Professional Practice 1 and the Case Study

In second year, practice experience is gained mainly through a full-time block 8-week placement in the April to May period. The placement helps you to test ideas, to learn from experience, to discover things about yourself in terms of the way you are inclined to go about things, and to develop your powers of analysis. Essentially, the placement gives you the opportunity to put yourself into practice. This means that you will develop your knowledge, skills and values, as you attempt to understand situations and deal with the associated tasks and issues. Practise experience is not, therefore, about trying to apply 'theory' from the BACE courses in any rigid or mechanical sense.

The role of the placement supervisor is key to the learning process. The focus in placement is on establishing a cooperative relationship around your professional development. You would be wrong if you expect supervision to be similar to experience with line managers, because it is more like a mentoring process. You will agree a learning contract with your supervisor who will adjust the work experience appropriately to your particular style, attitudes, and habits, as far as this is possible. It also includes a learning ‘contract’, which spells out how to engage with the placement to the full, and to balance this appropriately with work and personal circumstances and commitments. There are pre-placement discussions with the university tutor about, for example, placement preferences.

You will work through a sequence of eight structured tasks to be completed with the supervisor’s support. In order to make the links to the taught programme, you will be required to choose and apply a section of a reading from four of your first year courses.

Becoming Competent

It should be obvious from the scenes depicted at Cobblers Youth Club, that work in the fied of community education can be extremely difficult and full of challenges.

Read Bamber (2000) on the conditions, tasks and purposes of youth work. What messages for working with the young people at the youth club could you take from what Bamber has written?

What benefit would professional training have in terms of carrying out your work in such a situation? A good way to think about this is to consider what it means to be professionally competent. Competence is currently defined by the CeVe Guidelines, which is a sub-committee of the Scottish Government's Standards Council for Community Learning and Development, in relation to six main areas.

engaging with the community
developing relevant learning and educational opportunities
empowering the participants
organising and managing resources
practising community education within different settings
using evaluative practice to assess and implement appropriate changes

Is there anything missing from this list? McCulloch and Martin (1997) have criticised this view for being too reliant on an instrumental view of competence (the ability to do/perform), when there is an equal need to include critical understanding (the capacity to make sense of relevant ideas and concepts) and contextual awareness (sensitivity to the issues raised in relation to the wider context). Read the extract from their article. What do you think they mean by 'critical understanding?'

Clearly, working in the ways suggested requires extensive knowledge and skills, and a commitment to certain values. PP1 can help because it is designed to help you to acquire this kind of competence.

What next?

Having explored the contribution of PP1 in terms of seeing problems and issues differently, go to ICE and the case study to consider the case study from a theoretical perspective or WWIG and the case study to consider educational ways of working in a setting such as Cobblers.

CUE has been developed at the University of Edinburgh by John Bamber and Clara O'Shea as part of the Student Recruitment and Admissions 'Transitions' Project in 2006/7. For further information on CUE and on CUE: Community Education contact: John Bamber, Department of HIgher and Community Education, Moray House School of Education, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 8AQ, Tel.: +44 - (0)131 - 651 6116, E-mail: john.bamber@ed.ac.uk

Website updated: June 19, 2008