Learning to participate while shifting location in a hospital ward

Student nurses develop their professional vision (Goodwin, 1994) and their professional identity through interaction and participation in clinical practice. Shifting embodied participation frameworks (Goodwin, 2000b) and the use of contextual configurations (Goodwin, 2000a) are crucial parts of the development of a professional identity for the students as they learn to become competent practitioners or members (Sacks, 1989; Schegloff, 2007) in the field of nursing. The present study shows how students and their clinical supervisors move through different locations when students are introduced to new practices and interactions with patients: Instruction before interaction with patient takes place in the guardroom, the interaction with the patient takes place in the patient’s room and the assessment of the performed task takes place in the guard room again. Thus different kinds of routinized participation and interaction emerge that are connected to the different locations. Participation is thus understood in two ways: 1) Learning to participate as a competent practitioner with a patient is learned not just in situ by the patient’s side but also by 2) participating in interaction with the clinical supervisor alone, receiving instructions and assessments about the participation with the patient. Thus the study shows how the development of a professional vision and the process of learning to become a member of a community of practice (Hindmarsh, 2010; Lave & Wenger, 1991) is an on-going practice that takes into account the different types of participating and interacting in different locations in the ward, thus training the student to see the 'right things' when participating in interaction with the patient.