Radiography Students’ Learning During Clinical Placements: Developing Professional Knowing in Practice

Radiographers work with image production in medical imaging, a professional field that is undergoing rapid technical development. There is a need to understand how students in radiography education learn within this evolving practice. The aim of this paper is to investigate how radiography students learn professional knowledge in practice during clinical placements. Data collection was through qualitative design using observations and individual interviews. The theoretical framework for the study was a practice-orientated approach. Three themes describing the learning in practice of radiography students emerged as the final result. 1) Attuning to practice: Learning through listening and observing showed how students reconstruct prior knowledge into practical knowing and learn the situated practice. 2) Embodied knowing: Learning through acting in practice illustrated how students reconstructed prior embodied knowledge through their own acting in practice. 3) Dealing with the unexpected: Learning from breakdowns explains how students learn in situations in which unexpected things happen with materiality or relations. On these occasions, relationships with other people were important for developing the students’ knowing about the relationship between materiality, actions and people practicing radiography. This study it gives insight into radiography students’ learning during clinical placement, which can be useful for planning curricula, as well as clinical learning in radiography education.