This is the latest version of this item.

Postgraduate professional education assists practitioners in gaining advanced knowledge and skills to more capably respond to the demands of rapidly changing and increasingly complex health and social care practice environments. The postgraduate programme in the Centre for Health and Social Practice at Waikato Institute of Technology begins this capability development by assisting practitioners to achieve a deeper understanding of how they think and reason in practice and recognise how they use and value sources of information in this process of reasoning. One of the challenges for interprofessional education at the postgraduate level is re-focusing the thinking of people whose undergraduate education has been taught within disciplinary silos such as nursing, social work, counselling, midwifery, occupational therapy, physiotherapy and teaching. Finding common ground for thinking and reasoning in practice that pays attention to the particular emphases of each profession and yet provides a common framework for reasoning in practice in an interprofessional context has been a challenge underpinning capability development for these experienced practitioners. (how to take them beyond what they have known)The conceptual framework for an interprofessional practice epistemology in this programme engages students in learning activities enabling them to conceptualise reasoning in practice within three strands, including propositional/empirical, experiential/embodied, situational/relational knowing. While all three elements of this framework have value in practice, different practitioners will foreground and background aspects of the framework, depending on the focus of their approach with a particular client or family. This presentation explores the experience of engaging postgraduate practitioners in teaching and learning activities to examine an interprofessional epistemology for practice development.