Power and Legitimacy: A Theory Informed Exploration of SLP Students’ Learning Experiences in Practice Placements

Abstract

The socio-cultural and historical context and membership of the speech-language pathology (SLP) profession informs and defines practice today, including who is legitimised to enter the profession and why. We critically explored how this socio-culturally constituted knowledge and practice influences how students experience learning in SLP practice placements. Using the theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) as a conceptual framework, we interpreted qualitative data that explored student learning in SLP placements. Analysis identified SLPs’ understanding and expectations of students’ learning in placements as recursive and legitimised. Students adjust to accommodate professional practices and expectations encountered during placements, which may perpetuate majority culture practices. This research unmasked new understandings of student learning that relates to the challenge to increase SLP professional diversity. Purpose: The socio-cultural and historical context and membership of the speech-language pathology (SLP) profession underpins our norms of practice and our discourses. This context also informs and defines the ways that we practice today, including who we legitimise to enter our profession and why. In this presentation, we will theory as a tool to critically explore how this socio-culturally constituted knowledge and practice influences how students experience learning in SLP practice placements. In particular, we explore how power and legitimised practices shape the expectations, practice and outcomes of SLP student learning in practice placements. Method: We used the theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) as a conceptual framework to interpret qualitative data from two separate programs of research that had explored the phenomena of student learning in SLP practice placements. The first program of research (Attrill, 2016) explored the learning and practice experiences of international SLP students in Australian practice placements, where students were entering a majority Anglo SLP profession reflective of the Australian practice context. The second program of research (Davenport, 2020) explored the experiences of SLP students who had failed a practice placement in an Australian context. These research programs gathered the perspectives of SLP students and supervising practice educators, and theorised about the nature of this situated, educational relationship, and how it shaped and influenced the students experience of learning and their learning outcomes. The qualitative findings of these separate research programs were further interpreted and synthesised using Lave and Wenger’s (1991) theory. This facilitated further problematisation and opened up new opportunities to understand how SLP students negotiate placement experiences. Result: The findings were organised into four themes: Mutual, reciprocal learning opportunities; selection and control processes; degree of access to participation opportunities; and gatekeeping. The analysis cast light on how our understanding and expectations of SLP students’ learning and competency development in practice placements is recursive and strongly legitimised in our profession. Students adjust to accommodate the professional knowledges, practices and expectations they encounter in their placements and are rewarded when they adjust their behaviours to adhere to tacit rules grounded within the expectations of their practice educator and SLP community. Practice educators, meanwhile, shape the students’ behaviours and learning according to that typically expected, and this knowledge is prominently derived from their own prior learning experiences and the expectations of their practice community. As such, students’ learning process and outcomes are shaped by, and reflect the sociocultural practices and expectations of the SLP community in which the learning is situated. This facilitates the perpetuation of practices proffered by the majority culture. Discussion: Students who are under-represented within our majority practice community, irrespective of whether this relates to ethnicity, gender, disability or other non-dominant identity markers, or those who speak up against the expectations of practice or learning in placements, may experience additional challenges to ‘fit’ and be endorsed to enter the SLP community. There is no doubt that learning in a practice context is a complex social system in which individual, institutional and cultural aspects play a part (1, 2). The findings of this study suggests that SLP students may need specific skills to negotiate the tacit rules of the placement learning environment, and this may be more challenging for students from under-represented backgrounds who may have less prior knowledge and experience that aligns with the majority culture of the profession. As expected learning behaviours and endorsed ways to ‘be’ and to ‘communicate’ as a SLP are socially and culturally constructed, students from under-represented communities who may have less exposure to these discourses, may find it challenging to identify and enact these roles. For these students, their understanding of concepts related to health and professional practice are also influenced by factors related to their own background, culture and values. These differences may in turn affect how their placement learning is interpreted, resulting in learning outcomes and practice that may translate in ways that differ to the majority SLP community (3-5). Whilst these learning products may not be those normalised in SLP, it is reasonable to hypothesise that this synthesis of the cultural knowledges and identities of students from under-represented backgrounds with SLP knowledge and practice could result in practice outcomes that attend to the broader needs of minority communities who experience a disparity in SLP outcomes compared with those of the majority (6, 7). It is increasingly recognised that educational and practice institutions should consider their histories, practices and biases, and develop strategies to address the recursive structures that sustain these (8, 9). This includes examining the failure of previous methods that have relied on recruiting members of minority communities into university programs, but have not addressed or reflected about the institutionalised systems and structures that sustain the status quo, or how dominant professional practices, discourses and narratives marginalise those who are less represented (8). For SLP, understanding that individuals from minority backgrounds may develop professional identities and practice that differ to the majority culture (5) opens up opportunities to critically reflect about how contemporary SLP knowledge and practice might vary today if the nature of the profession were socially or historically different. Conclusion: This research brought together the findings from two separate programs of qualitative research, and used the theory of Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Lave and Wenger, 1991) to explore how SLP students’ learning and practice behaviours are shaped to reflect the normalised, and socioculturally constructed practices and discourses of the SLP profession. The use of theory allowed us to explore the phenomena of student learning in placements in a new light, which unmasked new understandings of the longstanding challenge to increase diversity in the SLP community diversity to ensure that we reflect the communities that we serve. Learner outcomes: • Participants will be able to reflect about how the socio-cultural history of the SLP profession has influenced and sustained our current practices. • Participants will consider how students enact learning in practice placements, and what this means for their own supervisory practices. (10-12)