ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of higher education that embraces work and learning. It uses empirical data to study the teaching and learning of deliverers in higher education institutions of professional programmes. These programmes include the training of clinicians such as general practitioners and emergency physicians. The deliverers are lecturers on the programmes as well as practitioners or have been in the past in those two areas of clinical practices.
The foci of this chapter are to 1) investigate the conceptual framework of these lecturers in higher education professional programmes from teaching and work perspectives, and 2) critically consider the pedagogic implications for the related teaching institutions from the perspectives of these deliverers.
The empirical data is drawn from a project (Loo, 2018). It consists of occupational programmes at the pre-university level (commonly known as vocational courses), first-degree level (e.g. dental hygiene and accounting, such as the Association of Accounting Technicians, or AAT), and professional courses (e.g. training of GPs and emergency physicians). For this chapter, the data will be concentrated on the data from the professional courses. The quantitative and qualitative data were drawn from seven participants from the two clinical areas. After administrating the questionnaire, the semi-structured interview questions were fine-tuned based on the information from the earlier research method so that a more contextualised approach to qualitative data gathering was carried out (Robson and McCartan, 2015).
In the first part of the chapter, following the introduction, and drawing from both the literature sources and empirical findings, a theoretical framework of the teachers’ occupational pedagogy will be investigated. The framework refers to the various definitions of knowledge such as disciplinary, pedagogic, occupational, tacit and explicit. The framework includes sources by Clandinin (1985), Shulman (1987), Becher (1994), Bernstein (1996), Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), Polanyi (1966), and Winch (2014). It uses recontextualization concepts to understand how the forms of knowledge may be applied in different pedagogic and occupational/work-related contexts. The sources include Barnett (2006), Evans et al. (2010) and Loo (2014). This section is about knowledge and curriculum formation. This section will argue that the notions of knowledge relating to occupational practices and pedagogic activities require re-framing and that more diverse definitions of knowledge (relating to pedagogic, occupation and life experiences) are required.
The next section focuses on the complexities of integrating the knowledge types for pedagogic activities. It draws on the findings of professional deliverers to provide examples relating to their occupational work in the two clinical areas of GP and EM and their teaching activities. This section relates to curriculum implementation from the teaching perspectives by practitioners who are teachers and implications for their pedagogic education.
In the concluding aspects, the contributions of this chapter will be explicated, and their implications for the deliverers and managers of the related HEIs programmes and the policymakers and related stakeholders will be investigated.
