| Summary: | This thesis explores ways in which practice teachers facilitate student learning on the Specialist Community Public Health Nursing programme. The knowledge they draw on and pedagogic practices they employ in the placement area seem obscure and difficult to articulate and, as a result, tend to be marginalised. A mixed methods approach is adopted drawing on three forms of data collection: semi-structured interviews, a questionnaire and practice teachers’ summative comments on student portfolios. Twenty practice teachers from one university were interviewed and practice teachers’ comments in student portfolios in the same university were scrutinised. The information from the interview data informed the third data collection method, a questionnaire sent nationally to 115 practice teachers in 12 English universities. It aimed to establish whether views expressed in interviews were more generally applicable. The findings offer fresh insights into, and interpretation of teaching practice and the knowledge relied on. Learning in the practice placement becomes an amalgamation of complex professional knowledge, client narratives, and cultural artefacts. These become appropriated and reconfigured as new professional knowledge. This process may result in different acts of translation of the day-to-day realities of each practice teacher rendering the approach person-bound and context specific. The thesis concludes that drawing upon the above process the practice teacher’s individual approach to teaching and learning develops and then (having assessed the context within which she is working) she engages to help with students’ learning by using a mixture of formal knowledge and knowledge developed from practice. A model of responses and relationships has been developed involving complex professional knowledge and pedagogic processes. The study, therefore, sheds light on learning in the practice placement.
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