Identity and Engagement for professional formation

•  Students entering university have notions surrounding their future professions. In someinstances the profession has a high social status and the work in that area is well known, inother areas the nature of professional work is opaque. In this paper we discuss the ways inwhich students develop a sense of identity with their profession, how the nature of the profession impacts on identity formation, how students engage with learning based on their professional expectations, and how their pedagogic experience as a whole leads towards their professional formation. We suggest that Wenger-s community of practice models that highlight integrated or distributed forms of engagement may be enhanced through a consideration of dimensions of learning, identity formation and engagement with professionally encountered content. To explore these issues we combine the research outcomes of two international projects, the Journeymen and Professional Entity projects, involving over 500 students in a variety of discipline areas. Students in these projects participated in semi-structured interviews that focused their attention on their understanding and experience of professional work, and the way in which their learning contributed to the development of their professional identities.Identity formation and engagement can be seen to be a relation with the students- learning experience - which in themselves build up an expectation of the intending profession - and the manner in which they anticipate or practice in professional working life. We postulate that students- views of their profession and their pedagogic experiences combine to incline themtowards a clear or diffuse sense of professional engagement. 

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SOCIAL SCIENCES

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