Umeå University's logo

Vocational training programmes in higher education encompass, as learning objectives, the development of relational skills and professional judgement, especially in welfare professions such as policing, teaching and healthcare, where know-how about managing close contact with people is a prerequisite. Based on a cross-professional analysis, the current article explores how students from three different professional education programmes – teacher education, police training and medical education – construct professional judgement in group discussions and interviews. The results show that participants construct professional judgement as relationships between three different dimensions: personal ethics, educational standards, and professional practice. When discussing professional dilemmas, students utilise these three different dimensions to argue for the moral or ethical soundness of their choices. The results of the study shed light on the importance of providing students with opportunities to reflect openly on professional judgement in different ways, even though such reflections may not always be formally assessed. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates similarities between the three programmes that we analysed, as well as similarities in students’ reflections regarding essential aspects of the professions.

This paper contributes knowledge on the effects of materiality and space on teaching and equal access to teacher education. Through an intersectional analysis, with a specific focus on orientations, bodies and materiality, we show how student-bodies orientate closer to or further from various parts of teacher education as an effect of the materiality of emergency remote vs. on-campus education. We elaborate on three different student-body orientating processes that take place during teacher education. These are all related to the emergency remote education implemented as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. We call these processes ‘remote education as relief’, ‘the embodiedness of raising the hand on Zoom’ and ‘energy-draining pre-recorded lectures’. We show how the materiality of emergency-remote education orientates the participants situated within the bodily horizons of intersectional positions of being deaf, female, racialized as non-white and not having Swedish as a first language, both closer to and further away from various parts of their teacher education. The analysis is based on both individual and group interviews with twelve teacher students. The paper contributes insights to emergency-remote education, remote education and on-campus educating.