Changing perceptions: Balancing professionalism during bachelor education

This paper focuses on how students in applied bachelor programmes transform from students to professionals during their educational path. At the brink of their educational pathway towards professionalism, students bring their own beliefs and expectations of what it entails to become a professional through higher education (Brownlee et al. 2009). It is, however, unclear how students’ interaction with the systematised body of knowledge and with the professional fields, both provided by higher education, result over time in professionals. Hence, the aim of this project is to understand howstudents’ professional identity, knowledge, and action transform during their bachelor trajectory.

In this paper, the notion of higher education as a pedagogic device through interactions with knowledge is expanded to becoming a professional, which implies changed knowledge, as also identity and actions of students. Combined knowledge, identity, and action comprise their professionalism (Griffioen, 2019). As (Young & Muller 2014) note, for a student, each step taken requests a transformation and therefore a struggle for knowledge, identity (see also Trede et al, 2012), and for action. While the construct of professionalism was conceptualised as a balancing of these three elements, it is so far unclear, how these three notions play out and relate with each other empirically at different moments in the students’ development towards professional.

The presentation focuses on the methodological aspects in the analysis of the development of the student through four professional disciplines as captured in multiple interviews. Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behavior is used as an analytic lens (Ajzen, 1991). The findings are expected to contribute conceptually by expanding the Theory of Planned Behavior (intention to action) to a new Theory of Planned Professionalism, with an addition of intentions of knowledge and intentions of identity.