EDUCATING FOR COMPETENCE IN PROFESSIONAL PRACTICE

In educating for the professions, teachers seek to enable students to engage in professional practice as competent practitioners. In this pa per we question the adequacy of traditional approaches for promoting c ompetent practice. These traditional approaches typically view compete nce in terms of attributes, such as knowledge, skills and attitudes. C ompetence development is then seen in terms of acquiring the necessary attributes. From an alternative view of competence as based on ways o f experiencing practice, we argue that competence development focus on enriching experience of practice. More specifically, we point out tha t competence development involves change in the structure of the meani ng for practice. Change in meaning structure for practice involves bot h a significant shift from one way of experiencing practice to another , as well as refinement and elaboration of the way of experiencing pra ctice. Implications of this view of competence development for profess ional education are discussed. In particular, we deal with implication s relating to the teaching-learning relation and the form the educatio nal programme takes. In summary, we argue that enabling students to de velop competence through experience of engaging in practice is most cl osely directed to the aims of education for the professions.