Ethnography as the prerequisite for improving quality of internship periods in professional practice

Our main argument in this paper is that doing ethnography, performing micro analysis of professional practice and using linguistic and multimodal methods are important prerequisites when aiming at studying and improving the quality of any professional practice. Our focus is students doing their internship periods within three different professional arenas and practices – thus combining an ethnographic and linguistic framework with important educational issues regarding ways to improve student learning within internship periods. Our aim is to present a way of working for researchers that creates essential value for both researchers and practitioners by combining ethnography and education, theory and practice, and various kinds of empirical data with the ambition to improve the quality of learning processes in internship periods. Based on empirical data and thoroughly reflected from theoretical perspectives such as ethnography (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007), learning theory (Wenger, 1998), Conversation Analysis (Sacks, 1992), multimodal analysis (Goodwin, 2000), and service design thinking (Brown 2009; Lockwood 2009), we address three important themes as we: 1) Describe how interns learn in very different ways at the university and in the professional culture respectively. 2) Discuss the theoretical and methodological approaches necessary when aiming to capture and understand learning practices in the professional practice. 3) Suggest how this knowledge combined with the new research value chain (Gravengaard 2017) can improve both the professional and educational practice thus bridging the gap between theory and practice supporting boundary crossing and creating more effective and efficient learning environment for interns. The paper presents three research projects analysing interns entering a particular professional community of practice (Wenger 1998) and the socialisation processes where the interns, via legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger 1991) learn both professional norms and craft skills and thereby become full members and culturally competent practitioners and develop professional vision (Goodwin 1994). Ethnographic field observation (Hammersley & Atkinson 1983 [2005]) combined with video and audio recordings of the professional practices (Goodwin 1998) make it possible to conduct micro analysis of the interactions thus giving us a nuanced and detailed knowledge concerning the often tacit knowledge (Polanyi 1966) about how learning practices take place in professional practice. This combination of ethnography, learning theory and micro sociological interaction analysis provide us with a framework enabling us to create a very deep and nuanced understanding of how learning takes place in the routinised professional practice (Giddens 1984). This knowledge serves as an important point of departure for reflections and discussions among researchers, supervisors, practitioners as well as educators interested in developing and improving learning practices and learning environments. In this paper, we initially describe how students learn in two different ways at the university and in the professional practice, and we discuss how to capture and analyse learning processes in the professional practice. After that, we give examples of how this theoretical and methodological framework can provide us with important knowledge about interns’ learning processes and we point out four essential aspects of this way of doing research – for instance how co-creation with practitioners creates a foundation for a joint effort in improving the quality of internship periods.