Exploring the emotional landscapes of placement learning in occupational therapy education.

This thesis is an account of a research project which explored how 3rd year occupational therapy students negotiate the emotional aspects of their placement learning, an integral part of their university course. The project involved students in producing creative writing that would illuminate a previously unheard/hidden aspect of their learning.The research was based on a wide ranging literature review of emotional labour in health and social care work and a poststructuralist critique of the concept of emotion. The research employed a set of four creative writing groups with student participants who produced stories and poems about their placement experiences. The writing, the group discussions and the one to one conversations based on the writing produced were analysed with poststructuralist and narrative theory. The students' stories reveal the role of emotion management as part of the 'technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988) as they engage with the discourses of professionalism in the health and social care environment.The student participants' work illustrates a constantly changing, complex and sometimes contradictory set of professional discourses which they navigate to perform the professional. Their creative writing is an evocation of their placement learning experience rather than a re-creation, one that provokes the reader to feel what aspects of their placement were like. The stories and poems reveal the impact of place, people and practices on their feelings and emotional expression/management as they constitute themselves as professional occupational therapists. The poststructuralist epistemology and creative research methodology adds a new dimension to the debate about the nature and role of emotional labour within health and social care.