Conference Agenda

Practising professionally involves, among other things, practical deliberation about what to do under a current set of circumstances, arriving at a moral judgement about what it is best to do, and then practising accordingly. For university educators, this implies not only caring about the consequences of educational practice, but also contextual awareness – understanding the immediate and broader circumstances within which educators practise in their everyday work with students, colleagues, and communities – and having a capacity to act in accordance with what is perceived to be the best course of action under those circumstances. During the recent coronavirus pandemic, many university educators’ contexts and practices across the globe changed dramatically due to university-wide shifts to online-learning and working-from-home arrangements. University educators were compelled to establish new ways of working in their endeavours to do what was ‘best’, in many cases, initially at least, without adequate skills and resources to make effective, timely adjustments. It is not surprising that stories now abound in higher education research literature of the many challenges university educators faced as they came to terms with the changed conditions and modified practices, but questions remain about what this period of dramatic change and challenge has meant for university educator professionalism.

Arguably, university educator responses to changed university teaching and learning arrangements included not only changes to their practices but also changes to their (sense of) professionalism: (a) changes in their ideas and understandings about what doing a good job in university teaching and learning means, (b) changes in the ways professionalism is (or should be) realised in their everyday work practices, and (c) changes in the ways professionalism is (or should be) expressed in appropriate relationships between teachers and learners (and others) in higher education. Drawing on findings from a cross-national study of academic practices and professional learning during the coronavirus pandemic, this presentation will explore the extent to which university educators’ responses to the pandemic have produced such changes. In the presentation, we will share empirical examples of how educators across a diverse range of sites were able to find interesting and novel ways to negotiate and overcome constraints and, in so doing, practise professionally, but differently, amidst and despite challenging times. Our aim is to provide inspiration and food for thought and future research about the construction and enactment of professionalism in academic work amidst changing and challenging conditions.

We use the theory of practice architectures (Kemmis et al., 2014) to describe and analyse changes in the practices of teachers (that is, changes in their sayings, doings, and relatings held together in the projects of their practices) – especially in interaction with students and in the practice architectures (combinations of cultural-discursive, material-economic, and social-political arrangements), which are the conditions of possibility that constrain and enable their practices. We use the notions of praxis (Kemmis & Smith, 2008) and praxis stance (Edwards-Groves & Gray, 2008) to explore ways in which the sayings, doings, and relatings of the educators align with professionalism in the sense described above. More specifically, we draw on two connected understandings of praxis: (1) a neo-Aristotelian view of praxis as a commitment to acting for the best for people and for humankind (Kemmis, 2012), and (2) a Marxian view of praxis as history-making action, or acting with regard to the consequences of action (Mahon et al., 2020).

In recent decades, police education has, especially in Europe, shifted from vocational training schools run directly by the police to university degrees, albeit in very diverse ways and for different reasons (Cordner, 2019; Paterson, 2011, 2015; Rogers & Frevel, 2018; Williams & Paterson, 2021). Changes like these are not limited to the police, as the education of several other professions has been reformed to higher education levels in recent decades, e.g., teacher training and nursing education (Björnsdóttir, 2015; Brint et al., 2005; Jóhannsdóttir, 2012). In this presentation we examine what characterizes the discourse on police education reform in Icelandic policy documents in 2014–2016.

As a part of a larger police reform where the number of police districts was reduced from 15 to 9, the police basic education in Iceland was reformed to the university level by amending the Police Act in 2016 (Parliamentary law bill no. 1215, case no. 742). It was subsequently decided that the University of Akureyri would offer a two-year undergraduate police program that grants the right to an appointment as a police officer. The premises of the reform were put forth in the explanations in the legislative bill.

In the preparation for the changes to university education, two separate working groups were formed and delivered reports on the matter. One compared the status of police education in the Nordic countries (Ministry of the Interior, 2014); the other dealt with the question of whether and how police education needed to change (Ministry of the Interior, 2015). These reports were inherently administrative reports of working groups based only to a small extent on scientific evidence and without the involvement of the university community in Iceland.

In several European countries, the Bologna process has led to reforms in police education, where police academies were granted university status (Jaschke & Neidhardt, 2007; Paterson, 2015). In 2008 the Danish police training was reformed at university level as part of wider police reform efforts. According to Diderichsen (2017) one of the main reasons for the reform has to do with credentialism. The Danish police is an institution that is constantly under pressure to appear as a legitimate, modern and efficient organization. Comparison with other professions was a part of the discourse and one of the arguments Diderichsen makes in the Danish education reform is that police education should mimic the evolution of nursing and teaching to professional undergraduate degrees.

Recently, Terpstra and Schaap (2022) compared police education reform to university level from a policy perspective in Norway, Finland, and North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany. Their findings highlight the same arguments appeared across the nations, including assisting the police in adapting to a changing society, enhancing the appeal of the police profession, keeping police training from falling behind other professions, and enhancing police-citizen interactions. The establishment and development of higher police education were significantly influenced by particular historical or political circumstances as well as organizational structures of the police. The higher police education systems are accepted as genuine in all three nations, but there are strong, continuous discussions regarding their structure and content (Terpstra & Schaap, 2022).

From the literature, it appears that police education reform has not been an easy linear process in other countries but rather significantly influenced by historical and political factors. In this study, we use historical discourse analysis to examine how the main arguments for police education reform in Iceland are discussed in Icelandic policy documents. The main questions in this presentation are: What characterizes the discourse on police education reform in Icelandic policy documents? What are the main legitimating principles in the discourse?

Training complex competences has become one of the major challenges in education (UNESCO, 2016). Despite the crucial use of practicum stages to develop these competences, there is a gap in higher education studies between the university teaching context and the professional practice. To overcome this gap, the courses are usually divided between theory and practice, but the content of the practices does not always have high similarity with the actual exercise of a profession (Grossman et al., 2009) and, therefore, some complex competences may not be easily trained.

To face this situation, in the last decades several disciplines (medicine, teacher training, engineering…) have implemented training through simulation (Chernikova, Heitzmann, Stadler, et al., 2020). Simulation can be defined as a simplified situation, where we mimic an interactive episode of real professional practice (Cook, Hamstra, et al., 2013); in other words, we represent a situation similar to those that our students will be facing in their future work.

As well as representing the situation, the other crucial component of simulation is the use of a structured and reflexive dialogue after the representation called debriefing (Decker et al., 2013). This debriefing stage can be organized differently, but it always should let the students talk about the experience and the learning goals of the simulation in a supportive climate (Fanning & Gaba, 2007).

Simulation has several advantages to train complex competences. First, students can face a challenging problem where their actions and decisions change the course of the events (Heitzmann et al., 2019). Second, they allow a progressive and guided experience to professional practice, permitting the decomposition of the core components of a professional situation (Grossman et al., 2009). Third, the close presence of the teacher allows the use of several feedback and scaffolding strategies (Chernikova, Heitzmann, Fink, et al., 2020). Fourth, simulation creates safe practice environments where mistakes are not irreversible (Cook, Brydges, et al., 2013). Finally, through simulation we can train the different components of professional practice: attitudes, conceptual knowledge, and procedural skills.

There is a lot of empirical evidence supporting the use of simulation to train complex competences (Chernikova, Heitzmann, Fink, et al., 2020; Chernikova, Heitzmann, Stadler, et al., 2020; Cook, Hamstra, et al., 2013). It has positive impact in learning and other important variables for the professional practice such as self-efficacy, i.e., confidence in your own skills to perform tasks (Gundel et al., 2019).

Considering the potential of simulation methodologies, we use it aiming to train communication and counselling skills with families. We designed two connected studies in education (study 1) and medicine (study 2) with two objectives. First, we test the impact of simulation through role playing to train communication and counselling skills with families in educational and health contexts. Therefore, we compare the effects of simulation conditions versus a lecture condition in three variables: conceptual knowledge about the topic, self-efficacy to communicate with families, and attitudes towards families. Second, we test three variants of the debriefing closing stage, asking students about ‘take-home messages’ in written format versus sharing them out loud versus a combination of sharing them out loud plus a written reflection.

In both studies (in education and medicine) we used a mixed method quasi-experimental design with pre-post measurements and quasi-control groups, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. In this communication we will present only the quantitative data. While data for study 1 (education) has already been collected, we will collect data for study 2 (medicine) during February and March.