experience)(Valsiner 2000). This shortcoming needs to
be addressed because, for instance, accounts of learning for and through professional practice cannot be premised on the immediate
social contributions alone, despite their crucial contributions. Whether referring to the social suggestion in terms of what is afforded in
educational programmes (i.e. the enacted curriculum), in professional practice (i.e. situated practice) or another social settings (e.g.
engagement with co-workers or other students), the bases by which individuals construe and construct these experiences shapes how
and what they learn (e.g. the experienced curriculum, participation in practice) from sources beyond but through their personal
experience.
Importantly, although the social world can be powerful, key social theorists all identify limits to and potency to its suggestion. Berger
and Luckman (1967) claim that the social world is unable to project its suggestion in ways which are comprehensive, uniform or even
without ambiguity, and individuals taking up of these suggestions will be distinct in particular ways because of this social fact. Giddens
(1984) proposes that, rather than individuals being wholly subject to and posterior to the social world, that the social world requires
individuals’ agency to sustain and transform its norms and practices, in response to changing societal needs. Moreover, Foucault
(1986) suggests that no amount of surveillance and monitoring can control desire, which has implications for professional dispositions
and values. That is, human interest and values might well be impervious to the demands of the social world. Not least of the
implications here is the need for individuals to actively engage with the social suggestion, because of the kinds of knowledge required
for effective practice are generated and sourced in the social world. Therefore, the learning of these historically-derived, culturally-
shaped and situationally-pertinent forms of knowledge likely arises from an active engagement by learners with the social world.
Such assertions emphasise the key role that human agency, intentionality and capacity plays in two processes of change: (i) learning
by humans and (ii) the remaking and transformation of cultural norms and practices, such as occupational practices. Hence, both
individuals learning and societal change is shaped by human intentionality.
What is suggested here is that conceptions of learning for professional practice need to emphasise the role of the personal
epistemologies and agency (Billett 2009). In particular, this agency is likely to be important for the rich learning of the complex and
massive bodies of knowledge which constitute effective professional practice. This proposition includes the agentic role that students’
engagement in integrating experiences in workplace and practice settings, such as in nursing, medicine, physiotherapy, etc will need
to exercise when engaging with, securing and reconciling the contributions from each of the settings. Yet, there is also a more general
educational purpose here. In order to be effective in professional practice, practitioners are required to be agentic in their exercise of
their professional practice. Consequently, developing learners’ capacity to be agentic stands as an important goal for both their
professional preparation and ongoing development. This claim suggests important challenges for university educators, particular as
much of what we do might be described as higher vocational education.
This paper first elaborates these assertions, and discusses their significance for learning for and through professional practice. Then,
some preliminary bases for how this agency might be developed in courses are advanced drawing upon recent work which is sought
to identify how such agency might be developed for and enacted within higher education programs that aim to develop professional
capacities. These conceptions and tentative procedural suggestions are offered as a means to promote broader discussion on how
best the development of learner agency might progress
The presentation will likely be structured through the following headings
• Learning through life-wide and lifelong experiences
• Epistemological agency and learning
• Agentic professionals
• Developing agentic professionals through integrating practice experiences
• Promoting agentic personal epistemologies
References
Billett, S (2009) Conceptualizing learning experiences: Contributions and mediations of the social, personal and brute, Mind, Culture
and Activity 16 (1) 32-47 / Billett, S (2008) Learning throughout working life: A relational interdependence between social and
individual agency British Journal of Education Studies 55 (1) 39-58 / Billett, S. (2006) Relational interdependence between social and
individual agency in work and working life, Mind, Culture and Activity 13 (1) 53-69 / Berger, P. L., & Luckman, T. (1967). The Social
Construction of Reality. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books. / Foucault, M. (1986). The Care of the self: The History of
Sexuality, vol 3 (R. Hurley, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin. / Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and Society in the
Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. / Valsiner, J. (2000). Culture and Human Development. London: Sage
Publications.
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10. DEVELOPING PROFESSIONAL QUALITIES IN LEVELS 1 & 2 OF UNDERGRADUATE STUDY

Lindy Blair, Professional Training Tutor, School of Management, Faculty of Management & Law
Anne Irving, E-Learning Adviser, Faculty of Arts & Human Sciences, both University of Surrey
This paper will describe and review the School of Management’s 4-year curriculum framework that holds the professional
development of undergraduate students at its core. Building on various School Learning and Teaching initiatives from the past few
years, Lindy Blair (SoM Placement Tutor), has developed a 4-year thread that aims to empower and enable students to develop
Professional Attitudes, Attributes and Abilities : the 3 A’s.
Barely two years into the 4-year programme, evidence is already emerging that is testimony to what can be achieved prior to
placement in terms of a student’s Professional Attitudes, Attributes and Abilities. This is explored with direct reference to visible
outcomes at levels 1 & 2 using examples of student perceptions of the importance of this process to the way we prepare them for the
workplace.
The paper presents the vision and reviews the curriculum developments carried out by Lindy over the past two years to embed the 3
A’s in all seven undergraduate management programmes, analysing the reasons why it is important, explaining how it can be
achieved, the technologies used to assist this process, and what can be done at a practical level. It reflects on the process through
which it has been possible to influence the School’s approach to learning and teaching to include the integral development of the 3 A’s
at all levels of undergraduate study. Lindy’s concept of ‘whole-life learning’ underpins the embedded approach and this paper seeks to
illustrate the effect that this may have on the future provision of central student support.
Through the agency of the SCEPTrE Fellows network, Anne Irving (FAHS E-learning Adviser) has been a strategic partner in Lindy’s
work over the past two years, providing support for the e-learning content of the programme by pooling and extracting resources that
were transferable to FAHS disciplines. Motivated by a shared vision while observing the daunting challenge Lindy faced of making it
work with cohorts of over 400 Management students and 80 academics, Anne poses questions that will explore how similar outcomes
might be achieved beyond the School of Management, from the operational issues that need addressing to how we use limited
resources to enable change within the wider university context.
Key words Professional Qualities, PDP, Employability, Curriculum development, Technology,
11.DEVELOPING CREATIVE AGENCY – HELPING LEARNERS THINK LIKE DESIGNERS FOR PROBLEM SOLVING IN COMPLEX PROFESSIONAL
WORLDS
Fred Buining, Organisational Developer, Zooangzi
Design and creativity: Design problem solving often requires more knowledge than any single person possesses. Problems span
more than one domain of expertise, an asymmetry of ignorance exists, in which each stakeholder possesses some, but not all,
relevant knowledge and the knowledge of one participant complements the ignorance of another and all knowledge together never
fully delivers the solution required. Creativity, emergence or self organization is the key enabler in the design process for the true
novelty, the emergent order to appear, the ‘aha’ to occur, entraining the elements that gave rise to it. The emerging form is not
learned, neither imported, nor pre-ordained from within. Design education through the development of behavior, skills and capabilities
aims to provide the right personal conditions for the omnipresent creativity to manifest in the design process once the designer
engages with the outside world professionally. These ways of thinking, when combined with the will to be creative, contribute to a
person's creative agency or when applied as part of team process contribute to collaborative creative agency.
If designers can facilitate the creativity in the design process, how can we then facilitate creativity, emergence, self organization in
problem solving for a complex world: the sort of problem solving that wicked problems demand. How do designers develop these
ways and habits of thinking? What can we learn from design education that we can transfer into the learning practices of other
disciplines? The University of Surrey's Creative Academy http://surreycreativeacademy.pbwiki.com has been developed through a
partnership between Zooangzi and SCEPTrE to help educational professionals develop techniques for facilitating students’ learning.
Drawing on the techniques used in Creative Academy, the workshop will provide an experience in which educators are led through a
process of designing a learning experience for learners engaged in solving challenging problems. The techniques can be applied to
any group problem solving situations.
The workshop will run twice during the conference and the two workshops will differ in set-up. The workshops will be filmed and the
content will feed into a conference wiki discussion around the idea of creative agency and the use of models, values and ethics,
ground rules, processes, techniques in higher education to develop such agency beyond design education. Through these processes
participants will contribute to the further development of the Creative Academy wiki which is our main vehicle for knowledge building
and sharing.
A definition of Creative Agency to spark exploration: Creative agency: the behavior, skills and capabilities which, once professionally
applied in purposive actions, facilitate local creative change beneficial to mankind and it’s environment;
The assumptions we have here around this definition are:
• creativity is a universal force that enters our awareness each and every time as a unique phenomenon;
• to grow behavior, skills and capabilities is a purposive action on it’s own
• willingness to be open to creative ways of thinking and to engage in actions that are more likely to lead to creative/
innovative outcomes are key to personal and collaborative (team based) creative agency
• facilitation is a personal relative act interdependent with it's context (meaning the facilitators intentions and actions are his/
her's but at the same time a product of the context).
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Intending participants will need to book in advance: there are only 15 places in each workshop.
Key words: facilitation, emergence, creativity, experiential learning
12. DEVELOPING A QUESTIONING APPROACH: THE EXPERIENCES OF SOME STUDENTS FOLLOWING A FOUNDATION DEGREE IN EARLY YEARS
AT THE OPEN UNIVERSITY
Carrie Cable, Gill Goodliff, Linda Miller, Practice Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, The
Open University
The government in England has committed to the reform of the children’s workforce through ‘a transformational reform agenda
designed to improve life chances for all and reduce inequalities in our society’ (DfES, 2006:2). This agenda acknowledges that
increasing the skills and competence of the workforce is critical to its success. This route to a more professional workforce includes
the development of an Early Years Sector–Endorsed Foundation Degree as a progression route to a new role of Early Years
Professional. As a major open and distance-learning provider The Open University is in a unique position to respond to the above
agenda in providing flexible and accessible progression routes leading to Higher Education work related qualifications for early years
practitioners which reflect employer needs.
This paper provides a brief overview of policy developments leading to the creation of a new workforce qualification and role. The
paper describes the tensions and challenges involved in developing distance-learning courses which support students in becoming
reflective practitioners whilst meeting external requirements and the needs of employers. The approach taken to enable students to
reflect on their practice and develop the ability to research their own practice with children in their settings in two work-based learning
courses in the Open University Foundation Degree in Early Years is discussed. The paper draws on findings from two research
projects, one funded by the Practice Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning based at the Open
University.
In the first study the final written assignments from 60 students on the first work based learning course were analysed. Student
responses suggest that their study offered possibilities for critical reflection and developing professionalism. We tracked these
students through to the completion of the Foundation Degree in Early Years and in the second study student, employers’ and tutors’
perceptions of the impact of work based learning on practice were explored through responses to a questionnaire and interviews with
students, tutors and employers. Our analysis of these responses indicate that researching their own practice provided students with
the opportunity to consider the perspectives of others and especially the children they work with and to embed reflection into their
ongoing practice and professionalism. This paper, therefore, connects to a number of the five interconnected themes for the
conference.
Key words: distance learning, professionalism, reflective practice, early years
13. DEVELOPING AN ENGINEERING PROFESSIONAL THROUGH COLLABORATIVE ENQUIRY

Janko Calic, Department of Electronic Engineering, University of Surrey
In developing the idea of life-wide curriculum and the new ways of learning to be professional, one of the main challenges to
academia has become the implementation of these ideas in a typical classroom environment. This paper presents a novel approach
to learning professional engineering practice in a classroom by means of Collaborative Learning (CL) and Enquiry-Based Learning
(EBL). By motivating students to engage in the collaborative enquiry, the inherently stark academic discourse transforms into a
natural environment where professionalism, collaboration, representation and collectiveness form a basis for learning. This goal has
been achieved by introducing interactive collaborative learning sessions to a modified enquiry-based learning structure of an
electronic engineering module in such an abstract subject as Digital Signal Processing.
The approach to include an interactive group-based weekly session encouraged students to act as professionals and conduct
individual enquiry into new and complex problems, thus developing skills of problem scope definition, learning from multiple sources
and application of the concepts involved. Raising individual enquiry to a whole new level, the collaborative sessions introduced more
aspects of professional development such as collaborative reflection as well as presentation and communication of the newly acquired
knowledge. These aspects were facilitated by the CL session structure where the students engaged in a discussion about results of
their individual enquiry followed by the group presentations on topics covered by their enquiry.
In a number of interviews conducted after the course, students highlighted interaction at multiple levels as one of the major features of
this approach - "...Interaction with lecturers was great. And through interaction with my peers, I got to know my actual level of
knowledge compared to the others..." In such an active environment, communication during the lectures was excellent and there was
a notion of personalised delivery, although the group was medium sized (cca. 50 participating students). In addition to the student
interviews, we conducted a detailed questionnaire-based evaluation that demonstrated exceptionally positive feedback by the
students involved in this module, especially towards the overall learning experience and the extracurricular skills acquired.
Key words: Enquiry Based Learning, Collaborative Learning
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14. LEARNING TO COPE WITH IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCES : A LIFE-WIDE PERSPECTIVE

Sarah Campbell, SCEPTrE Placement Student (Level 2 Psychology), University of Surrey
Part of learning to be professional involves being able to cope with immersive experiences – experiences that require total
engagement: that are initially confounding but require mastery. To gain insights into how students understood this concept SCEPTrE
sponsored a story telling competition on the theme of ‘Immersive Experiences’ : stories could be about experiences from any part of
life that the person felt was immersive. Whilst the stories were very diverse in nature, and covered a vast range of contexts and
experiences, the use of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) identified very clear themes, all of which were present in
almost all accounts. These themes provide an insight into what distinguishes a particular experience as being immersive.
Sense of journey – beginning (excitement), middle (overwhelmed), end (mastery)
Motivation – and the emotions associated with motivation
The will to be immersed – people chose to act in an immersive way
Presentation of situational status – justifies difficulties experienced and validates involvement of self in an immersive way
Balance/inbalance - many participants experienced great inbalance in terms of their immersive context and other facets of their lives
Support from others – often strangers become supporters
Loss of identity/role – transformational change with all the emotions that entails
Perspective change - this cognitive reappraisal or perspective change often gave rise to the changes in the person and the learning.
Paradox – creates dissonance, and therefore a need to change
Contextual sensitivity - greater awareness through the process of comparing what they experienced to a wider context
Change – leave behind, take on new, integrate.
It is clear that an immersive experience is incredibly challenging, and often the discomfort is what drives the person to change or
learn, leading to the emergence of a richer person with new perspectives and understanding. Such experiences can be encountered
in many different aspects of life – the family, travel, work or volunteering – they are truly life-wide in their origin. Immersive
experiences, it would appear, are incredibly rich as learning experiences, and the learning that occurs is life-long learning; that can be
applied to a plethora of situations and contexts, rather than the learning being context-specific.
Key words : immersive experience, life-wide learning
15. PERSONAL JOURNEYS ACROSS REGULATORY TRAMLINES: DILEMMAS OF PROFESSIONAL LEARNING IN SOCIAL WORK
Barry Cooper & Maggie Pickering, Faculty of Health & Social Care, The Open University.
This paper draws upon research carried out by the presenters over the last two years and examines the dilemmas addressed by three
of the conference themes: learning to be professional; reflection as an essential skill for professional learning; and the influence of
regulation in shaping what this means.
Some of the results from two connected enquiries, funded by the Practice-Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in
Teaching & Learning at the Open University, will be presented: Firstly, an enquiry into the experiences of professional transitions by
students undertaking courses that lead into the social work degree and the discovery of Personal Construct Psychology [PCP] as a
reflective tool par excellence for learner-centred engagement within the process of the investigations; second the resulting pilot of a
set of tools to focus specifically upon their use within social work practice learning.
The first half of the presentation will discuss the advantages of Personal Construct Psychology as a methodological approach that
starts from the way that the learner sees themselves and key aspects of their social world and learning environment. There will be
examples of the research tools used and some of the dilemmas arising from the outcomes such as the influence of national
occupational standards as an imposed framework that shapes and contains the learning experience. The second half of the
presentation will offer examples of stories from the personal learning journeys being undertaken by participants within the
investigations. These will be broadly structured:
• Pursuing the personal: some emerging themes from phase 1 dialogues
• Capturing the personal: phase 2 constructs and self-generated learning
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16. COLAB – LEARNING HOW ORGANISATIONS WORK THROUGH STUDENT-BASED ENTERPRISE

Clare Dowding and Norman Jackson , Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE), University of
Surrey
Understanding how organizations work and what makes them not work so well is something that most professionals have to learn.
Typically such understanding is gained through the experience of working in an organization on placement or through part-time
employment at university. SCEPTrE’s CoLab project enables students to find out what growing an organization and making it work is
all about.
The idea has progressively matured over three cycles of recruitment. Students apply to join CoLab through a letter of application in
response to an email advert. They are interviewed and those accepted (15 in 2008-09) join one of two teams :
1) Networking Team who conduct surveys of students’ views on various topics in the faculties, organise events that would be relevant
to students and run a weekly GU2 Radio show.
2) Technology Team who organize Web 2.0 Discovery Workshops and have developed a work enterprise that is again focused on
finding out what students think about a range of topics and providing a ‘Student Voice’ website for collecting, distilling and
broadcasting students views.
The core enterprise underlying the work of both teams is what John Dewey called productive enquiry. Productive enquiry is a key
agency that is relevant to any professional field it involves ‘finding out the things you need to find out in order to do the things you
need to do’. Learning is supported through a reflective process embedded in Learning through Experience Certificate.
Students learn many things from the CoLab experience but one of the most important things is how an organization forms, develops
and works. Whether by design or accident students learn that creating shared vision of an enterprise is very difficult, that negotiation
of the work enterprise is a continuous and difficult process, that good communication is crucial to successful performance, that
leadership and good management are essential for any successful enterprise. They also learn that there is a lot more to reaching a
successful outcome than having the initial idea and receiving an enthusiastic response from the team members.
The paper will examine what we have learnt about facilitating learning through a student-based enterprise - what students think they
have learnt and what we think they have learnt and reflect on the potential contribution of student organizations like CoLab to the
development of professional capability in a life-wide curriculum?
17. IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF WORK PLACEMENTS

Prof Michael Eraut, Research Consultant SCEPTrE, University of Surrey
This paper concerns research designed to improve the quality of the student professional training placement programme at the
University of Surrey (UK), where over half the undergraduates take up placements of 6 to 9 months duration in the 3rd year of a 4 year
programme. Phase 1 involved analysing documents and interviewing faculty responsible for placements in 12 different subjects. This
led to two reports, one based on these interviews described the variations in current practice and the other presented a review of
relevant literature on work-based learning. Phase 2 involved collecting data from students. First, SCEPTrE launched a competition for
students returning from placements in September 2008, in which they were asked to write an account of their placement on the theme
of Learning to be Professional. 28 accounts were provided through this process and 8 authors volunteered to be interviewed by Eraut
in order to: (1) clarify and amplify significant aspects of their experience and (2) discuss the roles of those who most influenced their
learning opportunities for good or ill. Finally, an invitation to complete a substantial on-line questionnaire was sent to all students on
placement in February 2009. Over 130 students completed this questionnaire by March 9th.
The conceptual framework for this project is based on four tools from the author’s recent longitudinal study (1st three years) of the
Early Career Learning at Work of accountants, engineers and nurses (Eraut 2007, Eraut et al 2007). These are:
• a typology of modes of learning
• a typology of learning trajectories (what is being learned over a period of time)
• a two-triangle model of factors affecting learning and their mutual interaction
• an epistemology of practice.
These tools are intended to help students on placements to understand their work environments and reflect on their experiences, to
consider their learning goals, to ascertain learning opportunities, to develop possible ways of accessing these opportunities directly or
through helpful intermediaries, and to handle negative experiences.
The intention is to strengthen the current system of support through this research and the tools it offers, and an increased capacity to
continue to learn from the experiences of those involved. The following ways of improving the quality of placements are in use, but the
attention given to them varies greatly:
• Pre-placement activities in the university
• Post-placement activities in the university
• Student to student sharing of issues, experiences and helpful contacts at work (especially when one student follows another in
the same employment setting)
• Documents for students, university supervisors and employer supervisors
• Training supervisors, informal or formal
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• Direct engagement with employers

There is a danger of just settling for general familiarity with the “world of work”, when much more could be achieved. Thus the
allocation of work and the contexts in which it is situated are crucial to an effective placement, because they encompass the need for
challenging work and relationships which both support those challenges and provide appropriate feedback. Students need both to
learn from working with others and to develop their personal agency.
Working alongside others is particularly important on placements, because it allows students to observe and listen to others at work,
and participate in shared activities. This enables them to learn new practices and perspectives, to become aware of different kinds of
knowledge and expertise, and to gain some sense of other people’s tacit knowledge. When people see what is being said and done,
explanations can be much shorter; and clues to situational recognition may not be remembered, unless they are picked up on-the-spot
while the fine detail of incidents is still in people’s minds. This mode of learning, which encompasses much observation as well as
discussion, is extremely important for acquiring the tacit knowledge that underpins routines and intuitive decisions and is difficult to
explain.
This has to be complemented by the personal agency of the learners in finding out what skills and situational understandings they
might need and how best they might access them, either directly or through their supervisors or, if necessary, through informal
mentors, who are prepared to offer help (Eraut 2008).
References
Eraut M (2007) Learning from Other People in the Workplace, Oxford Review of Education, 33 (4), 403-422
Eraut M (2008) Using research into how professionals learn at work for enhancing placement learning, Proceedings of the WACE Asia
Pacific Conference. Sydney September 2008
Eraut M. & Hirsh W. (2007) The Significance of Workplace Learning for Individuals, Groups and Organisations, SKOPE Monograph 9,
Oxford
18. SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR PUTTING KNOWLEDGE TO WORK: EXPLORING THEIR POTENTIAL FOR THE 'SANDWICH PLACEMENT MODEL' OF
WORK INTEGRATED LEARNING
Karen Evans, Institute of Education, University of London

Approaches to the longstanding challenges of ‘integrating’ subject-based and work-based knowledge have typically focused on
questions of how learning can be ‘transferred’ from one setting to another, usually from theory into practice. What has continually
dogged attempts at transfer is how to overcome the assumed ‘abstract’ nature of theory in relation to the assumed ‘real’ nature of
practice. This is often seen as a single movement as encapsulated in the term ‘from theory to practice’.
The presentation will offer a fresh approach that concentrates on different forms of knowledge and the ways in which these are
contextualised and ‘recontextualised’ as people move between different sites of learning in universities, colleges and workplaces.
The aim has been to improve practice in work-based learning (WBL) by researching how the subject-based and work-based aspects
of a curriculum or learning programme can articulate with one another. In a research field that has come to be dominated by
consideration of organisational arrangements and the technical issues that accompany credit and quality assurance frameworks,
questions of knowledge, teaching and learning have been relatively neglected. The concept of recontextualisation offers some new
ways of enquiring into longstanding and seemingly intractable problems, by articulating what is involved in successfully moving
knowledge from disciplines and workplaces into a curriculum; from a curriculum into successful pedagogic strategies and learner
engagement in educational institutions and workplaces. Specifically, the research has identified a number of pedagogic strategies that
facilitate this outcome. Some strategies are a ‘smart’ re-working of long-standing pedagogic practices, for example, the ‘gradual
release’ of knowledge and responsibility builds engagement and confidence. Other strategies, such as the use of ‘Industry
Educators’, supplements educational expertise in vital ways by bringing real-world perspectives into teaching and learning process
without losing sight of academic and/or education-related requirements.
These and other key principles will be explored for their potential to inform the design and facilitation of curricular that incorporate a
'sandwich placement model' of work integrated
learning.
Reference
Evans K, Guile D and Harris J (2009) Putting knowledge to work: The Exemplars. WLE Centre, Institute of Education, University of
London
Key words: recontextualising knowledge, integrating subject and work-based knowledge, work based learning
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19. WIDENING ACCESS TO PROFESSIONAL LANGUAGE THROUGH ENHANCED PODCASTING. FROM CABBAGE TO C.A.B.G?
Catharine Grob, University of Surrey
Nursing students find the use of professional language challenging. A nursing student stated ‘ I was sitting in handover and they
started to talk about cabbages and then they spoke about S.O.B. and I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about – I had to ask
one of the staff nurses what it meant’. From this lack of understanding the student went on to describe how inadequate she had felt in
the clinical setting. Learning the medical language and abbreviations used in practice is part of learning to be professional in order to
communicate effectively. In addition there is a legal requirement for trusts to provide a list of commonly used terms and abbreviations
used in practice which also helps to enhance patient safety.
This paper aims to demonstrate how enhanced podcasts can help in the understanding and learning of medical language. It will also
inform the pedagogical development of enhanced podcasting in nurse education, building on the conversational frameworks cited in
the literature and how students and teaching staff, can collaborate in the design of new learning technologies.
In this participatory action research study, enhanced podcasts (with both sound and vision), based on terms and abbreviations used in
practice were produced. Focus groups involving students, mentors and teaching staff enabled the podcasts to be developed and
utilised. In this way phrases such as C.A.B.G is a coronary artery bypass graft and SOB meaning shortness of breath were
incorporated into the materials. The pictures were taken from PowerPoint bioscience lectures already attended by the students about
various body systems. . In this way clear links were made between theory and practice, a vital aspect of student learning.
The podcasts were produced using Garage/Band software and an Apple Mac notebook. They were produced were scripted and
edited by mentors/consultants in practice and nurse teachers to check for quality and accuracy.
Whilst the time taken to produce enhanced podcasts is considerable this is offset by their reusability, cross-disciplinary usage and
ease of improving the original material. The podcasts were shared between professionals and viewed far and wide exceeding
expectations of the scope and distance of usage. They proved invaluable, particularly for students with dyslexia and those with
English as a second language.
This project is a snapshot of the students’ and tutors’ perceptions and views of using new technologies however the collaborative
approach enabled innovative ideas to crystallize out of thin air.
20. USING A WEB-BASED PERSONAL LEARNING SYSTEM IN THE TRANSITION FROM STUDENT TO HEALTH PRACTITIONER
Jackie Haigh, University of Bradford
This presentation will discuss the preliminary findings of a study exploring the learning experiences of newly qualified health
professionals and the extent to which a familiar online learning system (ePortfolio) was used to facilitate learning in the transition from
student to health practitioner. The preliminary findings concern the participants’ descriptions of using the system in the university and
therefore relate to the conference theme of learning to be professional.
Methodology: This is a case study of a cohort of student midwives who had experience of using a personal online learning system to
support personal development planning throughout their university course. Participants were provided with 2 year alumni accounts in
this system and consented to three blog and/or email interviews in the first 6 months post graduation. Seventeen students from a
cohort of twenty four agreed to participate. The first interview explored the students’ experience of using the learning system in the
university, the second explored the early experience of becoming a member of staff and the third will reflect on learning in the first six
months and evaluate the usefulness of the personal learning system in this transition period.
Analysis: Responses to the initial interviews were analysed using NVIVO whereby free nodes identifying issues or concepts in the
data are structured into themes using a tree node structure. These themes are influenced by the researcher’s theoretical framework
impacting on the way the questions are structured but also can be said to arise from the data as the individual respondents make their
own contribution to knowledge creation. The analysis focuses on three themes: Structural Motivation; Personal agency; and Transition
Intentions
Findings
Structural motivation – students used the system primarily because it was embedded in their course and linked to an assessed
assignment. However the design of the system was also seen as motivating. It was described as a personal online tool available
anywhere and helpful in planning work and getting organised. Words used included guide, diary, framework, and tool. Respondents
described how it helped to structure their thinking.
Personal Agency – Participants varied in the ways they expressed their learning experience with some clearly very proactive and self
motivated and others less so.
Transition Intentions – All acknowledged the potential of the system to support ongoing CPD and expressed the intention of continued
use.
Key Words: Personal development planning; Professional education; ePortfolio
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21. USING EPORTFOLIO ACTION PLANNING TOOLS TO SUPPORT LEARNING IN CLINICAL PRACTICE
Jackie Haigh and Jan Porter, University of Bradford

This paper discusses student evaluations of using an e-portfolio action planning tool to support learning in practice settings. Thus it
addresses the themes of:
• Qualities and personal agency needed to be a good professional
• Role of Professional and Statutory bodies in shaping what it means to be professional
• Use of technology to facilitate learning to be professional.
It is a mandatory standard of midwifery undergraduate programmes that 50% of available curriculum hours are spent in clinical
practice where the student is ‘under direct or indirect supervision of a practicing midwife when providing care to women and
babies’ (NMC 2004). Student learning in placement is guided by set learning outcomes (NMC 2007) and students document their
experiences in achieving these in a clinical portfolio. Assessment of clinical practice has been graded since 2000 and has been
intensively supported by academic staff. This process included three tripartite interviews with the student, mentor (the qualified
midwife who supports learning in practice and assesses student performance) and link lecturer (academic member of staff responsible
for ensuring the educational quality of a particular placement area and supporting mentors in their assessment of students). The need
to make this process sustainable and more ecologically responsible made us explore other means of supporting the student and
mentor whilst maintaining academic links.
The university has an adopted ePortfolio tool (Pebblepad) which our students use for personal development planning. This tool
contains templates to structure student thinking and record keeping. Action planning templates were pre-populated with relevant
learning outcomes for each clinical placement. Students copied these plans to their personal portfolio and shared them with the link
lecturer thus creating an electronic link between university and placement. Students added evidence of achievement, reflection, self
evaluation and academic study throughout the placement experience in preparation for their final assessment interview. This system
was introduced to all three years of the programme in September 2008. Prior to its introduction current students and mentors had the
opportunity to discuss the changes and raise any issues at mentor updates and staff student liaison committees.
On completion of their first placement using the action plans, students participated in SWOT analysis of their experience. This paper
will outline the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of using web based portfolio tools to support student learning in
practice settings from the student perspective, as interpreted by practicing link lecturers.
References
NMC (2004) Standards of proficiency for pre-registration midwifery education London NMC
NMC (2007) Essential Skills Clusters for pre-registration midwifery education programmes. London. NMC
Key Words: Clinical practice, E-portfolio, Action planning, Mentor, Link Lecturer
22. BECOMING A PROFESSIONAL IN THE CHILDRENS’ WORKFORCE

Roger Harrison and Ann Pegg, Open University, UK.
In this paper we describe the early stages of a research project which takes a socio- cultural perspective in examining factors which
enable practitioners working with young people to become professionals. We will be discussing the conceptual and methodological
choices we have taken in designing the study and hope to have some early indications of the kind of data which is emerging.
The project is situated within a context of changing definitions of what it means to be a professional, and expansive views of the
nature of the childrens’ workforce. National policies are driving the provision of training and development opportunities for
practitioners at the same time as curriculum development imperatives within Higher Education seek to reconfigure the relationships
between learning and working. The nature of higher education courses, the specification of learning outcomes and the qualifications
available to, and required by, practitioners are all the subject to policy level change. A key feature of these changes in the
organisation of professional formation is the expectation that practitioners will do much of their learning in the workplace, combining
knowledge and skills gained from formal training courses with informal learning from social interaction with colleagues and young
people.
It is the way that these different conceptions of learning are combined in the workplace which is poorly understood. Our research
questions are located in this area where there are both new professionals and new modes of learning and ask: How do the learners
make sense of the world around them? How do these workers shape their actions according to both experience, new policy initiatives
and new learning? How do workers understand these different ways of learning and what it means to be a professional in this
workforce? What degree of agency and interpretation do these new professionals use in making sense of the different modes of
learning?
The project will be using ethnographic approaches to examine learning as a situated phenomena occurring at the intersection
between policy change, formal episodes of learning, individual reflection and social relations in the workplace. The project will explore
how volunteers, part-time and full time paid workers understand and are able to access opportunities to learn in and for the workplace
and how this learning shapes their understanding of what it means to be a professional in this newly unified children’s workforce.
Key words: Professionalism, learning, workforce development.
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23. FASHION FUTURES AND “LEGS 11”: HOW A REFLECTIVE POD IS SUPPORTING THE PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF
STUDENTS ON PART TIME PROGRAMMES AT THE LONDON COLLEGE OF FASHION
Alison James, Head of Learning & Teaching, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts
LCF originated in 1906 as a trade school for couturiers and skilled workers and has since changed significantly (as part of The
University of the Arts, London) with 50 courses offering fashion, beauty, business and science subjects at all levels of study. Its
industry links remain strong, however, and the concept of professional development is inherent in curriculum delivery, even if modes
of this have also changed. Students no longer learn purely in workshops, but through simulated industry projects, client briefs,
competitions, preparing collections, mounting exhibitions and catwalk shows and having their work critiqued by industry professionals.
Furthermore, there has been a quantum shift in the kind of professional being ‘produced’, the needs and desires of employers and
whether/how these should match up.
This paper will have two main strands; the first will look at part time programmes at LCF, where students working full time in the
fashion industry during the week study at evenings and weekends to obtain their degrees. Students undertaking these degrees do so
to amplify their existing knowledge and practice, from technical and market expertise to greater cultural and theoretical understanding
of where, why and how they do what they do. However, while new to HE, they are not, predominantly, ‘novices’ at life. They have
qualities such as determination and maturity which help them develop incisive and focused thinking for different situations; they find
new ones through relating their academic study to professional practice. Already used to prioritising, making decisions and evaluating
actions, they reflect on choices and experiences through articulations of Personal and Professional Development (PPD, incorporating
PDP) which is embedded in every undergraduate unit at LCF. PPD embraces the ‘lifewide’ view, allowing for multiple modes of
expression and supporting self-and emotional – awareness. Their developmental narratives are videoed in our Reflective Pod and
build up into a visual archive of their personal growth.
In evaluating how using the Pod has enriched student understanding of their personal and professional journey I will lead into the
second strand of the paper. This summarises current pedagogic research which has generated a conceptual emotional framework
which maps onto their Pod narratives and highlights how emotional factors impact on an individual’s learning trajectory. We will
consider how the use of such Pods, narratives and frameworks can help students clarify awareness of factors within themselves – and
externally – which have inhibiting or positive effects on their personal and professional lives.
Key words: Reflection, Personal and Professional Development Emotions, Pod
24. THE VALUE OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING IN LEARNING TO BE PROFESSIONAL

Martin Jenkins and Phil Gravestock, University of Gloucestershire
Digital storytelling is a method of capturing reflections and thoughts through a combination of visual and oral processes. The
emphasis is on the narrative, rather than the digital processes employed to ‘capture’ the story. Digital stories can take a variety of
forms, but at their simplest level they consist of a series of still images – perhaps 6-8 separate images – linked by a voice-over
narration of about 2-3 minutes (the equivalent of about 250-300 words). Examples of digital stories can be viewed on the BBC
Capture Wales site: http://www.bbc.co.uk/capturewales/. During the conference we will be providing a drop-in opportunity (03/AC02)
for participants to come and make a simple digital story, using their own stories of learning to be professional. In this session we will
introduce the idea of digital stories and consider their potential value in helping students develop their understanding of what being
professional means.
Key word: digital storytelling
25. DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ PROFESSIONAL SKILLS USING PDP AND SELF-COACHING TECHNIQUES
Tracy Johnson, University of Bristol
This presentation describes and evaluates the teaching of professional skills to Computer Science undergraduates through an
accredited Career Management Skills Unit run at the University of Bristol. This unit has been running for nine years and has been
significantly re-designed since the advent of PDP to include a greater emphasis on self-management, reflective learning and
professional development. In its evolution from a course focusing on theoretical models of career management and skills
development to a new emphasis on PDP that allows individual learners to focus on their own needs, we have seen not only greater
take-up of the unit, but a significant increase in the number of students using this course to facilitate finding work experience, securing
interviews and developing their self-confidence and motivation. The unit has become a mechanism through which students can take
tangible steps towards employability and employment, acquiring the tools they need for lifelong professional development.
The presenter is both a higher education lecturer in academic skills & professional development and a qualified personal coach, and
has seen some success in the ‘rebranding’ of PDP with students as ‘self-coaching skills’. The fundamental PDP processes of self-
assessment, goal setting, action planning and reflection can be seen to map clearly onto established coaching techniques and, when
presented as established skills used within the professional environment, seem to appeal to students more than the ‘recording
achievement’ approach. The presentation will consider how successful this ‘rebranding’ of PDP has been with students on the Career
Management Skills Unit, using feedback and material produced from the students as part of their reflective learning assignment. The
presentation will also introduce questions for discussion such as:
• How can we use career management models to ‘professionalise’ students?
• How can PDP be presented as a tool for professional development? What should we call it?
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• How can we present reflective learning to students as a practical tool for professional development, rather than an abstract
concept?
Key words – PDP, coaching , self-management, professionalizing students
26. USE OF THE PDP PROCESS AND AN E-PORTFOLIO TOOL TO SUPPORT PROFESSIONAL & CAREER DEVELOPMENT LEARNING ACTIVITIES
Mary Ann Kernan, Centre for Publishing and Digital Enterprise Department of Journalism City University
Rae Karimjee, PDP Consultant Learning Development Centre City University, London
This paper will describe a model that integrates Professional & Career Development related activities through use of an Eportfolio
which can offer a solution for an integrated curriculum that looks at connections between academic, work placement and other real
world contexts.
This work will draw on the partnership between the Module Leader of the programme and City University’s Learning Development
Centre (LDC) and Centre for Careers & Skills Development (CCSD). It describes the process through which students can record and
reflect on their progress when preparing for placements. This work also aims to demonstrate that the e-portfolio provides a personal
learning space where students can:
• reflect on their learning processes and outcomes
• develop the art of successful presentations
• can be supported in preparing for their placement.
Personal Development Planning (PDP) is 'a structured and supported process undertaken by an individual to reflect upon their own
learning, performance and/or achievement and to plan for their personal, educational and career development'. PDP is integral to
learning in its broadest sense; it involves thinking and planning ahead, acting on plans and reflecting on what has been achieved. City
University sees PDP as the process of identifying a route to the successful achievement of a student’s goals, of developing
mechanisms to reach those goals and of reflecting upon and recording progress towards that achievement.
The programme context of this paper is the integration of an Eportfolio in the MA in Publishing Studies at City University - a vocational
MA focused on a commercial sector which presents a considerable competitive hurdle for entry-level recruitment. In addition to
knowledge and analytical assessments, this MA has in 2008-9 introduced formal assessment of its Placement Report through for a
reflective, progressive Eportfolio, relating to a compulsory five-week industry placement. This element of the MA accounts for 10 of the
180 credits. The associated teaching includes career profiling and an interview workshop with industry visitors; the associated
knowledge resources include the publishing industry's competency framework. The assessment criteria for the marked assignment
allow credit for evidence of reflective understanding as well as skill and knowledge gains, demonstrated in a formative PebblePad blog
as well as a summative report. We will also review the processes in place to evaluate the success of this programme element, and
initial student feedback on the MA’s formal and informal emphasis on vocational development.
27. DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ PROFESSIONAL BEHAVIOURS USING ASSESSMENT CENTRE APPROACHES

Arti Kumer, University of Bedfordshire
This presentation draws on the experience of innovating a project on Assessment Centres (ACs) within the curriculum at the
University of Bedfordshire – which is aligned with the idea of a life-wide curriculum, and future careers of lifelong learning. The project
was initially conceived for academic staff to understand how and why many employers use ACs, and to consider how such activities
could be replicated within curricula, to facilitate entry to graduate employment. The project has grown to encompass a broader view of
developing all students in a more intentional and holistic way, providing exercises that can challenge, motivate and enable them to
develop skills, knowledge, attributes and professional identities that are useful in the 21st Century. Mock ACs for finalists can
potentially provide opportunities for finalists to demonstrate attributes that may be assessed and possibly verified for inclusion in the
new proposed Higher Education Achievement Report (Burgess, 2007).
ACs are increasingly widely used, usually as the last stage in an employer’s competency-based recruitment process, after candidates
have been pre-screened through applications and interviews. The AC is “an integrated process of simulations designed to generate
behaviour similar to that required for success in a target job or job level. It enables candidates’ performance to be measured
objectively against specific criteria” (source: Association of Graduate Recruiters).
Any HE institution that wishes to develop students’ professionalism can benefit from introducing the type of AC approaches that we
are currently developing and subjecting to action research. The lessons that have been learned from the methods employers use in
ACs to observe and assess graduate applicants can transfer to the ways in which educators teach and assess students. They open
up different ways of conceptualizing learning, feedback, assessment and development – concepts which can prompt interactive and
innovative methods that effectively develop professional competencies.
We will present the views of both staff and students: early empirical evidence shows that these interventions can engage students
actively in an enriched experience of formative, holistic development through self/peer/ tutor/employer assessment, and improve their
learning outcomes – provided they are effectively introduced and facilitated.
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The presentation will show how:

• the ‘behavioural competencies’ that employers seek are congruent with the attributes tutors seek in an effective learner
• practical AC-related exercises, examples and resources may be adapted in any curriculum, but there are issues and challenges
in implementing these;
• action research can improve and spread such interventions in different contexts.
28. PDP, CAREERS AND PROFESSIONAL BODIES – A MEETING OF THE WAYS?

Nicola Langton , Centre for the Development of Learning and Teaching, University of Reading
Learning to be professional involves many stages and roles - some taught and some simply acquired through experience,
observation, critical self-reflection etc. Professionalism can derive from tacit knowledge linked to activities or experiences and a
repertoire of solutions to tackle new or difficult problems. Adult learners respond best to experiential learning when it is self-directed
and enables them to draw on relevant experiences to date, link immediate learning needs to developmental tasks in a work-based
setting. Offering undergraduates opportunities to engage in such experiential learning needs to be staged and include engagement in
different communities of practice:
‘As students begin to engage with the discipline, as they move from exposure to experience,
they begin to understand that ... different communities ... are quite distinct,... As they work in a particular community, they start to
understand both its particularities and what joining takes, how these involve language, practice, culture and a conceptual universe, not
just mountains of facts’. Lave and Wenger (1991:13)
This presentation will examine the potential roles PDP, careers advice and experiential learning opportunities offered within a
professional programme of study can have on helping learners become professional members of a community of practice. Reference
will be made to professional regulatory bodies’ requirements for practicing members to show evidence of Continual Professional
Development (CPD) (e.g. The Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain) or engage in voluntary knowledge and skills-based PDP
modules (e.g. The Royal Society of Chemists). Specific reference will be made to the undergraduate Pharmacy programme at the
University of Reading to illustrate how linking PDP portfolios using iLearn (a PDP support tool using Blackboard) to a Career
Management Skills (CMS) module and students experiences of professional clinical practice and reflective placement assessments,
students can potentially:
• keep better track of their experiences and reflective practice
• better understand that such experiences apply to their whole career
• discover what becoming professional means and why it is important
• identify opportunities for acquiring and evidencing the qualities and attributes becoming professional requires
• make clearer connections between academic, work and extra-curricular activities
It is hoped that a useful discussion will follow on how best to
integrate career development advice and professional disciplinary requirements with aspects of PDP (or vice versa)
use PDP portfolios to help student discover, record and reflect on what it means to be professional and how to acquire and evidence
essential qualities and attributes
Key words: experiential learning - communities of practice– professional degrees –governing body requirements – career
management skills - PDP and portfolios
29. WHAT LIES IN STORE FOR THE PHD STUDENT? PDP, COMPETENCIES, ATTRIBUTES AND PROFESSIONALISM
Anne Lee, University of Surrey
Competencies have been widely used as a management tool in organisations, but as Boyatzis points out (2007) ‘academic and
applied research has trailed application’ (p5).
Academics are wary of the use of the language that surrounds competencies, it is reductive, behavioural and prescriptive and thus not
necessarily applicable to a creative enterprise. Academics are more comfortable with the notions of values and attributes (Barrie
2004, 2006). However most occupations are carried out within organisations. A recent survey of 663 public, private and voluntary
organisations found that 60% of respondents used a competency framework and 48% of the rest intend to implement one. Smaller
companies are more likely not to (Hogg 2008).
The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) defines competency as an outcome based approach to recognizing
occupational standards. They are a signal from the organization to the individual of the expected areas and levels of performance.
They include behavioural and technical attributes. Getting the balance between too much and too little description is difficult and
important. The most popular names found in employer competency frameworks are:
• Communication skills,
• People management
• Team skills
• Customer service skills
• Results-orientation
• Problem solving
40
The argument for these schemes is that they are more fair, clear and open, the argument against is that they can create clones,
become unwieldy and focused on the past.
This paper will look at the attributes and competencies that might be required of our doctoral research students. It argues that as
creators of original knowledge they will have a special responsibility and opportunity to manage it. It draws upon the interviews with
PhD supervisors both at the University of Surrey and at Harvard University to explore some of the roles that PhD students go on to
inhabit and explores the skills and knowledge that they will need to fulfil them.
Key words: PDP, attributes, professionalism, graduate careers, competencies
References: Barrie, S. C. (2004) "A Research-Based Approach to Generic Graduate Attributes Policy", Higher Education Research
and Development, vol. 23, no. 3, 261-275/Barrie, S. C. (2006) "Understanding What We Mean by the Generic Attributes of
Graduates", Higher Education: The International Journal of Higher Education and Educational Planning, vol. 51,2, 215-241/Boyatzis R
E (2008) Competencies in the 21st Century. Journal of Management Development Vol 27 No 1 pp 5-12./Hogg C (2008) Competency
and competency frameworks a factsheet. Wimbledon. Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. http://www.cipd.co.uk/subjects/
perfmangmt/competnces/comptfrmwk?NRMODE=Published&NRNODEGUID=%7b0138D759-0AE6-4D2A-8C62-7DD66174B818%
7d&NRCACHEHINT=Guest&IsSrchRes=1&cssversion=printable accessed 16.2.09 Survey details at ), Chartered Institute of
Personnel Development Survey details at http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/EB18FA28-BD40-4D47-81B9-660034D280C1/0/
learndevsr.pdf )
30. EXPLORATION OF THE VALUE OF DIGITAL STORY TELLING AS AN AID TO REFLECTION AND TRANSFER OF TACIT PRACTICE KNOWLEDGE
Jane Leng, Division of Health and Social Care, University of Surrey

This paper describes work in progress which is exploring student nurses’ reflections on learning in practice using digital stories.
Particular attention is being given to the transmission, recognition and articulation of tacit practice knowledge. It is intended that the
project should generate further understanding of the processes involved in professional formation and lead to the production of
learning objects which may be used for student and staff development as well as evaluation purposes.
It is not unusual for nurse tutors to be faced by student nurses proclaiming that they have learnt little or nothing from a particular
practice experience. This fellowship should provide an opportunity to investigate the meanings that may underpin such statements. It
might not always be wrong to accept students have, indeed, learnt nothing for, as Ramsden (2003) argues, it cannot be taken for
granted that students will learn as long as they do things. They may have “been treated as just another pair of hands” performing
seemingly basic nursing activities without being supported in the development of an appreciation of the subtle and complex decision
making which may underpin the choices, observations and relationship development associated with these activities. However, much
nursing knowledge is, to a large extent, tacit and difficult to articulate. Moreover, students may equate learning with what they have
been “taught” and underestimate the potential for learning in the context, of what Eraut (2008) describes, as a by-product of work
processes.
Story telling is being used increasingly in higher education as a means of promoting reflection and facilitating deep learning (McDrury
and Alterio 2002; Moon 2004). Digital story telling involves multi media clips which weave together images, music, story and voice to
bring depth and vibrancy to everyday experiences (Digital Story Telling Association 2002). The Patients Voices programme utilises
such technology to enable the voices of patients and carers to be heard and involve them in the education of health professionals.
(Hardy 2007) Although there is limited research on the effectiveness of these interventions it is argued that digital story telling may
help share tacit learning (Barrett 2005). My Fellowship is being informed by the Pathfinders Project at the University of Gloucester.
Key words: digital story telling, nursing practice
References: Barrett,H.(2005) Digital Story Telling for Reflection and Deep Learning in e portfolios
http://electronicportfolios.org/portfolios/StThomas.pdf (accessed 23.4.08)
Digital Story Telling Association (2002) Defining Digital Story Telling / www.dsaweb.org/01associate/ds.html (accessed 23.4.08) /
Eraut,M,(2008) How Professionals Learn through Work paper commissioned by the Surrey Centre for Excellence in Professional
Training and Education (SCEPTrE) / Hardy,P. (2005) Patient Voices:An Investigation into Improving the Quality of Health Care using
Digital Patient Stories / www.pilgrimprojects.co.uk/papers.htn (accessed 23.4.08) / McDrury,J. and Alterio,M.(2002) Learning through
Story Telling in Higher Education Using Reflection and Experience to Improve Learning Kogan Page, London / Moon,P (2004) A
Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning, Routledge Falmer, London
Ramsden,P.(2003) Learning to Teach in Higher Education Routledge Falmer, London / University of Gloucester (2008) Pathfinder
Project:Enhancing Student Learning Experiences through use of Digital Story Telling /
http://www.glos.ac.uk/tli/lets/projects/pathfinder/index.cfm (accessed 1.5.08)
31. MANAGING CHALLENGING INTERPERSONAL SITUATIONS: HOW CAN WE HELP STUDENTS PREPARE FOR THE EXPERIENCES THEY MAY
ENCOUNTER IN THE WORKPLACE?
Paulo Lopes, Department of Psychology, University of Surrey
This workshop will enable participants to experience and discuss two approaches to helping people work with others and manage
challenging interpersonal situations effectively in the workplace. Both approaches can be incorporated into interpersonal and
emotional skills training programmes, or personal and professional development modules. They can be used with students, teachers,
placement tutors, and other professionals.
41
The first approach entails having participants discuss brief written cases based on challenging interpersonal situations at work
reported by others. In this workshop we will use cases reported by students and by university graduates during the first few years of
their careers. This approach can be used with both small and large groups of university students and may be particularly cost-effective
when used in large classes. Participants are asked to form small groups of four to six people each to discuss the cases. Following the
small-group discussion, the facilitator elicits and contrasts opinions from various groups, encouraging students to consider different
angles and possibilities, and involving the whole class in this reflective process.
The goal is to train participants to analyse the pros and cons of different strategies for managing complex interpersonal situations.
Participants are encouraged to anticipate others’ reactions and to consider various factors that might influence the impact of different
strategies, such as the social and organisational context, the history of the relationship, and others’ motives and personalities. In other
words, the facilitator encourages participants to apply their intelligence to the analysis of complex social problems for which there is no
single right or wrong answer. This approach can help participants to broaden their repertoire of strategies for handling difficult
interpersonal situations, to learn basic conflict management and communication strategies, and to develop perspective taking.
Participants may also gain an enhanced awareness of their response tendencies and of the biases they bring to bear upon the
interpretation of ambiguous social situations. Finally, this approach can show people how to reflect on and learn from their own
experiences in life.
This type of training can be enriched by having participants respond to a set of cases online before the actual training session. Then
they can be given individualised feedback showing how their response compare to those of other participants and those of more
experienced professionals, for example. This approach is being developed by Paulo with a SCEPTrE fellowship at the University of
Surrey.
The second approach entails having participants discuss their own experiences of working with others. This works best with relatively
small groups of 10 to 20 students, in the context of a broader training programme where an atmosphere of open communication,
disclosure and trust has already been created. This small-group approach can build upon the type of large-group training described
above. Here the facilitator helps participants to reflect upon their own experiences and asks other students to consider how they would
have managed the situation. Instead of speculating on the basis of the limited information provided in a short case, participants can
elicit further information from the person who was involved in the actual situation, and then explore solutions that fit the constraints
that this person faced at the time. Paulo has used this approach as part of a course on emotional intelligence and management
offered to MBA students.
Key words: training for challenging interpersonal situations, interpersonal and emotional skills training
32. REFLECTION: A KEY PERSONAL AGENCY FOR LEARNING TO BE PROFESSIONAL
Professor Ursula Lucas, University of the West of England

The question mark in the title of this presentation is intended to denote a reflective, questioning approach to issues of what we mean
by ‘reflection’ and its relationship to ‘learning to be a professional’.
The presentation will:
highlight the assumptions that underpin our research and pedagogic practice in this area
illustrate how these questions about the meaning and nature of ‘reflection’ and ‘learning to be a professional’ have been initially
raised, and partially answered, through a programme of research within accounting and business; and
consider the pedagogic implications of a focus on the “development of a reflective capacity” and on “learning to be a professional”.
The remainder of this abstract sets out background to these issues.
The focus of our work has been on the “development of a reflective capacity” rather than on reflection per se. Often the term
“reflection” is associated with cognitive thinking skills. However, we are concerned with critical reflection which involves the
questioning of taken-for granted assumptions and the “re-viewing” of a situation. We argue that “reflection” is a demanding process
involving a motivation that leads to a willingness, or a capacity, to develop qualities of openness, acknowledge uncertainty and,
ultimately, to take a view and act. This process involves the identification of taken-for-granted beliefs and a readiness to question
them across a range of domains. The development of a reflective capacity thus involves issues of identity or view of self.
Consequently change is unlikely to be straightforward. Challenges to existing beliefs may involve defensive responses such as denial,
grief and loss. However, it may also involve more positive aspects such as pleasure and eros (Lucas, 2008). Our use of the term
‘capacity’ indicates that there may be a potential for critical reflection but that it may not be exercised in all contexts or on all occasions
(Lucas and Tan, 2006).
A wide range of research has been conducted in the areas of critical reflection, and personal epistemologies. We have chosen to draw
on the work of Baxter Magolda (1992) on ‘ways of knowing’ because, to a large extent, she has synthesised findings from earlier
research (Perry, 1970; Belenky et al, 1986) through her large-scale empirical studies. Her work also complements that of King and
Kitchener (2004) on the development of reflective judgement. A further reason for our choice is that Baxter Magolda also integrates
issues relating to identity. She utilises the term ‘self-authorship’ (Kegan, 1994) and argues that this simultaneously comprises three
aspects of a “way of knowing”: cognitive (how one makes meaning of knowledge), interpersonal (how one views oneself in relation to
others) and intrapersonal (how one perceives one’s sense of identity). In our most recent research project (Lucas and Tan, 2007) we
investigate how work-based placement learning supports, encourages or inhibits the development of a reflective capacity. We found
that placement (unlike university) provides a context in which students have to take personal responsibility for their own learning and
performance. Thus it provides a context within which students have to develop interpersonally, through a range of changing
relationships with others, and intrapersonally, through a changing sense of self. Whilst placement provides a range of experience that
might be integrated with prior university learning and lead to cognitive development, this potential is realised in only a limited number
42
of ways.
The pedagogic implications of a focus on the ‘development of a reflective capacity’ and on “learning to be a professional’ are
significant. It is important that there is a clear pedagogic framework that supports all learners. Educators, as well as students, will
benefit from a questioning of their assumptions and beliefs. It is well-accepted that educators, themselves, conduct their teaching on
the basis of a wide variation in professed and enacted beliefs (Kember, 1997; Lucas, 2002). Consequently, for some educators, the
idea of ways of knowing and the interaction of cognitive, inter- and intra-personal development may challenge their own ideas about
the role of teaching. We work within a “developing as a professional” framework for ourselves and our students. This framework
assumes that it is not sufficient to assume that there is some recognizable end point of learning to ‘be a professional’. Rather, the
telos is to ‘act professionally’ on the basis of acknowledged professional values and beliefs in a complex world. This involves a never-
ending, ongoing commitment to development. And development involves the placement of a question mark in expected, and
unexpected, places?
Key words : Reflection, personal epistemologies, ways of knowing, work-based learning, business and accounting education.
References
Baxter Magolda, M. (1992). Knowing and Reasoning in College: gender related patterns in students' intellectual development San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass / Belenky, M., Clinchy, B., Goldberger, N., & Tarule, J. (1986). Women's Ways of Knowing: The Development
of the Self New York: Basic Books / Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press / Kember, D. (1997). A recon ceptualisation of the research into university academics' conceptions of
teaching. Learning and Instruction, 7(3). / King, K.P., & Kitchener, K.S. (1994). Developing reflective judgment: Understanding and
promoting intellectual growth and critical thinking in adolescents and adults. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. / Lucas, U. (2002).
Uncertainties and contradictions: lecturers' conceptions of teaching introductory accounting. British Accounting Review, 34(3), 183-
204. / Lucas, U. (2008). Being "pulled up short": Creating moments of surprise and possibility in accounting education. Critical
Perspectives on Accounting, 19(3), 383-403. / Lucas, U. and Tan, P (2006) ‘Developing a reflective capacity: the role of personal
epistemologies within undergraduate education’[online] Paper presented to support a Research Seminar at the 14th Improving
Student Learning Symposium, University of Bath, 4-6 September 2006. Available at: http://www.uwe.ac.uk/bbs/research/drc/isl.pdf
(Accessed 19th February 2009) / Lucas, U., & Tan, P. (2007). Developing a reflective capacity within undergraduate education: the
role of work-based placement learning. York: Higher Education Academy. Available at: http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/assets/York/
documents/resources/publications/LucasLengTan.pdf (Accessed 19th February 2009) / Perry, W.G. (1970). Forms of Intellectual and
Ethical Development in the College Years New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson /
33. 'ASSOCIATED THOUGHT’: SOCIAL SOFTWARE, PROFESSIONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND DEMOCRATIC PROFESSIONALISM
Paul Maharg, Law School, University of Strathclyde
Democratic professionalism is a form of re-professionalization built around models of active and collaborative democratic change.
One of the many problems inherent in democratic professionalism is the part played by professionals in both the creation and
maintenance of rights, and in the dialogue concerning the nature of freedom in a democracy. Do professionals shrink the space of
debate for their own selfish purposes, engaging only in technocratic professionalism; or do they play a nobler role in analysing
problems of democratic engagement, authenticity and integrity, thus engaging in democratic professionalism?
This paper argues, first, that Dewey's form of educational praxis is one method by which we can encourage democratic
professionalism; and that a key element of our approach should be the Deweyan concern with 'associated thought', namely the forms
and patterns of social thinking that professionals undertake in practice. Second, and moving from the early twentieth century to the
early twenty-first century, the internet offers us profound opportunities to engage in new forms of social and educational engagement,
and particularly in the applications known as social software. I give some examples of how such software has the capability to enrich
learning about professional relationships, and to transform professional education and knowledge production. In particular I shall
show how how critical is the focus on professional relationships early in a programme of study; how learning about and from such
relationships can encourage greater engagement with programme content; and what learners can achieve as a result of such
engagement. Finally, I analyse how such software could be used to facilitate forms of democratic professionalism in society.
34. EXPERIMENTS IN KNOWLEDGE CREATION: EXPERIENCING THE VOICES OF EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, AND RESOLUTION IN ACADEME
Arthur Male, Doctoral School, Institute of Education, University of London
Human beings are powerful learners utilising informative, formative and trans-formative exchange for artistic and scientific affect. In
doctoral education, staff and student colleagues script emancipating research journeys. I initiate collaborative conversations with
colleagues to enact ongoing, historical, and visionary quests for truth in education and modalities of practice. Evolution, revolution and
resolution characterise our dramatic relationships to education. Documenting the performance of knowledge creators at the Doctoral
School, Institute of Education, University of London, I open the dialogue in this area of learning by creating scenarios and
experiencing my methodology. The transcript narrates research participants’ experiments transforming ontological experience.
During episodic events, participants explore educational ascendance achieving a meaningful life. Epistemological praxis includes
creating conceptual art, cultural artefacts, and metaphorical archetypes. We author memoir stories, improvise theatrical dialogues,
and encounter our alter ego, the learner, conceptualising contradictions between personal experience and academic freedom. We
activate our life course processing multi-media texts and lifetime learning contexts. We focus attention on the genius we invest in peak
performances and miraculous outcomes to expand awareness of our personal learning paradigms. We provide evidence of our
moment-to-moment, evolving educational experience. Collaboration, evaluating emancipating experiences in educational experiments
has not been documented before.
43
In my evaluation, I engage: warrants generated by iconic, educational equations and formulas; matrices constructed from
collaborative conversations; and outcomes developed through colleagues’ participation in the alternative, matricised education
system, conversation model of education, and collaborative education programmes. Since, the mainstream, symmetrised education
system, hierarchic model of education, and competitive education programmes place all participants in a respondent relationship to
authority, this leads to my focusing hypothesis: in knowledge creating experiments, individuals generate independent educational
experience to validate subject, common, and self-knowledge. And inspires my research question: why do learners open conversations
to conceptualise learning entanglements in academe?
I assess three learning paradigms: academic, activist, and personal; and explicate research participants’ informative, formative and
trans-formative exchanges. The experiments increase colleagues’ awareness of themselves as unique, autonomous, knowledge
creating centres utilising metamorphs and sequents to matricise symmetrised learning criteria. I provide evidence of our revolutionary
interrogation, in diverse educational environments, of learners’ leornian conventions, academe’s liberalis covenants, and expected
educational experience. Learners activate visionary, virtual, and actual learning realities. Immersed in collaborative conversations,
colleagues’ epistemological praxis transmutes syntagmatic communication. Research participants compose successive
approximations of their evolving truth resolving the disparities between functional conflict and universal intimacy.
Key words: Learner, caring, learning, working, matrix, metamorph
35. LEARNING TO UNDERSTAND BUSINESS FINANCE

Johnny Martin, Finance Training and Advice to Entrepreneurs
Many professionals will at some stage of the careers get involved in the financial side of a business and a basic level of financial
literacy is useful to include in the education of all professionals. But basic financial awareness is often missing from professional
training in many disciplinary areas. Finding ways of delivering this type of training in a cost effective way is a useful goal.
I am involved in enterprise education and of all the modules in enterprise courses, finance is the one learners seem to dread most.
This “fear of finance” is pretty well universal - it is the combination of dreaded numbers with the jargon that generations of accountants
have invented, probably for obvious commercial benefit.
So many entrepreneurs come away from financial meetings bemused by what has been going on – and yet it is crucial for the success
of transforming ideas into businesses that entrepreneurs can talk to and understand the money men. Dragons Den has cruelly
exposed how financially illiterate so many people are – even those who are already in business.
The purpose of this paper is to focus on how we can promote financial business literacy and an interest in financial matters.
Motivation is a crucial starting point. Even before the credit crunch business TV programmes and personalities were making young
people more familiar and interested in business. The challenge is to develop and deepen this interest to include cash flow and
margins. Paul Smith (inventor of “Who wants to be a Millionaire”) told me – don’t go into business if you aren’t prepared to negotiate
the cleaning contract, and along with the cleaning contract goes basic financial literacy.
So if we can further develop motivation, the next hurdle is to overcome the “loss of face” issue – taking the first step to put your hand
up and admit I need finance training. There is a presumption that people learn finance like parenting – on the job!
It is here that tutors and teachers need to recognise that learning the language of finance (break even, gearing etc) requires
sensitivity, and creativity. It requires delivery mechanisms that learners can relate to and not have their fragile confidence shattered.
I have found that the use of video/digital media, keeping the numerical aspects as simple as possible to explain concepts, using real
life business examples and finally avoiding at all costs overloading the learner with too much information. Examples of my video work
will be shown during the presentation and be available for viewing afterwards.
Key words: financial training, business plans, enterprise, start-up, raising finance
36. DEVELOPING THE PROFESSIONAL SKILLS OF THE “VETERINARY TEAM”

Stephen May, Royal Veterinary College
Over the past 15 years, the Royal Veterinary College has diversified from being a “monotechnic”, educating veterinary surgeons, to a
college for the developing “veterinary team”, through pioneering degree programmes for veterinary nurses, veterinary physiotherapists
and bioveterinary scientists. As in other areas of science, the focus of curricula has moved away from knowledge transmission to the
development of key skills. This presentation concentrates on parallel developments in two courses: the five-year clinical programme
(BVetMed) and three-year honours degree in Bioveterinary Science (BSc).
Both courses have novel taught strands in key and professional skills. Each deals with relevant behaviours and interpersonal skills as
well as processes important to professional function, such as clinical reasoning (BVetMed) and scientific philosophy and methods
(BVetMed, BSc). These form the foundation for the major practice elements of each course: clinical practice (BVetMed) and research
projects in years 1, 2 and 3 (BSc) and years 2 and 4/5 (BVetMed).
Students with science backgrounds seem less used to any learning which goes beyond factual recall. Many also seem to have been
put off project work. Therefore, all educators in these strands have to work hard to encourage students to engage fully, and
appreciate the relevance to their professional lives. However, there is evidence that employers and graduates recognise the value of
these approaches. It is also increasingly clear that for a number of students on the BSc programme, the research experience has had
a transforming effect, diverting them into science PhDs , away from their original intention of applying for BVetMed graduate entry.
44
The College has always encouraged students to publish and present their projects at external, in addition to internal, scientific
conferences. It has recently appointed a “research champion” to help add this dimension of professional development to the
experience of a greater proportion of undergraduate students. The College has also recently been accredited to examine the new
RCVS Certificate in Advanced Veterinary Practice, which includes a large Professional Skills module, providing continued learning
opportunities beyond graduation.
A number of these elements have existed previously as “bolt-ons” to traditional curricula. However, these were frequently
unsuccessful due to a lack of integration with other classroom-based teaching and work-based learning, and a lack of effective
assessment. The increasing coherence within College-controlled vertically and horizontally integrated curricula has meant that
student engagement, understanding of process, and output have increased, benefiting them, in terms of employability, for their future
careers.
Key words: Professional skills, undergraduate research, integrated curricula
37. CAREER DEVELOPMENT LEARNING THROUGH A LIFE-WIDE CURRICULUM

Phillip McCash, School of Continuing Education, University of Reading
In research and in practice, the subjects of career development, professional development and education can appear superficially
distinct. Indeed in some circles the idea of studying career at all is still poorly understood. I will attempt to integrate these three
elements and discuss some of the relevant underlying literature. In particular, I will argue that there is a disconnection between the
emerging interdisciplinary research field of career studies (e.g. Arthur et al. (1989), Collin and Young (2000), Gunz and Peiperl (2007),
Inkson (2007), Krumboltz (1979), Mitchell and Krumboltz (1996)) and the practice of career education in higher education. Specifically,
the sometimes narrow conceptualisations of career employed within the latter present a problem for those who seek to link a life-wide
curriculum with richer conceptions of career. A key issue has arisen in this respect with regard to the models of careers education
used in higher education (Foskett and Johnston 2006: 45). The most commonly used pedagogies provide little scope for the surfacing
of student self- or world-view generalisations (Krumboltz 1979) and theories-in-use (Schon 1984) nor for engagement with multiple
perspectives on careers, employability, or work identity. In the light of this, there is an emerging consensus that new and more
advanced learning materials are urgently required (Bowman et al. 2006; Horn 2007; Kneale 2007; McCash 2006, 2007, 2008; Watts
2006). This indicates that there is considerable potential to enhance the life-wide curriculum through narrowing the gap between
research and teaching in the field of career. I will propose some methods to accomplish this and provide some examples including
case studies and resources. These topics will be of relevance to work-based learning lecturers, course designers intending to
introduce or enhance the study of career within their professional development programmes, as well as career educators and
personal development planning professionals.
Key words: career development learning, employability, career education, identity, professional development, reflective practice
References: Arthur, M.B., Hall, D.T. and Lawrence, B.S. (Eds.). (1989). Handbook of Career Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Bowman, H., Hodkinson, P. and Colley, H. (2006). Employability and Careers Progression for Full-time UK Masters Students.
http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/hecsu.rd/research_reports_129.htm (accessed 15 October 2009).
Collin, A. and Young, R.A. (Eds.). (2000). The Future of Career. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Foskett, R. and Johnston, B. (2006). Curriculum Development and Career Decision-making in Higher Education: credit-bearing
careers education. Manchester: HECSU.
http://www.hecsu.ac.uk/hecsu.rd/research_reports_127.htm (accessed 27 August 2008).
Gunz, H.P. and Peiperl, M.A. (Eds.). (2007). Handbook of Career Studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Horn, J. (2007). Prioritising Learner Development in Careers Education: a model for higher education. Career Research and
Development 17, 30-34.
Inkson, K. (2007). Understanding Careers: the metaphors of working lives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Kneale, P. (2007). Is it time to embed careers teaching and support in the disciplines? Career Research and Development 17, 35-38.
Krumboltz, J.D. (1979). A social learning theory of career decision-making. In A.M. Mitchell, G.B. Jones and J.D. Krumboltz (Eds.),
Social Learning and Career Decision Making. Cranston, RI: Carroll Press.
McCash, P. (2008). Career Studies Handbook: career development learning in practice. York: Higher Education Academy.
McCash, P. (2007). Career Studies: new ideas for academics and careers advisers. Career Research and Development 17, 23-29.
McCash, P. (2006). We’re all career researchers now: breaking open careers education and DOTS. British Journal of Guidance and
Counselling 34 (4): 429-49.
Mitchell, L.K. and Krumboltz, J.D. (1996). Krumboltz’s learning theory of career choice and development. In D. Brown, L. Brooks and
associates, Career Choice and Development (third edition). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Schön, D. (1984). The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Watts, A.G. (2006). Career Development Learning and Employability. York: Higher Education Academy.
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38. ACADEMIC ASSERTIVENESS – PUTTING PROFESSIONAL PRINCIPLES INTO PRACTICE IN THE STUDENT EXPERIENCE
Jenny Moon, Centre for Excellence in Media Practice, Media School, Bournemouth University
The concept of academic assertiveness arose gradually but powerfully as I wrote a book on critical thinking (Moon, 2008). I realised,
with help, particularly from Ron Barnett’s writings, that demonstration of effective critical thinking requires capacities that are generally
included in the concept of assertiveness – the willingness to give opinion, to challenge others’ opinions, the ability to accept
reasonable criticism and feedback, the willingness to accept that one can make a mistake and can fail, the recognition that one has
rights and that others also have rights that need to be respected – and so on. Success in professional positions demands more from
the learner that she has her head bowed over a book - even if then she has critical thoughts in her mind! Work on academic
assertiveness followed and it became a book that is written directly for students themselves. The development of academic
assertiveness involves the generation of awareness, some learning and access to various practical techniques. In this book this is
applied to and illustrated from all areas of student life (ie to the flatmate who will not wash up, as well as the willingness to disagree
with peers in class discussion).
In the conference session, I will present the ideas behind the concept of academic assertiveness and the component areas that I
consider to be helpful to learners. I will talk about how these ideas can be developed in higher education/professional development
situations and the contexts in which this can occur. PDP is an obvious context, but my favourite (not a new idea) is the provision of
courses in student unions.
More recently the principles of academic assertiveness have been employed to facilitate improvement of group work for students –
initially for media students ** and subsequently for all disciplines***. The materials are designed to be used in several tutorial
sessions – perhaps prior to group/project work. They provide a ‘language’ for dealing with the sticky issues of group work. In the
presentation, I will describe the generation and use of the materials.
References
Moon, J (2008) Achieving Success through Academic Assertiveness, New York, Routledge (written for students, but containing details
of how courses can be developed).
**Media student materials – www.CEMP.ac.uk/themes/academicassertivenessinhe/
***Making Groups Work, ESCalate (Higher Education Academy Subject Centre for Education) from the website
(www.ESCalate.ac.uk and hard copy available).
39. VALUING WORK-BASED LEARNING PEDAGOGICAL EXPERTISE

Paula Nottingham, Birkbeck, University of London
Knowledge of professional work environments has increasingly become an important topic for those who teach at university level.
Work-based learning (WBL) within Higher Education (HE) is a complex discourse that considers a range of university learning
contexts (Gray, 2001, Walsh 2008, Helyer, 2007) that include work-based learning, work-related learning and workforce development.
WBL(HE) practice structures and assesses experience-based learning that integrates the use of theory and the process of reflection.
Within this context, the dynamics of becoming a professional in the workplace (Eraut, 2007) are balanced with the understanding of
how the learning process can be developed throughout life (Jarvis, 2006). Some perspectives of WBL(HE) question the familiar
frameworks within which HE operates, such as the use of Mode 2 knowledge exchange (Gibbons et al.,1994).
WBL(HE) can engage ‘non-traditional’ students, often in part-time study, who remain in the workplace, as employees or volunteers, or
are working at home. Recent HE policy seems to support WBL(HE) as being able to increase the number of students who will enter
HE as a part of widening participation or as a progression route for vocational learners. WBL(HE) is now explicitly required as a part of
the Foundation Degree provision and is recognised by many institutions as a way of answering the Leitch agenda by delivering higher
skills and employer engagement targets. The Quality Assurance Agency (2007), Section 9, gives guidelines for WBL and work
placements, although the degree to which these two practices are similar may be contested within the WBL(HE) discourse.
Emerging findings from ongoing doctoral research indicate that the current philosophies used to research and practice WBL(HE),
while varied in perspective, provide innovative expertise that may inform a wider audience in HE institutions, especially practitioners.
WBL(HE) specialist knowledge has often been developed using personal experience where practitioners have developed pedagogy to
adapt to a changing Academy environment that is increasingly being asked to engage in demand led provision. The realities of the
WBL(HE) landscape (Nixon et al., 2006) may require WBL(HE) practitioners to adapt this pedagogy to a ‘best fit’ within their
autonomous institutions and prepare a wider group of professionals to obtain specialist knowledge for delivering this type of learning.
In some instances, some of the concepts developed within WBL(HE) practice might be used to enrich related learning for the
workplace, such as with personal development planning, as a part of enriching student experience.
Key words: work-based learning, workplace, expertise, pedagogy, employer engagement, Foundation Degree
40. FROM INWARDLY GAZING TO OUTWARDLY REFLECTING: THE CHANGING NATURE OF STUDENT POLICE OFFICER EDUCATION
Judith Oliver, University of Huddersfield
Student police officers used to be trained exclusively within the police organisation. Their education took place at the police training
school, they were trained by other police officers and their practical experience came ‘on the job’. The police force was a ‘family’
looking inwards for its structure, identity and education.
46
That has all changed.

An accepted benchmark for any modern professional group is the capacity for reflection. To be reflective practitioners the student
officers need the opportunity to learn about themselves as individuals and as professionals; to explore their existing skills and
consider the development of new ones; to explore theories and concepts which both underpin and shape the community and the
profession and have the opportunity to debate the issues which will face them as serving officers. In this way they will come to have
an understanding both of the community they will serve and the organisation of which they are a part. This reflective practice can only
be enhanced by exposure to other people’s thoughts and ideas and hence the need for an education system that reaches outside the
comfort of the police family.
The University of Huddersfield, in partnership with the West Yorkshire Police Force, has developed a unique Foundation Degree in
Police Studies. The student officers experience a tripartite learning environment which combines learning at University with learning
at the Police Training School and from experienced officers in Division.
The challenges in providing this new form of education for the students cannot be underestimated. The students vary in age, gender,
life experiences and educational background. It is not unusual to have students who left school at 16 years with minimal qualifications
in the same group as those with an Honours degree, Masters degree or a PhD. There can be resentment at being ‘forced’ to
undertake the Foundation Degree and a reluctance to engage with the process.
The presentation will explore how the module, Learning Process and Professional Development, seeks to develop the skills of being a
reflective practitioner. It provides the opportunity for students to explore their own learning styles, consider their own values and
beliefs and how these may impact on learning and practice; examine their existing talents and skills and develop learning plans for
new skills. Linking with the learning outcomes of the other modules and the National Occupational Standards, the module provides
the building blocks for the development of future professionals
Key words : Professional, Reflection, Police officer, Partnership, Challenges
41. FACILITATING AND RECOGNISING LIFE-WIDE LEARNING: THE ‘YORK AWARD’

Robert Partridge, Director Careers Service, University of York
Oven-ready graduates: a half-baked theory?: In the late nineties, there was much talk of the oven-ready graduate: a ‘professional’,
possessing the right combination of ingredients to make a rapid impact in the workplace. Setting aside more fundamental questions
about the purpose of HE, economic and pedagogic arguments alone imply that this is a flawed ideal:
1. The 1998 Coopers and Lybrand report on skills development in HE suggested that it was hardly the place of universities to
compensate for the inadequacies of employer induction and training programmes.
2. Hesketh (2004) reports that employers value ‘creative destruction’ above specific knowledge and skills, and perhaps this is
fortunate since
3 some educationalists argue that transferable skills are really not that transferable (for example: Atkins, 1999; Brown, 1999; Eraut,
1994; Knight and Yorke, 2000).
Nonetheless, universities persist in teaching transferable skills on the understanding that these will make students more employable
and employers continue to express concern about the gap between graduate skills and employer needs. So perhaps employers are
looking for oven-ready graduates after all and, perversely, universities are doing their best to supply them?
The University of York’s solution to this problematic area is to develop an Award Framework to enable learners to identify for
themselves the opportunities in their lives for developing and demonstrating achievement of the sorts of skills that are often termed
transferable. The York Award is the UK’s leading skills and personal development programme. It has served as the inspiration and
model for a growing number of UK and international initiatives and, over the last ten years, it has enjoyed sustained growth in
employer engagement and student participation
The session will describe the development and evolution of the York Award, the way it is implemented and reflect on what has been
learned since 1998, about the facilitation and recognition of life-wide learning.
Key words: York Award, transferable skills
References
Atkins, M. (1999) Oven-ready and self-basting: taking stock of employability skills. Teaching in Higher Education, 4 (2), 267-280.
Brown, C. "Examples of Essential Abilities." Victoria, BC: Centre for Curriculum, Transfer and Technology, 1999. (www.ctt.bc.ca/lo/
IDEA/symposium99/Abmodels.html)
Coopers & Lybrand (1998). Skills Development in Higher Education. Report for the CVCP/DfEE/HEQE,
Eraut, M (1994) Developing Professional Knowledge and Competence Routledge-Falmer Abingdon and New York
Knight, P., & Yorke, M. (2000). Skills plus: Tuning the Undergraduate Curriculum.
Skills Plus Project Report.
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42. LEARNING TO BE PROFESSIONAL – AN INTERNATIONAL DIALOGUE. CREATING HIGH QUALITY, RELEVANT AND MEANINGFUL WORK
INTEGRATED LEARNING EXPERIENCES ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
Deborah Peach, Queensland University of Technology and colleagues from QUT and ACEN the Australian Collaborative Education
Network
This interactive, video presentation will elaborate on the range of ways in which the goal of learning to be professional is pursued
across several discipline areas in Australian higher education. A panel of discipline-based work integrated learning practitioners will
provide an over view of some of the challenges, opportunities and ideas in engaging students, staff, and industry in relevant and
meaningful collaborative learning experiences. Career Development Learning will also be discussed and reference made to vignettes
of current practice in work integrated learning - gathered as part of a recent large scale scoping study of work integrated learning in
Australia. Participants in this session are encouraged to discuss issues and work integrated learning models relevant to the Australian
and UK higher education contexts.
Chair
Dr Deborah Peach, Office of Teaching Quality, QUT
Panel
Professor Lyn Simpson, Faculty of Business QUT
Ms Judith McNamara, Faculty of Law, QUT
Ms Jude Smith, Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT
Associate Professor Adrian Thomas, Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT
Mr Mike Plakalovic, Faculty of Built Environment and Engineering
Dr Alan McAlpine, Careers and Employment, QUT
Ms Carol-joy Patrick, Industrial Affiliates Program, Griffith University
Guide for presenters 5-8mins maximum per panel member
1. What does it mean to be a good professional in my discipline/faculty?
2. What are the different ways that learners in my faculty gain experiences that assist them to become professionals?
3. How does Career Development Learning contribute to the process of learning to become a professional?
4. What does what we are doing in Australia compare with what is happening in the UK?
43. TELL US WHAT YOU REALLY THINK! PUTTING SERVICE USERS AT THE CENTRE OF HEALTHCARE STUDENT ASSESSMENT
Jan Porter and Liz Whitney , University of Bradford
User involvement is at the heart of all current NHS policy and guidelines in the UK. This ranges from healthcare curriculum planning,
service planning and delivery to evaluation of services. The main driver for this is that the general public have voiced that they want
more influence over health and social care services. Professionals are then better able to provide a quality service if they understand
what local communities need. The Nursing and Midwifery Council, the regulatory body for nursing and midwifery in England and
Wales decreed in 2007 that service users should also be involved in the assessment of midwifery students by 2009. They did not
however state how this should happen.
In the Division of Midwifery and Women’s Health at the University of Bradford, service users are involved in selecting students for
entry to midwifery programmes, teaching, course management and curriculum planning. Users are often asked to participate in
healthcare education for students to learn and practice their clinical skills in the clinical setting, but they are rarely asked to evaluate
student performance. Students participate in these activities but do not always reflect on the impact of their participation in the care of
individual clients.
The purpose of this paper is to share an innovative approach to assessment that has placed service users at the centre of the
process. A draft framework was produced and shared with the clinical areas, service users and students for their consideration.
Comments were received and incorporated into the assessment draft and from this an assessment tool was developed.
The assessment was piloted with a cohort of year 3 students in 2008 that had been on a variety of clinical placements. Students had
some initial concerns about the process but all evaluated the experience very positively. Many commented on the ethical issues and
this brought ethics to life for them. Some service users commented that it was nice to be able to express their opinion of the care
received and clinical colleagues who had some misgivings also felt the assessment worked well.
We feel that we have developed a useful strategy for real involvement of service users in the education of healthcare students. This
places women at the centre of care mirroring the Maternity Matters agenda (DH 2007). We will continue to expand the level of user
involvement in all aspects of midwifery education which can only benefit all concerned.
Reference
Department of Health (2007) Maternity Matters: Choice, access and continuity of care in a safe service. London, DH.
Key Words: User involvement, Reflection, Feedback, Assignment, Midwifery
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44. LEARNING TO BE PROFESSIONAL: A SYNTHESIS OF STUDENT STORIES OF THEIR PROFESSIONAL TRAINING YEAR
Lori Riley, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey
This session presents a synthesis of students’ accounts of how they learned to be professional from their Professional Training Year
(PTY) experience based on 28 stories that were submitted to a competition in October 2008. At the University of Surrey, the PTY
experience is the first major transition for many students from university life into the professional world of work. SCEPTRE values the
learning opportunities which the PTY experience provides, and hence offered a story-telling competition for students to share their
experiences first-hand. The results have been compiled into a booklet encompassing the collective experiences of twenty-eight
returning placement students from a range of academic disciplines and professional fields. Key components of this session will
discuss how students: a) perceive their work placement context, b) draw connections to life-wide learning, and c) learn to maximise
their personal agency. The intended aims of the research are twofold: to serve as a reflective account of students’ experiences of
learning to be professional and to provide practical tips for educators to advise future placement students.
45. THE POWER OF E-FLECTION: USING DIGITAL STORYTELLING TO FACILITATE REFLECTIVE ASSESSMENT OF JUNIOR DOCTORS’ EXPERIENCES
IN TRAINING
Tony Sumner, Pilgrim Project/Patient Voices programme

Reflective practitioners and, perhaps even more so, reflective students, must be able to hear, shape,
articulate, acknowledge and reflect upon their own stories of professional and educational experience (and those of others) if they are
to process, build upon, and from those experiences. Reflection is built into undergraduate programmes in many ways, but runs the
risk of becoming just another
box-ticking exercise, without resulting in greater understanding or insight. A truly immersive, facilitative and reflective process is
needed if reflection is to become an accelerative process rather than an addition to the assessment burden.
Digital stories are created through a carefully facilitated reflective process resulting in a multimedia blend of images, music and voice.
Digital storytelling methodologies developed for the award-winning Patient Voices programme, which aims to give voice to all
stakeholders in health and social care, provide a rich environment within which service users, carers and service providers may reflect
on and shape their experiences, and then express them through a process which is at once effective, affective and reflective (EAR).
This process was used in 2008 to facilitate a group of final-year medical students at Leicester University medical school in reflecting
upon their experiences in the challenging environment of their clinical placements. The resulting digital stories (viewable at http://
www.patientvoices.org.uk/lssc.htm) powerfully demonstrate the possibilities for insightful reflection that the technique offers, and
provide rich resources that will support and inform
future cohorts of students. As one student doctor commented after the workshop “we are asked to reflect all the time, and then to
reflect on our reflection until we’re sick of it. But now, with the digital storytelling I understand for the first time what it really means, and
how powerful reflection can be for me, and as a way of sharing my experiences with others”.
This session will:
• describe the process used and how consider how technology facilitates that process
• enable the medical students to share their insights and experiences of learning to be professional
• through their digital stories
• illustrate the potential in CDL and PDP of reflective digital stories created by students.
Key words : digital storytelling reflection education medical doctor
46. DEVELOPING LEADING LEARNERS, LEARNING TO LEAD

Sue Thompson, Tim Cable and Phil Vickerman, Liverpool John Moores University
Liverpool John Moores University is implementing a major strategic initiative intended to equip all its students with the higher level
skills and attributes important for employment and life long learning. At the heart of this lies the development of students’ self
awareness, self confidence and self efficacy and the ability to make a difference and make things happen.
This employability skills agenda has, however, highlighted a range of curriculum design challenges for the teaching, learning and
assessing of what have been described as the ‘wicked’ competences or the ‘soft’ skills, graduate attributes and complex
achievements highly valued by employers. These competences are often hard to define and problematic to teach and assess.
Employers that have worked with the university to develop ‘World of Work’ skills tell us that they want emotionally intelligent
employees who can demonstrate a clear awareness of organisational culture and ethics, work related behavioural skills and
professionalism. In other words, they want enterprising learners with leadership qualities.
This paper will describe research being undertaken as part of a Higher Education Academy funded National Teaching Fellowship
project ‘Developing Learning and Assessment Opportunities for a Complex World’. In examining the role of the curriculum and
assessment in developing enterprising learners for a complex world, the project is using ‘close up’ research to illuminate the problem
by identifying dissonance and congruence in stakeholder perceptions and understandings.
How can teaching, learning and assessment practices take more heed of workplace needs and how can the workplace be better
informed of HE objectives? HE, employers and students speak their own languages and one of the project’s aim will be to promote
two- way knowledge transfer that provides a means of bridging understandings (and reducing dissonance and misconceptions)
The discipline focus of the research spans subject areas in the Faculties of Science and Education that have designated Centre for
Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) status for their track records in work based learning and applied enterprise activity.
49
The Centre for Excellence in Leadership and Professional Learning is developing innovative approaches to learning designed to
enhance students’ employability, leadership and entrepreneurial skills.
Research outputs will inform curriculum intervention strategies that will more closely align learning and assessment opportunities and
bridge perceived gaps in stakeholder perceptions and understandings of the employability skills and competences expected of 21st
century graduates.
Key words : Employability skills, close-up research,
Links: www.ljmu.ac.uk/cetl and www.ljmu.ac.uk/ntf
47. A CURRICULUM FOR COPING WITH COMPLEXITY

Bland Tomkinson, Helen Dobson, Rosemary Tomkinson, Charles Engel, University of Manchester
For professionals one of the key challenges is that of tackling wicked problems, which are necessarily complex. The results of a
Delphi study1 amongst engineering educators suggested that the approach in such cases needs to be inter-disciplinary and to use
student-centred learning, such as problem-based learning (PBL). These results echo a Royal Academy of Engineering sponsored
pilot study2 conducted in the University of Manchester which focused on issues of sustainable development, in its broadest sense, with
interdisciplinary groups of third-year engineering and science undergraduate students. The pilot course unit has been adopted by the
university and offered to a wider group of undergraduate students but the concept is capable of much wider applicability. The vision of
the authors3 is that universities should adopt the responsibility of preparing their graduates for inter-professional and inter-sectoral4
collaboration, in order to participate in the management of change as it relates to the world's major, interrelated problems
The Delphi study suggested that a systemic approach was necessary to deal with complex issues and also that conventional
approaches to teaching were inappropriate. Student-centred approaches were favoured, including case studies, role play and,
especially, the coherent educational approach of PBL5. Many of these ideas had already been incorporated into the pilot module
developed within the RAEng sponsored study. That study has been seeking to evaluate the approach, largely in terms of student
learning. Despite good evidence of student acceptance and development of deeper approaches to learning, the assessment regime
was felt not to match student needs. For the second, larger, cohort an individual reflective log was introduced in place of individual
assessment through modified essay questions. Assessment is seen as an integral, and important, part of learning and has to be
related to the student encounter with this experiential approach.
This paper will look at the two studies, including evaluation results from the second year of operation.
Key words: Complexity, PBL, Delphi, wicked problems, sustainable development, change and seek to draw lessons for wider
applicability to questions of preparation of students for professional careers.
References
1 Tomkinson, R, Tomkinson B, Engel C and Lawson A (2008). Education for Sustainable Development in Engineering: Report of a
Delphi Consultation. Loughborough, Engineering Subject Centre. Available from
http://www.engsc.ac.uk/downloads/scholarart/delphi-consultation.pdf
2 Tomkinson, B (ed) (2008). Educating Engineers for Sustainable Development: Report of a Royal Academy of Engineering
sponsored pilot study. http://www.eps.manchester.ac.uk/tlc/sd/raeng/RAEng_Report.pdf
3 see: Engel C, Tomkinson B and Warner R (2004) The Ultimate Challenge: Higher Education, Globalisation and Change. EDiNEB
Conference, Maastricht, June 2004. http://www.edineb.org/sessiondetail.asp?conferenceID=19&entryID=816
4 eg: Engel, C E (2002). Towards a European approach to an enhanced education of the health professions in the 21st Century.
London: CAIPE. http://www.the-networktufh.org/publications_resources/furtherreading.asp#T
5 see: Engel C E, et al, (2007). Whole System Approach to Problem-Based Learning in Dental, Medical and Veterinary Sciences - A
Guide to Important Variables. Manchester: Centre for Excellence in Enquiry-based Learning. http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/
ceebl/resources/resourcepacks/pblsystemapproach_v1.pdf
48. 'UNLOCKING CREATIVITY: DEVELOPING A METHODOLOGY TO HELP STUDENTS UNDERSTAND HOW THEY ARE CREATIVE?'
Paul Tosey, Faculty of Management and Law, University of Surrey
In HE, creativity is widely regarded as a core competence for the complex professional worlds of the 21st century. While there is an
extensive, established literature on creativity, including Csíkszentmihályi ( 1997) and Sternberg and Williams ( 1996), there is still a
need to reveal more about the creativity inherent in activities such as problem-solving, in order to give students and teachers maps of
the processes involved that they can put into action.
In this session I will describe a methodological approach used in a pilot study of the experience of essay-writing. The study originated
when I was asked by a group of mature postgraduate students for guidance on how to write essays. I enquired into the experiences of
four students who had achieved consistently high grades, using interviews that incorporated aspects of `modelling’, a practice derived
from of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). According to Dilts, `The objective of the NLP modelling process is not to end up with the
one `right’ or `true’ description of a particular person’s thinking process, but rather to make an instrumental map that allows us to apply
the strategies that we have modelled in some useful way’ (Dilts 1998:30).
The result, a synthesised map of the essay-writing process (Tosey 2008), suggested that for these students, the essay writing process
had important affective and imaginal dimensions, which may be neglected by rationalised, prescriptive accounts in the literature and
guide books.
This methodology, enhanced with insights from related enquiry methods (e.g. Petitmengin 2006), is the basis of a proposed
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collaborative project with the Open University to develop more detailed knowledge of ways in which students are inherently creative.
Key words: creativity, learners’ creative processes
References
Csíkszentmiháyli, M. 1997, Creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention Harper Collins, New York.
Dilts, R. B. 1998, Modeling with NLP Meta Publications, Capitola, CA.
Petitmengin, C. 2006, "Describing one's subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of
consciousness", Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 229-269.
Sternberg, R. J. & Williams, W. M. 1996, How to Develop Student Creativity Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development,
Alexandria, Virginia.
Tosey, P. 2008, "`It's a Living Thing': a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Perspective on Essay Writing", Humanising Language
Teaching, vol. September.
49. WORK-RELATED LEARNING AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREATIVITY: FINDING ONE’S VOICE IN SMALL-GROUP COLLABORATIVE ACTIVITY
Angeliki Triantafyllaki, University of the Arts, London
There is a growing body of research around the development of creativity in higher education (HE) and creativity is a key component
of the government’s education agenda. Within creative arts HE, there has been a significant focus on work-based learning – the
knowledge and skills acquired as students engage in professional activities as part of their course. Yet, little is known of
undergraduates’ learning experiences in work-related activities within public and third sector settings. Within collaborative work-related
activities, constructing arts-based knowledge involves meaningful exchanges among perspectives within the individual and among
members of peer groups. In this sense, learning is about collaborative meaning-making and knowledge construction. In collaborative
arts-based contexts, where the creative object (as much as the individual, relations and contexts) becomes the focus of attention, the
dichotomy between learning and creating breaks down.
This paper presents and discusses initial findings from a small-scale research study of creative arts students’
work-related learning experiences within educational settings. Focusing on The Sorrell Foundation’s Young Design Programme
(whereby school pupils act as clients by commissioning a school design project and HE design students
acting as the consultants), data is presented both from previous cohorts of undergraduates and a small group of current participants
collaborating on the Programme. The case study employs focus group discussions; individual interviews with student-group members;
and participant observation of group members as they engage in within-group work and interact with their client team. Institutional
documents and interviews with students’ tutors and organisers of the YDP provide contextual information.
Ongoing data analysis reveals strong links between the development of creativity and collaborative work through the need to construct
an individual identity; make connections between old and new knowledge; engage with novel ways of thinking; and deal with
conflicting interests and constraints. A key outcome of this work-related experience is the development of students’ voice, in that it
provides a framework where opportunities to take initiatives and greater responsibility for their own learning abound; and, essentially,
an empowering experience where autonomy and independent thought are highly prized as a result of valuing individual students’
‘expertise’. Implications for learning to be a professional through acknowledging the value of and embedding these experiences within
a life-wide curriculum are discussed.
Key words work-related learning, collaboration, creativity
50. USING NEGOTIATION-BASED LEARNING AS AN ELEMENT OF A LIFE-WIDE CURRICULUM
Simon Usherwood, Department of Politics, University of Surrey

Negotiation-based learning offers one way of developing the notion of a life-wide curriculum. By creating a safe place for students to
practice both the application of their substantive knowledge and the various transferable skills they have acquired, it helps them to see
how their work within the classroom can be organically linked to the rest of their lives. In particular, this paper highlights the benefits
of such active learning, in both the short- and longer-terms. At the time of the activity, students are guided through a process of
converting ‘academic’ skills and knowledge into something with more general application, and are then supported in engaging in
critical self-evaluation as an integral part of the activity. These processes help to open up the model of achievement that is typically
found within a University setting and, in the longer-term, encourages students to challenge the perceived boundary between
‘academic’ and ‘non-academic’ settings. Within the particular example discussed here – a Level 2 compulsory module for Politics
students at the University of Surrey – it is shown how negotiation-based learning, together with other elements of the degree
programme, can act as a useful primer not only for life after a degree, but also a practice for those going on placement.
Key words: negotiation-based learning; life-wide curriculum; politics; active learning
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51. CULTURAL ACADEMY: AN INNOVATIVE APPROACH TO DEVELOPING CULTURALLY AWARE PROFESSIONALS

Vasso Vydelingum Faculty Health and Medical Sciences University of Surrey
Norman Jackson, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey
Lori Riley and Sarah Campbell students involved in Cultural Academy
Osama Khan, Faculty of Management and Law, University of Surrey
Winston Yearwood, Procurement, University of Surrey
Identities of self have traditionally been defined through structured domains such as professional knowledge. What makes a good
professional can be determined by the personal qualities and level of personal agency a learner brings to the professional action.
Much of this agency is bound up in acts of communication and relationship and culture is an important factor in this activity. Students
who are developing themselves to one day take on a professional role rarely explicitly engage with the issue of culture,
communication and relationship in their study programmes.
Cultural Academy is an emergent collaborative project involving four members of staff from diverse educational, cultural backgrounds
and organisational settings. It provides a co-curriculum (outside the formal curriculum) opportunity for students and staff to interact
and share their experiences and understandings of culture and its effects on their lives as part of their professional journey. During the
process participants are encouraged to think about their own cultural identity and enquire into the multicultural campus society they
are living in to help them appreciate the cultural dimensions of learning for the complex world of the ‘professional’. Teaching and
learning approaches include: the exchange of cultural gifts, conversation, creating rich pictures, use of voting systems to test
propositions, student-organised events/shows, reflecting on action and in action, concept maps, enquiry, wiki building, use of film/
video to document activity and aid reflection.
Cultural Academy comprises two connected processes: 1) a multicultural welcome workshop designed to help students coming from
a culture that is very different to our own to share their sense of bewilderment and help each other make sense of their new
environment 2) a series of four workshops and two or three enterprises. The later begin in October and are completed in March during
the University’s International Festival. A description of the Cultural Academy with illustrative film and student commentary can be
found at http://surreyculturalacademy.pbwiki.com see also this short youtube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zD_bsyctLg
Participants discover that ‘knowing more about other cultures’, ‘finding new things about other cultures’, and ‘the diversity of
everybody’s culture’ as fascinating. Planning and organising the multicultural party: the “Big Cultural Bash’ and creating a Guide to the
Multi-Cultural Campus were found to be successful and worthwhile cultural enterprises.
The paper will consider the importance of being culturally aware in the make-up of a successful professional in a world that is
culturally complex and reflect on the ways in which Cultural Academy is helping to develop this aspect of participants’ personal
agency.
Key words: Co-curriculum, culture, diversity, professionalism, communication, enquiry, reflection
52. CONSTRUCTING A PROFESSIONAL STORY :

Tony Wailey and Susana Sambade, London College of Communication, University of the Arts
This presentation translates the successful pilot work in Creative Writing at LCC, run successfully for five years as an undergraduate
elective, into an abbreviated version to help develop writing skills for undergraduates with the Personal and Professional Development
programme (PDP).The focus is that ‘showing not telling’ aids the process of reflection as a reflexive skill.
Historically the context of PDP (PPD) at the College is characterised at specific levels. Technical and academic at level one, (year
one) hermeneutic or interpretative at level two (year two) and critically reflective at level three, (year three). In other words, the
development of academic skills, enterprise, careers and embryonic research skills and finally an understanding and application of
action research skills both within cognate discipline and ontology of professional life.
• Level One Academic development within learners subject discipline - Technique
• Level Two career enhancement, Enterprise - Hermeneutic/ Interpretative
• Level Three Action Research within learner’s professional technique, treating major projects as both research object and
research subject. - Critical
In year two creative writing is the most popular set of undergraduate electives. Given the well attested issues of art/design students’
relationship with writing in general, why is this? The research builds upon other academic work within PPD illustrating how students
not only see or socially construct the world of creative writing but also the relationship of cultural capital to their own specific academic
discipline or indeed, life arena. (Bordieu, 1998). Creative writing has much to offer students in the development of both ‘softer’ and
‘harder’ writing skills in the arena of professional development as well as facilitating reflection.
‘Softer’ skills enable the exploration of identity, being and location within the world familiar to the process of art/design making. For
‘harder’ skills, creative writing teaches students to write tightly and concisely, often to a very specific format and within constrained
limits.The psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, (1997), refers to the important relationship between intuition and intellect when
describing creative processes. He describes not only the ingredients necessary for creative work but also the personality traits of the
individual, the environment and the conditions of work. Using ‘creative flow’, he describes an experience of deep immersion in work ,
‘flow’ is expressed as being a ‘merging [of] action and awareness’, an autotelic process of “connection”.
Naming, Being and Seeing are the themes that enable students to explore their own professional identity by these workshops within
the PPD module. In writing a series of sequential relationships between text and image, these skills contribute to learning within a
complex world by building a sense of self whilst writing about “others”, and in their own ability “to construct a story” (Dawson, 2007).
This thematic approach builds upon our recent collaborative work with academics and students on relating processes of Intertextuality
(Deleuze, 2003 Ed) in order that individual stories may contextualise different possibilities.
Creative writing as a mini module within the Personal and Professional Programme helps with projection and assists students towards
critical reflection or reflexivity. Yet the process is never about what it’s about. Being “here” is never just “here”. Professionalisation is
52
about the process of “becoming” wrote Donald Schon (1983) a quarter of a century ago. It is what Boden (2005) might call the
distinction between working in a conceptual space and transforming that space.
Key words: Creative writing, PDP, reflection, reflexivity
53. WHEN YOU’RE BEING MOST PROFESSIONAL, YOU’RE LIKE WHAT? CONNECTING PROFESSIONAL WORK-SKILLS, THE PERSON AND THE
CURRICULUM THROUGH PDP
Caitlin Walker and Sarah Nixon, Training Attention Ltd and Liverpool John Moores University
Developing the individual learner within and beyond their time at University is at the heart of the PPD processes presented in this
paper. This session will share the work being undertaken through the CETL at Liverpool John Moores University using the
approaches from Training Attention Ltd. The partnership has been together for two years re-designing PDP within one degree
programme and the work is attracting positive attention from other areas within and outside of the University.
To underpin our systemic philosophies and process we’ve asked questions of professionals in the field, of staff members and of
students so that we have examples of critical reflection, goal setting and development from a number of credible sources to build into
the life-wide curriculum.
We elicited models and stories from successful sports professionals on how they came to achieve their goals, overcome setbacks and
make key decisions. We worked with individual members of staff to support them to engage in critical reflection on how they teach at
their best and to give one another high quality professional feedback. We’ve asked mixed ability students at undergraduate and post-
graduate level what they wished they’d paid more attention to during their time at University. From this multi-stranded approach we
have created a 3 year work book series with a DVD of professional stories to complement it. This workbook based PDP is best
supported through interactive tutorials but is designed to benefit students even without an engaged tutor.
Key words : PDP, reflection, learning, professionalism, staff, students
54. POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH TRAINING COURSES AS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT?

Paul Walker and Jenny Marie, University College London
Our paper addresses questions of the potential for professional development beyond the confines of the work environment and the
home discipline of postgraduate students undertaking research degrees, in particular professional doctorates (e.g. EngD) and Master
of Research programmes. The postgraduate modules we provide for this constituency (entitled ‘Professional Development in Practice’
and ‘Issues in Research Practice’) occupy and explore the intermediate territory between Donald Schön’s (1987) “swamp” of real
professional work and the academic “high ground” of institutional education. The experience of students working through the learning
tasks in these modules, as evidenced in their outputs and reflections, appear to indicate that valuable learning opportunities, which
might not otherwise be apparent to them, arise in this zone, The design of these modules is based on the assumption that, especially
in postgraduate research degrees, all of the essential ingredients for ‘being professional;’ are overtly available in the learning
environment, with the integrating agent being the students’ recognition of this and their autonomous and responsible engagement in
the working conversation. On this assumption, students are exposed to and engaged in the discourse of professionalism as well as
professional practice across a range of disciplines and sectors. This approach has demonstrated significant success in students’
recognition and development of professional skills and attributes. A strong feature of this paper will be the voice of the students
themselves, offering insight into the experience and outcomes of this learning process.
Key words Postgraduate Research, Professional Development, Taught Modules
55. CLEAN FEEDBACK – THE BEDROCK FOR DEVELOPING PROFESSIONALISM?

Barbara Walsh and Nancy Doyle, Liverpool John Moores University and Training Attention Ltd
Clean Feedback is a process designed to aid critical reflection, observation skills and goal setting. It encourages both the giver and
the receiver of feedback to separate out what is being seen and heard from the meaning it has for people.
Receiving clean feedback trains people to be aware of the differing ways their actions may be perceived by others. Giving clean
feedback trains the giver to become aware of their values and beliefs around other people’s behaviour. Giving clear examples of what
it means to act in a professional way at work encourages staff and students to develop a flexible range of behaviours that maintain
professional standards across diverse individuals.
At Liverpool John Moores University this model has been introduced and evaluated with Post Graduate Trainee Teachers and the
results of this pilot will be presented in our paper here.
• Clean feedback has also been introduced into:
• PDP processes whereby students give themselves, one another and staff clean feedback,
• staff have introduced clean feedback into their standard essay marking forms,
• the model is being taught within faculty administration to aid good relations between admin, academics and students, senior
staff are using the model during peer review of one another’s lecturing
53
• students are being asked to give themselves clean feedback on an essay and then receiving feedback both on their essay and
on their feedback
This multi-layered approach to feedback is intended to develop a learning community which is able to demand and develop
professionalism at all levels. The issues in implementing such an approach as well as initial findings will be discussed.
Key words: Feedback, critical reflection, diverse, meaning, professionalism
56. SUPPORTING CREATIVE PRACTICE, ENTERPRISE AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH PDP
Lisa Webb and Jacqui Bleetman, Teaching Development Fellow CSAD (Coventry School of Art & Design), Coventry University
The initiative to implement PDP (Personal Development Planning) across the HE sector has been embraced at Coventry University,
where each School/faculty has developed its own response specific to their requirements and student population. At Coventry
University’s School of Art & Design we have developed a PDP programme which spans and integrates with the undergraduate
curriculum. PDP is presented in a module, but necessarily connects and is embedded within each course. It aims to provide a holistic
approach whereby students are encouraged to embrace reflective practices in order to better understand their creative direction and
potential professional futures.
At level one the approach to the module is atypical in its structure and delivery, and is somewhat anomalous in that it necessarily sits
outside of the curriculum whilst simultaneously drawing from within. At this level PDP aims to encourage students to develop a
reflective approach to their learning and creative practice. Level two builds on this by asking students to begin to identify potential
communities of practice that might be relevant to their aspirations, and thus to consciously start to prepare for their professional
positioning. For many students this also allows them to test this out in the context of a professional experience opportunity that they
might undertake in the same year. Supporting also the culmination of the undergraduate program with degree show preparations and
portfolio development, PDP at level 3 aims to directly support students’ exit strategies into their career aspirations.
The narrative the programme creates supports principles of PDP in that it encourages students to become independent learners and
to learn how to learn, and it also takes a holistic view of students learning to be practitioners, developing enterprising behaviour and
becoming professionals. Ultimately, this allows them to use the reflective process to prepare and plan for their learning, and thus
potential futures. This paper shares our approach to the PDP undergraduate programme.
57. PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING FOR LABS: RE-ENGAGING STUDENTS WITH DESIGN AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Kevin Wells and Janko Calic, Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences, University of Surrey
This presentation will report on a pilot project aimed at re-engaging students sense of enquiry and personal expression through a
design, implementation and testing process that spanned first year Laboratory and Professional Skills courses. This SCEPTrE-funded
project had the dual aims of bringing greater relevance to developing professional skills in Surrey’s first year electronic engineering
programme
Enhancing student engagement with practical work by replacing tired script-based experimental work with an industrially-flavoured
student-led design and implementation process.
As a result of work initiated in January 2008, and continued during the current academic year, we believe we have successfully
developed a method to teach professional skills (time management, team working, brain storming etc) in a way in which
undergraduate freshmen students can see practical application for their current programme of study and beyond. By developing
these activities as a primer to free-form laboratory sessions, we have developed skills in planning, team working, design and
innovation, professional judgement and criteria design and assessment. Results of the initial student-designed peer assessment
scheme, and the QA methods used on the raw assessment data will also be presented.
58. INTERACTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE REFLECTIVE PRACTICE

Roy Williams, University of Portsmouth
The Nested Narrative method for reflective practice produces a series of uniquely rich personal, interactive and collaborative texts on
learning and practice, for the student, employee, and for the academic or workplace institution.
These multimedia texts are captured in an interactive interface, which is a resources for:
• Personal exploration and articulation of tacit knowledge and understanding.
• Expanding sense making and reflexive learning through multimedia
• Interactive reflection in a range of settings with a range of people
• Collaborative reflection with colleagues, tutors, line managers or researchers, through additional multimedia, and potentially
with kinaesthetic multi-touch tables.
The process and the interactive interface produces:
• Unique facilities for strategic reflection and research at organisational level
• Rich exemplars for other learners, employees and the profession
54
• Ongoing personalised learning and continuous professional development.
• Knowledge sharing on complex tasks.

The Nested Narratives method is based on story telling along the lines of the method used in the Biographical Narrative Interview
Method, and is the outcome of a research project funded by the HEA in 2008, Affordances for Learning
Key words: collaborative reflection, nested narrative
59. CAN WE REALLY ASSESS PROFESSIONALISM? AN EXAMINATION OF THE LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THE PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
(WIL) AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SURREY
Jenny Willis, University of Surrey
The University of Surrey has a well-established policy on the assessment of professional training (WIL), aligned with the UK’s Quality
Assurance Agency’s Code of Practice. Robust validation procedures are in place to ensure that all programmes of study comply with
protocols. These include the means of assessment (by visiting tutor, employer and student; through reports, presentations and
debriefing) and the weightings of each element required to qualify for the 120 P (professional) credits achievable for the period of
placement. These may or may not contribute to the final degree award.
But how does this policy translate into reality at subject level? Precisely what constitute appropriate learning objectives? Are they the
acquisition and demonstration of competence in practical skills? Or rather the development of greater understanding in their subject?
Or perhaps it is those more fuzzy ‘wicked’ competences and metacognitive skills? Or a combination of all four? We celebrate the
University’s long-standing success in graduate employment but what exactly makes our students desirable professionals?
After considering some of the conceptual and theoretical models of work-place learning e.g. Boud and Symes (2000), Yorke (2005),
Brennan and Little (1996), this paper examines a selection of programmes from the Faculties of Arts and Human Sciences, Health
and Medical Sciences, Engineering and Physical Sciences and Management and Law at the University of Surrey. Desired learning
outcomes are found to be diverse: they encompass specialist knowledge, personal and professional skills and recognition of ‘wicked’
competences. It is asked how, given the variability with which policy is interpreted, professional experience can be compared and
valued equally. Is there a single definition of our graduates’ professionalism? The paper concludes with a proposal that the true value
of the professional experience lies beyond the easily measurable indicator of employability. Commonality can be achieved through
evaluation of the depth of critical reflection demonstrated by the student. It is argued that this, not the short-term achievement of
employment immediately after graduation, is the true and enduring value of professional placement. But are we ready to embrace this
subjective, elusive, objective?
Key words : assessment, critical reflection, learning objectives, professionalism, ‘wicked’ competences
References
Boud and Symes (2000), Brennan and Little (1996), Yorke (2005)
60. CREATING COHESION IN A WORLD OF FRAGMENTS: THE EXPERIENCES OF NURSE MENTORS

Anthea Wilson, The Open University
This paper examines the role of the mentor in the pre-registration nurse education context. Through a series of in-depth interviews
and event diaries with 12 nurses who were actively engaged in mentoring, I explore their pivotal role in encouraging and enabling
student nurses on their journey through the professional curriculum.
In nursing, the mentor is a well-defined role that requires mandatory preparation and updates (NMC 2006). Mentors help to identify
learning needs and opportunities for their students and facilitate access to this learning within their own practice area. In this context,
they are also responsible for assessing and validating practice competence and professional conduct of students. The quality of the
student experience is partly dependent on the quality of the mentoring they receive. Investigating the mentor lifeworld can increase
our understanding of how exposing students to real professional work plays out in practice for those nurses who are central to and
actively engaged in educating the next generation.
Participants were recruited by a process of snowball and purposive sampling from an NHS hospital trust and a primary care trust in
the south east of England. A total of 29 conversational, in-depth interviews were carried out with 12 participants within a mentoring
cycle, and 28 events were described in diary format. Taking a hermeneutic phenomenological approach, the qualitative diary data
and the interview transcripts have been analysed to identify emerging themes which would represent the structures of experience.
Initial findings reveal some overarching themes: working with fragments of experience; being aware of high stakes; having hope for
the profession. Both mentors and students work with fragments of experience. The mentor sees a fragment of a student’s learning
journey and has to imagine where and how it fits with their image of a professional nurse, in addition to helping the students connect
their experiences. The stakes are high for mentors and their students. There is urgency about learning, and mentors can be subject
to persistent questioning or find themselves striving to ‘unlock’ a quiet student. The accounts reveal how when a relationship is under
tension, there is a range of emotional responses. Underlying a decision about a student’s aptitude to become a nurse is a poignant
reality-check: would I want this person caring for me or my family? Hope for the profession extended to concern and optimism for the
future and recognition of the importance of the mentor role.
Key words : Nurse education; mentoring; phenomenology
Reference: Nursing and Midwifery Council (2006) Standards to support learning and assessment in practice: NMC standards for
mentors, practice teachers and teachers. London, NMC
55

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Learning for a Complex World

Learning to be Professional through a Life-wide Curriculum

University of Surrey, Guildford

Professor Norman Jackson - Director of SCEPTrE

Supporting Organisations & Networks

Work Integrated Learning Network

Programme designed by Susan Wood and Jessica Lo

A Message from Professor Paul Ramsden, CEO HE Academy 5

Foreword - Professor Norman Jackson, SCEPTrE, University of Surrey 6

Conference Learning Experience 11

SCEPTrE External Fellowships 2009-2010 17

Work Integrated Learning Network 17

Programme & Abstracts

Papers and Workshops 22

Welcome from Professor Christopher Snowden,

Professor Christopher M. Snowden FRS, FREng

A Message from Professor Paul Ramsden,

Living and learning in a turbulent world

The wicked problem we share

What does being professional mean?

Why a life-wide curriculum?

Our learning enterprise

Tuesday March 31st AC Building

10.00-11.15 Registration SCEPTrE reception 01/AC01

19.00 Reception Kai Janson, SCEPTrE Musician in Residence

Wednesday April 1st AC Building

07.00 Breakfast in ‘Seasons Restaurant’

Conference Learning Experience

1. Personal stories about being professional

3. Visual Dialogue : telling stories through self-created pic-

Conferences can be very busy places so we are offering you a

Closer than a tear

Guildford School of Acting

A vibrant mini dance festival from level 2

Registration Desk Audio Visuals

The opening hours for the registration Car Parking

Campus Catering Facilities

A traditional licensed bar and

It offers a full range of Lakeside Restaurant -

Offering a full range of Monday to Friday with

Floor Plans STAIRS

Tea & Coffee

01AC03 02AC03 03AC03 04AC03

Tea & Coffee

SCEPTrE Fellowships 2009-10

Fellowship policy and application form

Work Integrated Learning Network (UK)

To find out more visit:

RON BARNETT is Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of

MICHAEL ERAUT is Professor of Education at the Sussex Institute of the

STEPHEN BILLETT is Professor of Adult and Vocational Education in the

URSULA LUCAS is Professor of Accountancy Education at University of

KAREN EVANS is Professor of Education (Lifelong Learning) at the

PAUL MAHARG is Professor of Law, Co-Director of Legal Practice Courses,

COLIN BEARD is a Faculty Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Organisation &

FRED BUINING Based in the Netherlands, Fred’s international consultancy

Papers & Workshop—Index

Margaret Berrie Shaping the new professional for a complex world 6

Lindy Blair Developing professional qualities in levels 1 & 2 of undergraduate study 10

Janko Calic Developing an Engineering professional through collaborative enquiry 14