ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the women negotiate pathways through the complex demands of being academic students, being students on placement in the Children’s Workforce, and their own lives. The first section presents the women’s accounts of this part of their journey as biographies, focusing on their placement experiences. The women identify and reflect on critical moments informing their professional practice and how these affect their understanding of professional identities and how academic study influences this process. From this biographical data, four broad themes surface, and these are used to organise the analysis. The first theme considers the impact of work experience with children on their evolving professional identities. The second theme focuses on how organisational processes and practices affect developing professional identities, and includes a consideration of the women’s engagement with policy discourses and also with gender, ‘race’, and class. The third theme explores the significance of emotion work on their professional identities. The fourth theme examines the experience of applying academic theory to practice.
