Being and becoming a professional : restoring history to the education of health professions

The conveners of this conference have challenged participants to consider whether the University still acts as an environment for developing engaged, disciplined citizens. In this presentation we interrogate student learning in the health professions and a tendency of educators and students to favor ‘forward thinking’ technical rationality, where the history of the discipline and its past ways are considered irrelevant. We contend that a pragmatic, forward thinking approach to learning how to ‘do’ or become ‘competent’ to practise may stand in the way of becoming critically reflective professionals. As Schon (1983) stated “many [professional] practitioners, locked into a view of themselves as technical experts, find nothing in the world of practice to occasion reflection. They become too skillful at techniques of selective inattention, junk categories, and situational control, techniques which they use to preserve the constancy of their knowledge-in-practice” (p.69). How have some health professions come to be framed in such a way that the histories of their emergence have largely been erased from university curricula, and what are the consequences for how students learn to become professional