This paper focuses on the organizing and structuring of knowledge in professional education in DK. It specifically examines Nursing Education and the consequences of the increasing orientation towards intellectual ‘academization’ with emphasis on the difficulties of obtaining coherence within curriculum knowledge organization

The paper introduces a conceptual framework for curriculum differentiation and for the study of knowledge transformation processes in professional education.

During the past twenty years two major trends have influenced professional education in many parts of the world… including DK. One is an academization process involving higher skills in theorizing. The other trend is an increasing orientation towards external market demands, often referred to as regionalization (Bernstein 2000), possibly leading to what Barnett has termed ‘operationalism’ (Barnett 1994). In other words where the universities becoming a function of society rather than being a university in society. In some ways the two trends are contradictory, because such operationalism’ may result in focusing too heavily on applied knowledge forms and less on the theoretical and paradigmatic aspects of knowledge – ‘knowing how ’before ‘knowing why’.

In the rush to become an independent profession, nursing education in DK has strived for academization (Eriksen 2005), while still claiming to master the craft of nursing. But, from a ‘sociology of knowledge’ point of view, the question of coherence in the various knowledge forms becomes crucial, as such coherence determines the ability of nursing students to combine both craft and experiential knowledge with explicit theoretical and academic knowledge.  Although not insurmountable, the span from craft to academic seems extremely challenging.  

If Bernstein’s works of knowledge structures and later theories of Muller and Maton are applied, it is possible to illuminate where such difficulties arise (Muller 2007). With the emphasis on ‘semantic gravity’ and ‘semantic density’ weak semantic connectivity between propositions and between concepts can be identified and semantic gaps defined (Maton 2014, Maton 2013) This not only applies to how knowledge is recontextualised into the curriculum, but also how various knowledge forms are expected to be integrated and learnt (Kolb 1984).

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