Multiple roles – multiple selves: exploring students’ experiences of a shared learning space

Abstract

The conference workshop focused on the way that part-time students on work-based learning programmes manage the demands of competing roles and identities within their private, professional and academic lives. This paper reports on research into student experiences of undertaking foundation degree study in the School of Education. Notions of ‘professionalism’ and ‘professionalisation‘ are explored and it is the learner practitioners that appear to be shouldering significant costs of government reforms into the children and young people’s services workforce. A visual mapping of the relationship between competing selves was considered as a useful framework for individual reflection and self-conceptualisation