This article outlines a theoretical understanding of competence as the inferred potential for desirable activity within a professional practice. By employing the concept of ‘teleoaffective structure’ as developed in Schatzki’s practice theory, our study investigates how notions of competent and excellent professionals are defined in two separate practices in which highly qualified professionals share formal qualifications. The study is comparative and based on a total of 39 interviews carried out in the Swedish National Police Counter-Terrorist Unit (police) and with recruiters of medical interns (doctors) in Swedish healthcare. Results indicate that, despite obvious differences between the professional groups in the study, some remarkable similarities are apparent in what are regarded as high levels of competence. Surprisingly, technical expertise was downplayed as an indicator of high levels of competence in both practices. The professional groups emphasized flexibility, drive/ambition and social competence, as well as the ability to balance between being highly capable and being humble before others, including other groups of professionals as characteristics of excellence. Based on the results, the authors discuss a ‘logic of excellence’ that can be used to describe mechanisms of competence differentiation in professional practices from a practice theory perspective.

No abstract

No abstract

Live simulations in which students perform the roles of future professionals or act as confederates (i.e. student actors) are important training activities in different types of vocational education. While previous research has focused on the learning of students who enact a professional, secondary roles in scenario training, such as student observers and confederates, have received inadequate attention. The present study focuses on student observers and confederates in order to examine how these roles can support the learning of other participants in live simulations and to determine how the experience of performing these roles can become a learning experience for the performers. A total of 15 individual interviews and 1 group interview of students attending Swedish police training were conducted. The study findings indicated that the observer role is characterised by distance and detachment, and the confederate role by directness and sensory involvement. Both roles can support as well as inhibit intentional learning for primary participants and offer learning experiences for those playing the roles. The study theorises these roles and lists practical implications for planning live simulations in vocational education and training.

Storytelling has been shown to play a key role in transferring work experience from more experienced towards novices in a number of vocational educational practices, however previous studies have not to the same extent dealt with the role of students' own storytelling practices for sensemaking of work experience. This study set out to examine police students' storytelling of their first occupational experiences from a sensemaking perspective, with an analysis drawing on the concepts of enactment, selection, and retention. The study is based on participant observations of field training follow up sessions' in the context of police education. Findings indicated that student storytelling of work experience tended to be geared towards action, extremeness and the telling of 'war stories'. Furthermore, these type of stories functioned to enable student identification, self-enhancement and emotion management. These findings contribute to our current understanding of how students engage in sensemaking of work-based experiences and in extension how knowledge integration and learning from work placements can be structured pedagogically.A longstanding theme in research on vocational education and training has been how work-based experiences for students can be integrated with learning in vocational and higher education programmes (Aarkrog 2005; Sappa and Aprea 2014; Stenström and Tynjälä 2009; Tynjälä 2013). As stated by Billett et al. (2013) and Billett (2009Billett ( , 2014, a central challenge for educational institutions that provide work-based student