To look and behave like a professional: the practical accomplishment of hospital-located physiotherapy education

Kell, Clare Margaret 2012. To look and behave like a professional: the practical accomplishment of hospital-located physiotherapy education. EdD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis provides a window into the world of work-placement-based pre-registration physiotherapy education in the UK. This empirical study followed final year students as they went about their everyday practices on placement in hospital-based settings. Adopting a perspective sensitive to social theories of learning, and drawing on ideas and methods from ethnography and interactional sociologies, the project makes visible some of the complex, but taken-for-granted, interactional practices and processes by which students, their educators and patients co-enact their work of physiotherapy student education. How placement education is actually done - its practical accomplishment - is captured by focusing on the minutiae of participants’ interaction performances. Physiotherapy practice interactions typically involve participants’ use of space, speech, paralanguage, touch and movement of themselves and others. The research required the development of a new method for recording interaction proxemics, kinesics and verbal elements in real time and with only paper and pencil. Created from the ideas of choreographers, social anthropologists and video/conversational analysts, the multi-modal data sets generated by the method bring interactions to life and enable the detailed exploration of participants’ practices. The evidence collected suggests that placement learning experiences are an integral part of professional development framed within a situated learning environment where the dominant discourse is of ‘physiotherapy as science’. The evidence also suggests that students’ placement practices adapt to satisfy the needs of their summative assessment. The thesis considers the impact of placement education interactions on the patients about whom they orientate. The thesis, and the new method it describes, is immediately relevant to the practice of physiotherapy, its education programmes and professional project discussions. The quality of the interaction data presented in this thesis makes physiotherapy practice education accessible and available for others to explore, and the method is suitable for transfer to other studies of human interaction.

Item Type:	Thesis (EdD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) L Education > LB Theory and practice of education > LB2300 Higher Education R Medicine > R Medicine (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	11 Sep 2023 12:39
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/47178

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