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“Becoming” a Professional pp 13–32Cite as

‘Becoming’ a Professional

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Part of the book series: Lifelong Learning Book Series ((LLLB,volume 16))

Abstract

This chapter problematises professional becoming through an examination of two principal concepts – ‘becoming’ and ‘professional– ’ which underpin the chapters in this interdisciplinary work. The author suggests ways in which we might answer the question – what are professionals and how do we account for professional becoming? The chapter first locates, within the scholarly literature, the provenance of ‘becoming’ as an iterative and emergent concept of identity formation. The adoption of ‘becoming’ rejects conventional novice-to-expert explanations of being a professional, accepting instead the ‘ongoingness’ of developing a professional self and all that this implies. Following this the chapter draws extensively on the literature to consider the claimed cultural specificity of ‘professional’; this is followed by a consideration of the long and still unresolved search for a satisfactory definition of the term ‘professional’, again with extensive reference to the literature. The chapter continues by examining what has traditionally been taken to constitute the essence of a professional by looking at the epistemological and ontological dimensions of this essence and at the same time locating contemporary challenges to these dimensions. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which becoming is contiguous with lifelong learning in an iterative cycle of becoming a professional throughout one’s professional life.

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  1. Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Lesley Scanlon

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  1. Lesley Scanlon
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  1. Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

    Lesley Scanlon

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Scanlon, L. (2011). ‘Becoming’ a Professional. In: Scanlon, L. (eds) “Becoming” a Professional. Lifelong Learning Book Series, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1378-9_1

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