Facilitating the Exchange of Knowledge, Evidence, and Insights Derived From Research Between Professional Fields

• In Event: 44.038 - Learning From Each Other: Can We Better Achieve Social Goals With Cross-Professional Teams?

Abstract

This contribution addresses the issue of communication between professional fields about the insights, ideas, experience and evidence acquired in research on professional education. The record of research on teaching, learning, and development in the professions is a rich repository of knowledge that professions educators can draw on to improve educational interventions and open new research frontiers. All too commonly, however, professions educators work in field specific communication silos, a tendency that is well known and universally decried. Why are cross professional barriers so intractable? Taking inspiration from behavioral economics (e.g. Ariely, 2008), in the first part of the paper I draw attention to social factors that conspire to create strong and systemic disincentives to pursuing cross professional knowledge exchange. These include expectations to produce scholarship that relates to preparing future professionals in a specific field and collaborate with and cite scholars in that field. Instead of denying this reality, I argue, we need to build forms of collaboration and exchange that can accommodate and operate within these social parameters. In the second part of the paper, I present two models of cross professional interaction in educational research that are consistent with this aspiration. One model, the problem-based model, involves drawing on the techniques and findings of researchers from other professional areas who have addressed similar research questions in the past. My own survey work on ethics curriculum in initial teacher education (see Maxwell et al., 2016) illustrates this model. Familiarizing ourselves with comparable survey work in other fields paid dividends. It provided us with an effective solution to an unexpected major methodological problem and it also allowed us to draw conclusions from our results that went beyond the anecdotal nature of the discussion of the issues as they had previously been playing out in the literature. In the theory-based model, by contrast, researchers from different professional fields use a common set of theoretical constructs to investigate a cross professional phenomenon but turn to their home fields to conduct validation research. This approach is exemplified by Bebeau and colleagues’ research program on professional identity development (see Bebeau & Monson, 2012), which has produced a well validated model of professional identity development and a corresponding psychological measure, the Professional Identity Essay (PIE). This work has advanced knowledge by generating empirical support for the long-held theoretical notion that there is a core experience of being and becoming a professional (see Carr-Saunders & Wilson, 1933). Clearly, this finding could not have been reached without input from multiple professions. The practical value of this work is that it provides a basis for collaboration between professions educators from different fields to develop applications and find innovative solutions to common challenges relating to the issue of professional identity. Two noteworthy applications are the use of the PIE as an alternative to the notoriously unreliable admissions essay and drawing on the stages of professional identity development as a resource for teaching and learning about professional identity in university-based professional education (see Bebeau, 2014; Bebeau & Monson, 2008).

Author

• Bruce Maxwell, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières