Theorising conceptualisations: curriculum and professional identity
3.8 Development of professional identity through the curriculum
113 Knowledge
Developing professional identity
Self Action
The theoretical schema suggests a model for curricular change that would achieve an integration of knowledge, skills and the development of the ethical self, to support the development of professional identity through the foundational academic education phase.
The next section provides a review of theorising focussed on the development of professional identity.
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and their knowledge, which is echoed in the work of Barnett (1997), Eraut (1994) and Sullivan and colleagues (2007), describing the uncertainty about the purpose and function of professional education. This phenomenon runs counter to the exponential growth of professional services in developed economies, and has resulted in the complete reshaping of the nature of professional (legal) services, due to increasing internationalisation, the growth of large corporate law firms and the decline of small practices (G. Johnstone, 1999;
Sommerlad, 2008). The challenge facing universities in undergraduate professional education is to prepare students for their professional lives, when the actual situations and problems they will have to face have become increasingly difficult to predict in a post- industrial, increasingly complex age (J Bowden & Marton, 1998).
Expert knowledge is said to consist of three main elements: formal, theoretical knowledge;
informal, often tacit practical knowledge; and self-regulative knowledge (Eraut, 1994;
Tynjala, Valimaa, & Sarja, 2003, p. 154). However, market trends and the impact of globalisation on higher education have placed emphasis on the acquisition of transferable skills and competences, and on a narrow view of “core” knowledge, which many students have internalised. A distinction between vocational (professional) skills and graduate attributes, or generic skills, has been drawn in Australian higher education (Higher Education Council, 1992, p.20, quoted in Bath, Smith, Stein, & Swanna, 2004) but it is evident that generic skills and values are most effectively acquired through the context of disciplinary or contextualised knowledge (J Bowden, Hart, King, Trigwell, & Watts, 2000).
The detrimental effect of approaches that focus unduly on generic skills is that key professional attributes have been marginalised, such as affective knowledge, intuitive, critical, theoretical and contextual knowledge, which “lie at the heart of practice of any human profession” (Rochette & Pue, 2001, p. 187).
In contrast, the reflective practitioner model, which encourages the development of responsiveness to change, flexibility and professional self-growth, presents a preferable foundational education for aspiring professionals (Coughlan, 2000). Goldsmith (1998) argued for an interdisciplinary, contextualised approach in legal education, merging theory, critique, and practice to develop an awareness of the social consequences of law. Schön (1995) has pointed out the inadequacy of “accumulating specific knowledge” in preparing
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professionals for future skilled practice, while Dall’Alba confirmed this through empirical research involving medical students.
This study empirically challenges the adequacy of a conventional focus on knowledge and skills acquisition as a model for curriculum design. A focus on developing understanding of professional practice, rather than accumulating a rapidly expanding body of knowledge and skills, provides one means of dealing with the current context of constant change and increasing complexity.…It has consequences for the aims and objectives of courses and programmes, contexts for promoting learning, teaching and learning methods, and assessment of the practical understanding that develops during a professional programme (Dall'Alba, 2004, p. 690).
A challenge to the traditional emphasis in American law schools on “learning how to think like a lawyer” suggests that teaching students to “think like a professional” would better harmonise the ethical aspects and the social consequences of legal practice. Perry (2008) argues for the integration of the personal and professional dimensions within the curriculum, to encourage the “flourishing” of graduates, both as individuals and as professionals”. Creating “intentional, structured and sustained opportunities” for students to develop “moral imagination” would, he argues, make graduates better equipped to apply intellectual knowledge and technical skills in combination with reflection (Perry, 2008, p.
159). A liberal legal education that ignores the development of habits of self-reflection, the ability to relate to others, participate and contribute to social activities and live ethically does not provide an adequate foundation for professional life (Pring, 1995, p. 129). A vocational education, broadly conceived in the Deweyan sense (Dewey, 1916), with a central core focussed on the study of ethical issues, is presented as a means to reconcile the dichotomy between theory and practice, university and profession, liberal or vocational education (G. Johnstone, 1999).
The process of professional identity formation, centred on the development of the self, within a context of intellectual professional knowledge and professional knowing-in-action, is constructed not only during formal university education, but more obviously through the professional socialisation phase. Professional identity includes multiple dimensions such as gender, race, class and educational credentials (McMichael, 2000, p. 176) and according to
“role theorists”, requires students to progress through various stages before they acquire
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the confidence to become that professional (Bates, Bates, & Bates, 2006, p. 125).
Sommerlad (2008, p. 216) has theorised the socialisation process of professional identity formation through internalisation of law’s cultural paradigm and discourse, noting that it remains largely closed to “outsider” graduates unless they subsume their personal identity within the cultural norms expected by the legal profession.
A profession has traditionally been regarded as providing a service, “based on a systematic, scientific body of knowledge” (Barnacle & Dall'Alba, 2008), but this notion itself is no longer valid in light of conceptions of knowledge as both constantly changing over time and context, and situated within particular settings (Lave, 1993). Professional skills are regarded as “the skilfulness with which professionals engage in practice” and are traditionally acquired through “a process of accumulating knowledge and skills, promoted by practical experience” (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 2006, p. 383); recently, however, the notion that “skilful know-how” is progressively acquired, by “passing through various developmental stages from novice, competent, to expert” has been added to this understanding.
Empirical studies across a range of disciplines have focused on a fixed sequence of stages, based on “the traditional notion of professional skill as a set of attributes” which are
“identified and described in a de-contextualised manner, separate from the practice to which they refer”. This approach, according to the Dall’Alba and Sandberg (2006), reflects the “container” view of practice which Lave (1993) identified when he described practice as a “container for particular forms of social interaction” that can be seen as an objective structure, consisting of institutionalised social rules and norms. Giddens (1984) argued that
“practice is intersubjectively constituted through mutual understanding of a specific institutionalised order enacted by professionals”, which emphasises how varied the understandings and enactments of practice may be across different contexts. One of the most influential models of skills acquisition is the “stage model” of professional development, which views skills acquisition as proceeding through five levels, leading up to
“expert” (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986). This model shifted current thinking in that it emphasised that professional skills are context-dependent, and that advanced skills levels can be acquired only through experience in practical work situations rather than depending on context-free knowledge and skills.
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The implications of this theory are that education programmes related to professions usually focus first on the “progressive accumulation of a body of knowledge and skills”
(through the official curriculum of substantive discipline knowledge), followed by the accumulation of additional knowledge and skills in the workplace, through formal and informal training.
The “stage models” of professional skills development have been criticised because they fail to focus on “the understanding of and in, practice”, where understanding is taken to mean an embodied understanding, an integration of “knowing, acting and being” (Dall'Alba &
Sandberg, 2006). This “professional way-of-being” is constituted by the knowledge and skills learned, which are “renewed over time, while becoming integrated into ways of being in the professional in question” (Dall'Alba, 2009). These integrated attributes are essential to prepare professionals for an “uncertain and fluid world” where they will need to be able to cope with unanticipated situations and respond spontaneously to a changing global context (Barnett & Coate, 2005).
It has been said that approximately 15 years ago, “a crisis of confidence and public scepticism” about the “beneficence and practical utility of professional knowledge”
materialised, as a relic of the positivist tradition of technical rationality that had been prevalent in the late nineteenth century” (Schőn, 1983, 1995). Sullivan et al. (2007) mention how public perceptions of the legitimacy of the professions have reached a low point, due to factors such as “crisis, scandal, weakening of public confidence and public outrage”, which raise questions about “the point and value of the peculiar features of the professions”. Practical professional knowledge appears to have been undervalued unless it had been formalised through scientific research. This has lead to an increasing dichotomy between theory and practice, thought and action, the university and everyday life, which ironically persists at a time when pressures in higher education have focussed on universities producing high quality career-oriented graduates, equipped with transferrable generic skills, through accountability measures and processes.
Coupled with legal academics’ anxiety about maintaining their position as a legitimate discipline within the academy and their status as bearers of a separate body of discipline knowledge (James, 2004a, 2004b), these factors have exacerbated the ongoing conflict
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between law educators and the professions as to whose responsibility it is, and at whose expense it should be, to train graduates to effectively translate their discipline knowledge into “knowing in action”. Schőn (1995) sees the types of knowledge that emerges through practice as being “knowing in action” and “reflective practice, both regarded as key professional skills. Professionals have generally been accorded heightened status and authority, are remunerated for providing a valued service, and are expected to exercise informed judgement, act ethically, and maintain confidentiality, as appropriate to their particular context (Barnacle & Dall'Alba, 2008). Unless the curriculum explicitly incorporates these aspects, it fails to address the coherence of the trilogy of professional competences:
to think, to perform and for professionals to conduct themselves as such (Sullivan et al., 2007, p. 27).
In the United States, the Carnegie Foundation Report Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Sullivan et al., 2007) blamed the positivist emphasis on the primacy of scientific knowledge in American universities for “sundering the component parts” of a sound legal education. By reinforcing the rift between theory and practice and ignoring the craft dimension of professional practice in favour of formal legal knowledge, the report points out, it derogates from the understanding of law as “a tradition of social practice that includes particular habits of mind, as well as distinctive ethical engagements with the world”
(p. 8).
These components of professionalism, or the three apprenticeships of legal professionalism described by Sullivan et al. (2007, p. 12) correspond closely with the schema presented above positing the three moments, or building blocks, of curriculum – knowing, acting and being (knowledge, action and the self) – as the three essential constituents of higher education curriculum. The emphasis on the integration of an ethical, moral component is reiterated in Shulman’s contention that
[p]rofessional education is not education for understanding alone; it is preparation for accomplished and responsible practice in the service of others. It is preparation for ‘good work.’ Professionals must learn abundant amounts of theory and vast bodies of knowledge. They must come to understand in order to act, and they must act in order to serve (Shulman, 2005, p. 53).
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The way in which professional practice is understood, in an “embodied sense”, is
“fundamental to how the practice in question is performed and developed, both by individuals and collectively” (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 2006). Understandings of professional practice are developed through (our) interpretations of them, according to Heidegger (Heidegger, 1962 [1927], p. 183). They are based on something already previously understood and thus there is an “unfolding circularity” about the way in which previous understandings are reproduced in each new learning encounter. Dewey’s (1938) notion of habit and continuity of experience reflect a similar repetitive feature that reinforces earlier experience. Interpretation always takes place within the particular practice context and this too gives rise to “an unfolding circularity…both for individual professionals and for the profession as a whole” (Dall'Alba & Sandberg, 2006). Patterns of behaviour, the rituals of
“knowing in action”, are internalised and applied in re-interpreting what it is to “practice”
law and to be a professional.
The document “Profile of a Legal Practitioner” developed by the Law Society of South Africa in 1995, and accepted by SALDA, sets down a list of personal qualities, ethical values and competences which a qualified legal practitioner should embody.58 The document purports to identify in advance the qualities that a person who is admitted to practice as an attorney should embody. There are many areas in common with the attributes of a graduate as described in the SAQA exit level outcomes. For legal academics, however, the end result of educating law students must be founded upon a vision of a transformative legal curriculum which equips the graduates to take up their place in a democratic South African society, adequately prepared for their professional role in the widest sense, and not just a narrow vision of a list of professional practice competences.
These insights suggest possibilities for informing the law curriculum in an endeavour to address the demands of a professional education. In the next section, the ways in which students understand what their professional role will entail are shown to affect their approach to their academic studies.
58 Appendix 11
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3.9 Theorising professional legal entity by extending