This paper is a progress report of my research, as I write the dissertation of my practitioner-research masters degree programme, informed by my work situation. I currently have the opportunity to return to work I left in the 1990s, teaching on professional education courses for nurses and healthcare practitioners (I am a qualified nurse with experience of managing acute psychiatric units in severalUKhospitals). The opportunity has arisen because I work as an educational services provider in a range of countries with a small consultancy business, offering professional advice and support to nurse and healthcare professional educators in higher degree settings, as well as to professional teacher educators. I am therefore involved in various debates about continuing professional education (CPD), and am especially interested in issues of assessing quality in professional practices. This now becomes the topic for my dissertation.

Because of my background and personal and professional values, I believe that services such as nursing and teaching should be conducted with the service user (patient or student) in mind (e.g. see Manley et al., 2011 writing about Nursing Standard D: ‘Person-centred care’). Assessing the quality of professional practices should focus on whether the practitioner is providing a service that will benefit the client, and assessment of quality of professional education practices should focus on whether the educator is helping the practitioner to achieve these goals. I believe therefore that contemporary debates about the need for practitioners to evaluate their practices, as proposed by Boyer (1990) (for teaching) and Benner (2010) (for nursing), are core to the realization of these values, as are debates about the need for whole organizational development, where egalitarian relationships are promoted to encourage all to explain how they hold themselves accountable for their work (see the literatures of situated learning and whole organizational learning, e.g. Brown and Duguid, 2000; Lave and Wenger, 1991; Senge, 1990; Wenger, 1999).

However, I frequently perceive slippage between the public rhetoric of professional educators and their everyday discourses and practices in relation to student nurses and teachers. I have gathered extensive interview data that shows the following contradictions, all of which reinforce the traditional theory-practice divide:

• While there is considerable agreement about the need for innovative thinking for improving practices, especially through adopting service-user perspectives (see McNiff, 2013), there appears to be less agreement about the need for research approaches involving values-based assessment criteria and standards of judgement, or the willingness to apply them.
• Power-constituted discourses of ‘them’ and ‘us’ are perpetuated through identifying ‘practitioners’ and ‘academics’ as separate realms of experience and discourse.
• ‘Nursing / teaching practice’ (done by ‘practitioners’) is perceived as about practical work, whereas ‘research’ and ‘theory generation’ are perceived as the province of higher education educators.
• Assessment practices often use traditional academic criteria rather than practice-based criteria that show the realization of the practitioner’s values as they emerge in practice as dynamic client-centred criteria and standards of judgement (McNiff, 2013).

My data archive contains many manifestations of these contradictions, as follows.

Benner, P. (2010) Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass/Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. New Jersey, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Brown, J. S. and Duguid, P. (2000) The Social Life of Information. Boston, Harvard Business School Press. Elliott, J. (1991) Action Research for Educational Change. Buckingham, Open University Press. Habermas, J. (1976) Legitimation Crisis. Boston, Beacon. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Manley, K. et al (2011) Person-centred care: Principle of Nursing Practice D. Nursing Standard, 25, 31, 35–37. Retrieved 30. 1.2013 from http://www.rcn.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/377365/Nursing_Standard_Principle_D_April11_560KB.pdf McNiff, J. (2013) Action Research: Principles and Practice (third edition). Abingdon, Routledge. Senge, P. (1990) The Fifth Discipline. New York, Doubleday. Wenger, E. (1999) Communities of Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press