about Dall’Alba article

In general, if I understood correctly, Dall’Alba talks about transition & transformation from school to professional level. She reconsidered the process of professional education not just as a collection of “right” knowledge, but as a process of “becoming” a professional. It takes time for a new college graduate to adapt a new culture and an organizational environment where new graduates are going to work. The author discusses this transformation from a “school-boy/girl” to a professional from epistemological and ontological perspective. She said that we need more than knowledge in particular field (gained in school), we need skills –how to become a professional.
Dall’Alba names a few features, which explain when aspiring professionals (after school) become a practicing professionals: “The features include: continuity over time with change in ways of being professionals; possibilities in the ways we can be with constraints on those possibilities; openness in taking up possibilities with resistance to doing so; and
individuals who are becoming professionals with others involved in that process” (p.38).
This article brought to my mind some thoughts about differences between features of novices and experts. It takes time for a novice to become an expert, so, in the same way, talking about Dall’Alba article, it takes time to transform and be accepted by professionals. This transformation is not always easy, and to say the true - it is hard time for many graduates.
Last Spring 2010 semester I took a S. Brophy’s class here at ENE department. He gave as a very interesting article (Jonassen et al., 2006) about attitudes of expert/professional engineers towards their new colleagues (novices after graduation). I think that Dall’Alba is trying to describe the same problem but from the different perspective. Jonassen’s study included more than 100 participants, which were engineers with different background and working experience. The main purpose of this study was to discover how and why the problem-solving in classrooms is different compare to the problem-solving in the real workplace. The problem is that all problems that are solved in the class are well-defined. Students are expected to present the only one “right” decision of the problem. On the other hand, all tasks in the real workplace usually are ill-defined; there is not a “right” decision; for any particular situation many equivalent choices can co-exist. On the other hand - skilled engineers usually refer to the previous experience in problem-solving. But novices –they don’t have this “previous experience” yet. Theoretical and conceptual knowledge are important, but not dominant or prevailing. Often engineers are involved in absolutely-not-engineering activities, like: how to stay inside of the budget, or “how to keep the client happy”, and how to earn money on the project. Many engineers noticed that new graduates have to work 1- 3 years to become “real” engineers.
I had a similar experience in the past. After my MS graduation in Russia (almost fifteen years ago) I worked as an engineer-technologist on the factory, which produced microchips. My first year was very frustrating, I felt like my college knowledge were not connected to the real life and workplace. At the first week of my employment a couple of “old” engineers took me on the floor and showed me equipment and machines, which produced microchips. I had no idea what those engineers are talking about. I felt like I am a newborn, and as a result of my “newborness” some jokes about my “professionalism” were produced by the ‘old’ engineers. (to say the true- it was very unpleasant). It took almost two years to figure out what I have to do and what I was responsible for. Now I understand why it was so difficult: because my college experience to solve well- defined problems was insufficient for ill-defined tasks in the real workplace.
So, for me, the main idea of Dall’Alba article is: professional education has problems and we need to do something about that because the transition from a school to a real working place is not easy for many graduates.

I hope it is enough for today, see all of you in class…………

References:
Jonassen, D.H., Strobel, J. & Lee, C.B. (2006). Everyday Problem Solving in Engineering: Lessons for Engineering Educators. Journal of Engineering Education; Vol. 95 (2) ProQuest Education Journals.