Presentation to "EdD Conference 2024 - Research in Practice"

Activity: Talk or presentation typesOral presentation

Description of Activity

Abstract: Having spent over two decades as an educational practitioner, and following my doctorate now squarely within the academy, the development of my professional identity is undergoing a shift which may place me within the realms of the pracademic. Yet, the existence of pracademia as a space, and the pracademic as those who inhabit this space is contested, poorly defined and problematic. Because the wider literature, particularly in relation to education and pracademia, is both limited and at variance when it comes to understanding and defining these spaces and people I find myself located within a social rupture - I could be an academic, but as I still have aspects of my professional and personal self attached to practice I could be a practitioner, or I could be a pracademic. Because of the contestation and problematic existence of pracademia in education, there is a challenge to understand the change in the formation of professional identity for those who move from one space to another or exist between the two. This paper helps to bridge the gap within the literature and, add weight to the existence and location of the pracademic in education. Through a reflective process as described by Aklvesson & Skoldberg (2005), I use my academic self to turn inward towards the practitioner self in order to critically engage with my positionality within both the academy and practice. In this way I also engage with conscientization (Freire 1988), in that through this critical reflection of my own identity I develop an awareness of a social reality, the pracademic. This is coupled with a use of the tools provided by Bourdieu, to interrogate the location of the filed of pracademia and the intersections of doxa, illusio, and symbolic violence that impact the formation of the pracademic habitus.
Period20 Jul 202424 Jul 2024
Event titleEdD Conference 2024 - Research in Practice
Event typeConference
LocationUnited KingdomShow on map
Degree of RecognitionLocal