Eva King, PhD Candidate, Thesis Review Seminar, "Learning to interact and interacting to learn: a substantive theory of clinical workplace learning for diverse cohorts"
Eva's advisors are Dr Dan Schull, Dr Merrill Turpin, and Dr Wendy Green.
Representing the processes by which students learn during their clinical placements has proven challenging to educational researchers, owing to the complex, context-bound and highly variable nature of this educational context. In health sciences education, sociocultural theories of learning and qualitative, theory-building methodological approaches have opened up new ways of conducting research into this ‘hard to reach’ educational context.
One area particularly in need of investigation is the interactional nature of participation in CWL. Interactions are pivotal to participation in workplace activities, and participation is considered to be of paramount importance to students’ learning. Given the high levels of diversity that exist in todays’ health sciences student cohorts, there is also a need to account for the role of students’ cultural/linguistic backgrounds in CWL theory.
The aim of this study was to generate a theoretical understanding of students’ interactive processes in a rotation-based curriculum of CWL, in which high levels of student diversity existed. The research was conceptually underpinned by Billett’s ‘affordances and engagement’ theory of workplace learning and used a constructivist grounded theory methodology to generate theory from empirical data. Data collection and analysis were premised on the principles of theoretical sampling and constant comparative analysis, and involved survey, diary and interview data collected from two cohorts of final year veterinary students and interview data from clinical educators.
The findings, in the form of a substantive-level theory entitled ‘Learning to interact and interacting to learn’, represent the conditions, processes and consequences of interactions in CWL and are applicable to diverse student cohorts. They respond to a perceived need in international student education to move away from a deficit discourse by developing educational theory which focuses on the nature of participation, rather than the nature of the student. They also extend current understandings of workplace learning theory and weigh into current debates about optimal length of placements and the benefits and drawbacks of continual assessment.
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