Pedagogic Practices Supporting the Integration of Experiences

Abstract

To optimise the educational worth of providing students with and integrating practice-based experiences into their programs requires more than the provision of those experiences in practice settings, that organisation and ordering. Instead, there is often a need for interventions (i.e. pedagogic practices) by those who teach in higher education institutions, and also those supervising students in practice settings. This chapter seeks to set out some considerations for how those interventions in the form of pedagogic practices might best be utilised. What is proposed here is that there is a need for such interventions (i) prior to students engaging in practicum experiences, (ii) during those experiences and then, (iii) importantly, after the completion of those experiences. A key principle in the approach adopted here is that such practices and interventions need to be of the kind that can readily be a part of higher education staff members’ work activities. That is, rather than having hybrid processes or costly infrastructure that will not be sustainable over time, the concern here is to identify practices that have the prospect of being used by busy teachers in higher education and that can be part of their working practice. The rationale here is that if these processes are hybrid, costly or require extensive infrastructure, they are far less likely to be engaged with and sustained than those practices which can be easily organised and implemented by teachers and practitioners.