Workplace affordances facilitating students’ workplace learning. A qualitative exploration

To contribute to the awareness of supporting workplace learning, the aim of this empirical study is to operationalise how students are invited to learn at workplaces. More specifically, this study explores workplace affordances that facilitate student physiotherapists’ and student nurses’ learning. The term affordances is used to refer to all activities, direct and indirect interactions in which students are engaged while learning at workplaces (Billett, 2001). The qualitative research method enabled the researchers to identify affordances that are provided at workplaces to support students’ learning. We specifically focus on affordances in students’ work activities in interaction with their supervisors, and other colleagues. Seven students and their supervisors were observed during a twenty-week internship experience at workplaces in physiotherapy and nursing. First, the researchers familiarized their selves with the raw data by means of reading through multiple interview transcripts and observational field notes. A sub-set of data was selected to start exploring and describing the data (Brooks & King, 2014). Explanation of the data involved all authors and was an iterative process of multiple cycles of organising, discussing, and interpreting data to allow a preliminary understanding of our results (Miles et al., 2019). In the round table session, we plan to discuss these preliminary results. Questions will structure the discussion during the session. Participants are invited to help to discuss emerging themes and relations in our work in progress.