The will to be a professional or to be a mentor?

Ron Barnett gave a keynote speech at the 2009 SCEPTrE conference, unpacking the notion of the will to be a professional. He posed the challenge that the basis of the formation of the professional will is unclear and that this creates opportunities to re-think how we as educators can help students develop the necessary dispositions and qualities that maintain the professional will. He drew parallels with themes from his book "A Will to Learn", which has provided me with extra insights into what it means to be a student in the journey through processes of learning.

I’d like to be able to add something to this knowledge. My PhD research is partly driven by the desire to discover the will to be a mentor for students on placement. It's a role that isn't enjoyed by all nurses and some seem to have a greater propensity than others for supporting and educating students in the workplace. Also, I wonder if there is a relationship between the strength of their professional will and their will to be mentors.

As Barnett pointed out, there can be tensions in the doctor-patient repationship when the doctor has the ideal patient in mind and the patient has the ideal doctor in mind and between them the relationship is worked out. I can see parallels here with the mentor-student relationship. Some of the mentors in my research have described characteristics of their "ideal student", and there is plenty reported in the literature from the student viewpoint of ideal characeristics of mentors. According to Barnett, the will has to be continually nurtured and re-nurtured (possibly because of these tensions?), but we don’t have a theory of what professionals do to maintain the will to be or become professional in the present, in the here and now. The educational challenge is of helping to form this professional will in such a way it will be durable. For nurse mentors, this nurturing of a professional will needs to take place at different levels:

the mentor as a nurse has to sustain a professional will to be a nurse and also to be a mentor.

Not only that, but they also need to find a way to nurture a professional will in the students.

Occasionally, they see that there is no professional will in a student

The will exists in knowing, acting and being. Mentors are challenged to devise a space or spaces in which the acting and the knowing and the being relate to each other, both for themselves and their students.

Teasing out the relationship between what it means to be a professional and the life around the professional, it's clear that the professional is part of a wider community, but you have to question whether their own interior spaces provide resources for going on, amongst turbulence and uncertainty. Because, according to Barnett, the professional is able to critique the profession and move it forward, standing apart from the profession as well as part of it, it isn't sufficient to rely only on a community of practice to nurture the professional will. It will be useful to look out for signs of critiquing the profession in the themes and accounts that emerge in my data, and as I'm delving into thoughts and feelings, I may have some insight into the interior spaces of the mentors in my study.

To end this entry, I'd like to share this list of sources of the professional will that Barnett presented:

Delight – something keeps us going, we look into a classroom, we see a little event that students put on in an evening, all by themselves

The language, the poetry of the moment – something happens, something is said, something is done with care

Recognition – a moment of affirmation

Humour

Graciousness

Perceived value – we have to perceive value in what we’re doing in order that that will be nurtured

Perceived effect – a sense that what we’re doing has some kind of valuable effect

Faith? Hope? (I’ve already identified hope as something that features in the mentor experience)

I think there is a lot of this coming through in my data from the mentors, so it will be exciting to see the parallels.

Learning to be professional

I'm preparing a paper for a conference organised by the University of Surrey's Centre for Excellence in Professional Training and Education (SCEPTrE). The main theme is 'learning to be professional' and I think my research has a lot to contribute, in that it provides the part of the story that depicts the experiences of the professionals who directly support learners in the workplace. They have their own idea of what it is to be professional and go to some length to instill professional skills and behaviour in their students.

Although it feels like early days yet (last data was collected at the end of January), interrogating the data with both the research question and the conference theme in mind has brought out some intriguing themes: working with fragments of experience; being aware of high stakes; having hope for the profession. Both mentors and students work with fragments of experience. The mentor sees a fragment of a student’s learning journey and has to imagine where and how it fits with their image of a professional nurse, in addition to helping the students connect their experiences. The stakes are high for mentors and their students. There is urgency about learning, and mentors can be subject to persistent questioning or find themselves striving to ‘unlock’ a quiet student. The accounts reveal how when a relationship is under tension, there is a range of emotional responses. Underlying a decision about a student’s aptitude to become a nurse is a poignant reality-check: would I want this person caring for me or my family? Hope for the profession extended to concern and optimism for the future and recognition of the importance of the mentor role.

I'm looking forward to the conference and to having some fruitful discussions about how what I'm doing complements some of the excellent work already done in the field of work-based and professional learning, such as by Stephen Billet and Michael Eraut.