Fiction is understood to have unique qualities that emotionally engage the reader, making it suitable as a didactic tool in medical education to help students prepare for the emotional aspects of their future profession. To date, however, little is known about the processes through which talking about fiction, film or poetry can help medical students to co-construct emotional reactions as affective stances and how that might contribute to their professional development.

Using a discursive psychology approach, video recordings from 36 fiction seminars collected from 2016 to 2018 were analysed regarding how affective stances related to reading were constructed by medical students. The findings illustrate how students use subject–object relations to account for affective stances, meaning that they attribute their emotional reaction either to an aspect of the book (object-side explanations), or to personal characteristics (subject-side explanations). The way students enact and account for their affective stances can provide opportunities for tutors to create teachable moments for the students. This study contributes to discursive psychology and reader-response research, as well as medical education research.

Den praktiska ämnesdidaktik som projektet fokuserat på var en virtuell praktik, en lärarledd simuleringsundervisning med fem virtuella elever. Träningen på att undervisa de virtuella eleverna följdes av återkoppling som gavs av en ämnesdidaktiker i historia och en i samhällskunskap. Den virtuella praktiken bakades in som ett obligatoriskt moment i två campusförlagda kurser för blivande ämneslärare, i historia respektive samhällskunskap.

Vocational training programmes in higher education encompass, as learning objectives, the development of relational skills and professional judgement, especially in welfare professions such as policing, teaching and healthcare, where know-how about managing close contact with people is a prerequisite. Based on a cross-professional analysis, the current article explores how students from three different professional education programmes – teacher education, police training and medical education – construct professional judgement in group discussions and interviews. The results show that participants construct professional judgement as relationships between three different dimensions: personal ethics, educational standards, and professional practice. When discussing professional dilemmas, students utilise these three different dimensions to argue for the moral or ethical soundness of their choices. The results of the study shed light on the importance of providing students with opportunities to reflect openly on professional judgement in different ways, even though such reflections may not always be formally assessed. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates similarities between the three programmes that we analysed, as well as similarities in students’ reflections regarding essential aspects of the professions.

Vuxna andraspråksinlärare talar ofta språket med en brytning, men det behöver inte betyda att det är svårt att förstå talaren. För att undvika missförstånd i kommunikation är ett begripligt uttal nödvändigt. Därför är explicit uttalsundervisning viktigt. Många lärare menar att det är svårt att undervisa i uttal och lägger därför mera tid på andra moment i sin undervisning. Efter att ha fått mera kunskap och didaktiska verktyg, i ett samarbete mellan lärare och forskare i ett ULF-projekt, har lärare nu fått en ny insikt om viken av uttalsundervisning och integrerar det i sin undervisning på olika nivåer. De menar också att eleverna fått en ökad medvetenhet och förståelse för vikten av ett förståeligt uttal vilket kommer att bidra till ett bättre och tydligare uttal.