“Becoming what I want to be”: A Grounded Theory of Professional Identity Development through Reflection and Relationships in Work-integrated Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although work-integrated learning (WIL) has received considerable investment from the Canadian Government and is regarded as a panacea for incorporating students into the workforce, scholars have argued that more explicit curriculum and reflection related to professional identity development is needed. Reflection is well-established in WIL curriculum, predominantly through graded written reflection assignments, but there is preliminary evidence that assessed reflections may be performative. Using a constructivist grounded theory approach, drawing on semi-structured interviews with undergraduate WIL students and instructors and discourse analysis of students’ reflection assignments and course syllabi, this study addressed the question: How is professional identity developed through reflection in WIL curriculum? Through theoretical sampling, the importance of relationships in WIL emerged as a recurring pattern. Findings are reported across patterns of professional identity, reflection, and relationships. Students and instructors conceptualized professional identity as internal or external, and in follow-up interviews, students articulated professional identity as a merging of their internal personal identity with their more external professional one. Reflection played an important role in generating, deepening, and documenting learning, but students also curated their reflections by excluding or enhancing details. Students gave compelling examples of when they reflected dialogically through relationships, finding that sharing ideas with others without worrying about how their thoughts were being documented deepened their reflection. Relationships emerged as an essential part of students’ WIL experience and professional identity development. Their role in teaching and learning, trust and support, and being part of a community, as well as the absence of relationships spanned both course and workplace contexts. Based on the patterns emerging from the data, a theory of professional identity development through reflection and relationships in WIL curriculum is proposed. The theory is contextualized in the broader literatures of WIL, professional identity development, reflection, and relational approaches. While reflection is widely recognized as an essential part of WIL, it is argued that relationships also play a key role. Suggestions for application of the theory are explored to strengthen reflection and relationships in WIL. The study’s limitations are discussed, as well as possible directions for future study.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.037 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".