Placement Education Pedagogy as Social Participation: What are Students Really Learning?

This study adopted a social perspective of learning to focus on the minutiae of placement educator, student and patient interaction practices during student‐present therapeutic activities. Two days of placement for each of six senior students were densely recorded in real‐time focussing specifically on the verbal, kinesics and proxemics‐based elements of the participants' interaction practices. Repeated cycles of data analysis suggested consistent practices irrespective of the placement, educators, students or patients. ResultsThe data suggest that placement education is a powerful situated learning environment in which students see, experience and learn to reproduce the physiotherapy practices valued by the local placement. Consistently, placement educators and students co‐produced patient‐facing activities as spectacles of physiotherapy‐as‐science. In each setting, patients were used as person‐absent audiovisual teaching aids from which students learnt to make a case for physiotherapy intervention. DiscussionThe paper challenges physiotherapists and other professions using work‐placement education to look behind the rhetoric of their placement documentation and explore the reality of students' learning in the field. The UK‐based physiotherapy profession may wish to consider further the possible implications of its self‐definition as a ‘science‐based healthcare profession’ on its in‐the‐presence‐of‐students interactions with patients. Copy...
Source: Physiotherapy Research International - Category: Physiotherapy Authors: Tags: Research Article Source Type: research