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The work that many nurses do involves the use of their own body as one of the tools of their occupation. Being a nurse, in many cases, means controlled, purposeful use of her or his own body oriented to the patient. This paper discusses some of the ways in which nurses' bodies and the work that those bodies do are represented in professional and academic research accounts and made relevant in literature. Using instances of bodies and bodily activity mentioned in a variety of literature, the paper discusses three categories of accounts of nursing bodywork: those which are problematised and where the nurse's body is seen as a topic for investigation, and those which are unproblematised either explicitly discussing bodily activity (for example, touch) or implicitly dealing with bodywork (for example, taking blood pressure). Four ways in which nurses' bodies are made relevant in accounts are proposed: relational, corporate, instrumental and human. The paper discusses the prominence (or not) nurses' bodies are given in professional and academic accounts, as a contribution to preliminary work of generating a topic for investigation and concludes with some suggestions as to how this investigative project might be taken forward, focusing primarily on an examination of methodic practices, or how bodywork is brought off and executed as a skilled but taken-for-granted activity.

This paper discusses a study examining how mentors in nurse education make professional judgments about the clinical competence of their pre-registration nursing students. Interviews were undertaken with nine UK students and 15 mentors, using critical incidents in practice settings as a focus. The study was undertaken for the English National Practice-Based Professional Learning Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. This paper reports on the conversation analytic thread of the work. The mentor role with pre-registration nursing students is not only supportive but involves formal assessment. Central to the relationship is communication. In professional education, communication is seen as a skill to be applied and assessed in practice settings but is also the medium mentors and mentees use to talk about the relationship. Analysis of excerpts of conversation in the interviews shows that episodes of communication are used as topics of conversation to establish professional identity. It also reveals that judgments about the extent of professional capacity of both students and mentors are grounded in everyday behaviours (for example, enthusiasm, indifference and confidence) as well as professional competence. In addition to focusing on clinical issues, mentors can and do use mundane communication as a resource for judgments about competence.

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Accounts of experience and direct testimony are used extensively in health and social care education. In the sphere of open and distance learning (ODL) they both offer a richness and texture in the materials and form the focus for the use of a spectrum of ‘human data’, which are central to the health and social care professions. This article discusses some of the uses of experience and testimony in ODL relating to health and social care and examines ways in which testimony is transformed for pedagogic purposes in open and distance learning.