Towards sustainable veterinary education: Embedding professional identity development into the curriculum

In a contemporary world that has been described as not merely complex but supercomplex, sustainable models of veterinary education will prepare students to be new graduates, but also to engage with an unknowable future. The first year of veterinary practice is a critical developmental period with implications for future practice. With a goal to explore professional identity through engaging deeply with situated experience, this research study adopted an integrated narrative research approach with eleven new graduate veterinarians.
A conceptual model was developed, in which new graduate professional identity development can be represented as a process of striving for a professional voice. Through storytelling, and inward and outward facing dialogue, participants mobilised individual and collective resources in the tasks of striving for a sense of practice capability and moral authenticity. In making their engagement explicit and meaningful they trained and strengthened their own professional voices, creating a dialogic space of reflexive inquiry and agency in which they could enact pragmatic professionalism and envisage future practice wisdom.
The model provides tools for veterinary educators to use in mapping and scrutinising curricula with regard to professional identity development. The goals of this workshop are to present the model, and to explore strategies and challenges for embedding professional identity into the undergraduate veterinary curriculum.