Learning to Practice (review)

This collection of essays, which investigates the history of professional education in Canada, has the advantage of a shared conceptualization of the key problems that need to be studied. As such, it is a more helpful to the reader than run-of-the-mill anthologies in which individual contributions are only loosely connected to one another. In this instance, the authors have benefited from the 'Learning to Practise' symposium at the 2003 Congress of the Federations of the Humanities and Social Sciences and from reading and discussing each other's work. Three main themes bind the essays together: the historical processes that determine where professional education takes place; the relationship between what professionals learn and how they learn it; and continuity and change in professional education as revealed in specific historical contexts. There is also an overriding concern with gender, which arises from the fact that professionalism traditionally has been identified with masculine character traits, making it more difficult for women to enter the charmed circle. The editors admit that these questions do not exhaust the range of topics that could be studied under the heading of professional education, but this is not a fault. Their decision to limit the scope of inquiry makes the book stronger rather than weaker.

The most theoretical of the essays is Bob Gidney's "'Madam How" and "Lady Why": Learning to Practise in Historical Perspective.' It challenges the conventional narrative that celebrates the triumph of the university over apprenticeship and the non-university school as the preferred site for professional education. Gidney calls for a 'more skeptical spirit about the presumed virtues of classrooms' and 'more care in assessing how these two models actually worked for men and women' (22). William Westfall takes up this issue directly in his piece on the formation of Anglican clergy in the Diocese of Toronto from 1780 to 1880. He concludes that it is misguided to believe 'that the proper destination of the narrative of clerical training is a professional school placed within a university setting' (62). Cathy James's study of social work education at the University of Toronto, 1914–29, explores in detail the relationship between theoretical education and fieldwork. By adopting the model of medical clinical training, social work was able to bolster its claim to professional status. James emphasizes the role of practical experience in teaching 'cultural practices' (87), which constitute the hidden curriculum of thought patterns and behaviour to which aspiring social workers are expected to conform.

Other essays in the collection touch on the rivalry between Voluntary Aid Detachment workers and registered nurses in the First World War (Linda Quiney); education of missionary physicians (Ruth Compton Brouwer); experiences of women engineering students at the University of Toronto (Ruby Heap and Ellen Scheinberg); women law students (Jean McKenzie Leiper); Ontario dental hygienists (Tracey Adams); female academics in history and physics (Alison Prentice); and students in medicine, engineering, and dentistry at the University of Toronto (Wyn Millar, Ruby Heap, and Bob Gidney).

Taken as a whole, the essays take a properly critical approach to the study of professions as 'historically and culturally contingent' (2). However, there is insufficient attention to theorizing power (except for gender relations, which are amply covered). The drive for professional status is, at one level, a bid for power. For the bid to succeed, the power aspect has to be concealed. The knowledge that underlies the profession must be made to appear natural, inevitable, objective, scientific, and neutral. Gidney maintains that the university, with 'its commitment to dispassionate analysis and critique' (30), destabilizes professions by forcing them to re-examine existing assumptions and practices. The opposite also happens. The hidden curriculum is present in the classroom, as well as in the field. A good example is journalism. Its professional status rests on the claim that journalists do not exercise power, but rather report on those who do. When it becomes obvious that reporters, either individually or in their collective capacity, shape stories and filter information – that is...