Increased attention is being focused on the need for interprofessional collaboration (IPC) between professional actors, in various fields, to improve the quality of services. This has resulted in a widespread growth of interprofessional educational programmes (IPE) meeting such needs across, within, and beyond the health and social care sectors (Barr, Gray, Helme, Low & Reeves 2016). The current paper presents results from the qualitative parts of a study researching students’ learning in an interprofessional educational project, INTERACT[1], supporting students’ competencies in interprofessional collaboration about and with children. This may prove to be of particular importance in recent times, seeing the COVID 19- pandemic with its implications for the everyday lives of children and youth as a backdrop. Moreover, transformations towards post- industrial societies impact not only the composition of professional groups, but also the relations between different professional groups and their roles in society (Parding, Bellini, and Maestripieri 2021).

In modern welfare states, such as Norway, various public services and professional practitioners are involved in children’s lives. All children will interact with professional actors through their everyday lives in kindergarten, schools, general health services etc. Some children will also interact with professionals in more specialised services such as specialised health care settings or children’s welfare services. Thus, offering children and their families comprehensive support when it comes to education, health, and social welfare requires collaboration and mutual understanding among the professional actors involved. INTERACT is an IPE- programme involving undergraduate students from study programmes within and across education, health and social care at Oslo Metropolitan university, Norway. By contributing to better collaboration among professional practitioners meeting with children and families, INTERACT aims at strengthening the hope among the students as well as among children/families for future professional practitioners to offer better services.

In the field of IPE there is a demand for more qualitative and mixed- methods research exploring the processes involved in IPE to understand its “whys” and “hows” (Lawn 2016). This paper contributes by presenting research exploring processes by which students participating in INTERACT negotiate their positions and the relevance of their emerging professional knowledge in the groups. IPE is commonly defined as: 'occasions when members or students of two or more professions learn with, from and about each other to improve collaboration and the quality of care and services' (Statement of Purpose CAIPE 2016). Thus, a key feature of IPE is the social dimension of the learning situation where learners in IPE create knowledge through social interactions with others. Theoretically, the study presented in this paper draws on a sociocultural understanding of learning in which learning necessitates both personal and social transformation (Packer & Goicoechea, 2000). Moreover, positioning theory (Davies & Harré, 1990; Harré & Langenhove, 1999; Potter & Wetherell, 1987) was used as analytic tool in the analysis of the study’s interview data.

The paper’s attention to processes involved in students’ meaning making in IPE may be of particular importance to developers of such programmes. Still, the scope of this article ought to be of general interest for professionals within Higher Education who are interested in processes of learning and teaching in HE. This paper presents the results of a rich contextualised analysis of students’ meaning making processes in an IPE- programme focusing on interprofessional collaboration with and about children. This situates the study, at the same time as it makes it possible for others to understand the specifics of the programme and draw parallels to own educational settings. Relationships between locally situated studies and the international is something to be further explored through discussions in Yerevan.

[1] Interprofessional Interaction with Children and Youth

The research project this paper draws on has a mixed methods research design comprising survey- and interview data. This paper presents an aspect of the qualitative part. 15 students who participated in INTERACT were interviewed in exploratory semi- structured interviews focusing on pre-group preparations, group work and post-group experiences. The audio- recorded interviews were fully transcribed and analysed according to steps in qualitative analyses of interview data focusing on meaning construction within each interview as well as on patters developed by reading across the material (Haavind 2000). The process of data analysis was also inspired by a hermeneutic interpretive process where the analysis shifted between empirical driven interpretations and concepts given by the theoretical framework. The results of the analysis should be understood in their contexts. Still, the systematically produced understandings of the processes involved in the students’ meaning making in INTERACT ought to be useful also to scholars interested in learning and teaching outside of this context. Results of contextualized analyses of interactions may open up for analytic perspectives of interest also in other contexts.

Results of the study highlight the importance of providing sufficient scaffolding both in advance of, and during, the delivery of IPE to students across a broad range of disciplines. In our study we see that the students’ discursive constructions of what INTERACT is about is vital for their meaning- making and thus for their contributions in the interprofessional learning groups (IPL). The students’ discursive initiatives in the groups seem closely linked to knowledge acquired through participation in their respective study programs. Students moreover appear to position themselves relative to each other based on their discursive constructions of ‘children’ and negotiate the relevance of their emerging professional knowledge on these grounds. This affected how, and with what, the various students participated in the IPL- groups.

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