The content of professional development shouldn’t be restricted to the technical or instrumental dimensions of handling the ‘how’-questions (Hargreaves, 1995; Kelchtermans, 2023). In particular professional practices that are deeply relational, like for example those of medical doctors or teachers, also involve moral challenges, conflicting interests and power issues, all of which don’t leave the professionals involved emotionally indifferent. Preparing those professionals for the emotional dimension in their job is therefore of paramount importance. This is for example reflected in the CanMedsroles, an internationally accepted framework to structure the medical education curriculum that explicitly acknowledges and values the competency of dealing with the emotional dimension of the profession (CanMEDS // Guide). In this paper we critically reflect on more than a decade of a particular narrative pedagogy in medical education aimed at facilitating students’ learning from emotional experiences. More in particular, medical undergraduate students were required as part of the portfolio assignments for their final internship, to produce a reflective vignette on an emotionally significant experience (critical incident technique). The individual reflective accounts were used as starting points for collective sharing and unpacking of the narratives in structured meetings with peers (up to 100 participants at the time) and facilitated by two senior staff members with complementary expertise (one medical, the other educational). We reflectively reconstruct the rationale behind the pedagogical set up (setting, preparation, enactment of the facilitation) and identify the critical conditions determining its meaningfulness and learning potential. Our data collection and analysis encompassed individual autobiographical reflection by as well as a duo-interview of the facilitators, portfolio vignettes as well as feedback from the participating students. The findings reveal the importance of balancing individual reflection as well as collective narrative sharing, the collegial interplay of the complementary competencies of both facilitators, the interactive unpacking of the shared narratives by both embracing and acknowledging the experiences in the narrative accounts, while at the same time offering different lenses or perspectives to understand or re-interpret them. Our findings show how the ethical, emotional, political and technical aspects are closely intertwined in their constitution of the professional practice. We conclude that the envisaged professional learning in education for the professions (i.e. medical education) should not be conceptualized in terms of isolated or juxtaposed dimensions, but rather addressed in its complex entanglement.

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