‘There is more than one way to kill a cat’: Making sense of post-experience professional training

This chapter considers the vocabularies that experienced but untrained teachers from further education (FE) use and acquire on a university-based certificate of education training course. It concentrates on the vocabularies used by the trainees to handle their heightened vulnerability and visibility before peers and experts from the ivory tower. Students developed pragmatic vocabularies to describe how their professional practice with patients had made them 'more realistic'. Trainees retrospective accounts suggest that during their occupational socialization at the workplace they had been handed vocabularies of realism. On successful completion of the Certificate of Education in-service course, the variously experienced participants are awarded either the Postgraduate Certificate in Education or Certificate of Education respectively. Trainees referred to the real world of FE where they were all working a twenty-one hour student contact timetable, and where time was a limited resource not to be wasted.