Students as future professionals: exploring the meaning of signature pedagogies of internships

Professional schools educate students to become professionals by organizing internships in the field. These internships have their own signature pedagogies, or characteristic teaching and learning practices that are deeply rooted in a particular profession. This study aims to uncover the moral dimensions of the signature pedagogies within internships in one teacher education and one medical education programme in Flanders and explores what these signature pedagogies reveal about expectations of (future) professionals. Using positioning theory’s concept of moral orders, we examined rights and duties embedded in internship-related documents, complemented by interviews with programme leaders. The analysis focused on what, how and where things were written within the documents. Findings reveal that the teacher education programme emphasizes students’ development of professional identity, positioning students as professionals in development. The medical education programme prioritizes the development of professional competence, positioning students as future workforce. The study concludes that programme documents shape expectations and power positions of future professionals, thereby encouraging other programmes to critically reflect on their own documents and learn across professions.