Sharing Stories and Building Resilience: Student Preferences and Processes of Post-practicum Interventions

Abstract

Post practicum interventions: Student preferences To graduate occupationally-informed and work-ready graduates, the Australian higher education sector has increasingly incorporated work-integrated learning (WIL) components into degree courses. These components can take many forms such as practicums, clinical experiences, and internships. They play an essential role in bridging the content studied at universities and professional social practice experienced in the workplace. With reference to the health care sector, Courtney-Pratt et al. (2012) describe the significance of clinical placements as being "undisputed as a key to professional competence" (p. 1381). It is understood, however, that the provision of these experiences alone will be insufficient to realise their full educational potential. Indeed, in enacting the provision of those experiences, the deliberate process of securing the integration of these two sets of experiences and students' reconciliation of them requires particular actions and engagement by learners (Billett, 2009). As a consequence, attention is now being given to the kinds of curriculum and pedagogical considerations required to secure that integration, and realise the full benefits of these experiences. There are good reasons to want to realise those benefits, because they come at considerable personal and institutional costs. In some instances, students are charged with finding and organising their own WIL placements. But, primarily, it is the higher education institutions that direct considerable resources, time, and funding towards sourcing and facilitating these experiences. Then, there are the contributions made by employers in terms of their time and resources in providing these experiences, and increasingly educational institutions are supporting, and sometimes paying for, students' practicum experiences. Added to this, is the considerable investment of students as they engage in these experiences and in doing so also commit considerable time, resources and often incur financial costs. Therefore, along with evaluating the effectiveness of experiences that workplace learning provides, it is also necessary to consider how interventions can best secure the integration of those experiences into the higher education curriculum and achieve strong student learning outcomes. The focus here is on how the educational potential of these experiences can be enriched through interventions after students have had or completed their work experiences: post-practicum experiences. In the past, post-practicum reflective self-assessments have provided some insight into the usefulness of work placements. However, higher education students typically receive little guidance on undertaking reflective practice (Ryan & Ryan, 2013), with significant differences and variations in explicit teaching of reflective practice between disciplines and institutions. This type of self-assessment often ends up being descriptive, which, while useful in its own way, is insufficient to appraise the impact the placement ha...

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