THE EXTRACURRICULAR PROFESSIONAL INTERNSHIP IN THE TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAM IN THE VOCATIONAL FIELD OF HEALTHCARE

There are numerous internships to be completed within the diverse study program landscape of vocational teacher training in Germany.The prerequisite for a qualifying degree is practical professional experience within the vocational subject area, which is gained either through a completed vocational training of at least three years or an extracurricular internship in the professional field for at least one year.The latter is intended to familiarize students with the professional and working world of the trainees, who the students will train and teach in the future.While internships in schools are quite often subjects of research, there are gaps in the research of extracurricular internships, which gave rise to the author's doctoral thesis, which focuses on the vocational field of healthcare and nursing.In an explorative, qualitative research, based on the methodology of the grounded theory, a sequential trend study with semi-open interviews will be used to find out how students experience the internship, which professional socialization processes occur and what influence the internship has on the professional actions of teachers who completed the internship already.The contribution will present the theoretical foundations and outline initial empirical results, for example an overview of the structures of the extracurricular professional internship, based on a document analysis throughout Germany of similar teacher training courses in various universities and also first results of the interviews.In addition, an outlook on curricular development processes at the university in relation to the professional internship regulations will be given to empirically support and possibly adapt already existing documents about internship regulations.