The change in professional attitude in the transition from nursing to teaching

The study focuses on the German states of Lower Saxony and Thuringia. The results will include a comparison of east and west Germany. In addition, the project, which will initially be funded by the DFG for three years, is investigating the effects of the current reform of the Nursing Professions Act (PflBG).

In their study, the teams led by Prof. Dr. Heidrun Herzberg, Department of Educational Sciences and Vocational Pedagogy in Health Professions (BTU), and Prof. Dr. Anja Walter, Chair of Health and Nursing/Professional Didactics (TUD), are investigating which steps are needed to transform the practical knowledge required in the nursing profession into action knowledge that can be imparted didactically. This process requires, as the project leaders say, a transformation of the professional habitus "from caring to teaching" for many of the professional educators concerned.

Prof. Herzberg explains the focus of the research: "Of particular interest to us is the so-called "tacit knowledge" - knowledge that comes from practical experience and must be mixed with scientific knowledge. We call it "intermediate knowledge." We want to investigate how this mixture comes about and how crucial it actually is for professional pedagogical practice, especially in the health professions. In doing so, we will not only interview experts, but also observe teaching situations. It is indeed about tracing the difficult learning process that actors* go through whose basic profession was nursing and who are now supposed to become reflective teachers."

However, the reconstruction of different forms of knowledge has not only the potential to empirically trace the necessary professionalization step from nursing to teaching in nursing teachers. It is also suitable for the theoretical elucidation of a process that is interesting in principle for professional research, which the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has described as "habitus transformation", a kind of modification of the attitude that actors adopt towards their (professional) world. Such changes take place to a considerable extent implicitly and are based on the aforementioned intermediate knowledge stocks.