Ruby Heap, Wyn Millar and Elizabeth Smyth. Learning to Practice: professional education in historical and contemporary perspective.
Reynolds, Ruth
Ruby Heap, Wyn Millar and Elizabeth Smyth. Learning to Practice:
professional education in Historical and contemporary perspective,
Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 2005, ISBN 0776-6060-50.
This is a collection of well written and thought provoking interdisciplinary articles written around the theme of what makes a
profession. The book has three themes--establishing the most efficacious place to carry out professional education; the nature of the link
between initial training and continuing training; and the comparison
between professional training across time and occupations. Of the three
themes the first is the one that can be more easily identified as the
strong focus of most of the essays with the other two mostly inferred
rather than directly addressed. The essays began as a collection
directly targeted toward women's professional work and there is a
strong undercurrent focusing on women's struggle to be identified
in professions which were dominated by men and had a professional
culture dominated by men. This is both a strength and a limitation to
the book in that because of the strong women's theme, some of the
larger issues which it purports to address get lost in the story.
However this is of minor concern. This is a book providing a very
useful, usually historical, context to present debate on professional
preparation and continuing professional reflection. The issues that
arise are thought provoking and salutary in a world that often dismisses
the lessons of the past when exploring current issues, reinforcing the
need to continually guard against those who would reduce the role of
historical and sociological studies when training for the professions.
The methodologies are various including oral histories, archival
documents, various university student documents, professional journals,
surveys, and personal letters and as such the volume provides a useful
guide to historical methodology.
The first essay by Bob Gidney, 'Madame How' and
'Lady Why': learning to practice in historical perspective, is
an excellent examination of the various forms of professional training
over time and some of the contexts in which this training took place. It
links contemporary perspectives to historical trends. Gidney argues that
there has always been a tension between professionals learning
'how' and also learning 'why' and it appears to be
the case that the various quantities of the 'how' and
'why' are what leads to different forms of training, from an
apprenticeship model, to a community college model, to the university
model. In order to be a more prestigious profession it was usually
desirable to go to university. The university-only model for
professional training did not widen the social base for the profession
however. The apprenticeship and community colleges did.
The rest of the essays provide case studies to exemplify the
overall themes of the book. They include studies of the training of
clergy; the training of social workers; the training of wartime
volunteers in nursing and the impact that this had on the nursing
profession; the changing role of Christian missionary medical assistants
in birth control clinics in India; an excellent comparative
sociologically--based study of students attending professional training
in Engineering, Medicine and Dentistry from the 1910s to the 1950s; and
a group of studies using life stories of women--women in the Faculty of
Applied Science and Engineering at the University of Toronto, a
comparative study of women studying to become physicists and historians
in select periods of the twenthieth century and women becoming lawyers
in contemporary times. The final study is one that is the exception that
tends to prove the rule--the history of dental hygienists who were at
one time educated in universities (supervised by the dental profession)
but in order to improve their professional standing, oral hygienists are
now being trained in colleges.
It is difficult to draw strong conclusions from such varied groups
of studies but the case studies are interesting and informative. If
there were to be any criticisms they would be that there is a strong
emphasis on women's studies (not necessarily a bad thing but not
identified as the subject of the text); a strong emphasis on Toronto,
Canada (that could perhaps limit the applicability of the research
findings); a variety of different methodologies which allow for
diversity but limit the ability to apply principles to other areas; and
the fact that only a couple of essays put the individual study in the
wider academic context. Overall I would recommend it as a useful
collection of case studies as exemplars for examining methodology for
historical research, as well as a valuable guide to perspectives on the
current issues surrounding professional practice.
RUTH REYNOLDS
The University of Newcastle
