Students’ identities and professional becoming is at the centre of the study, as the context and anchor for how meaning-making is explored. Identity is understood as something people do and negotiate in relation to the social world they participate in, not something they statically have (Holland et al., 1998; Wenger, 1998). Thus, it is actively constructed and contested through participation in different contexts, cultures, and interactions. At its core, identity is inseparable from belonging and recognition – from oneself and others – as it is a process of negotiating meaning and membership in response to other people, contexts, and personal beliefs (Gadot & Segev, 2025; Wenger, 1998).

Becoming foregrounds the open-ended nature of identity and appears especially valuable in the context of students’ professional identities (Dahl, 2020; Dall’Alba, 2009; Sanna et al., 2026). By using the term ‘professional becoming’ it emphasises the underlying assumption that people are neither made up of distinct, separable identities that they switch between, nor that there is an end point where people statically are professionals (Dall’Alba, 2009).

Instead, this highlights that identity is lifelong and context dependent and that different aspects of people’s identities are made relevant or useful in different contexts. Students’ professional becoming, then, is not only related to their instrumental knowledge and skills, nor the formal certifications they receive upon graduation, it also relates to their identification with, commitment and feelings of belonging to, and recognition by their professional field, as well as their understandings of the culture, norms, and expectations of this profession (Park & Hong, 2022).

Meaning-making is approached as situated work where students construct if and how an experience is meaningful in relation to, in this context, their professional becoming, learning and competence. Building on Wenger (1998), learning becomes an ongoing interplay between active participation in social practices, and reification – the process of objectifying meaning in artefacts, concepts, stories or routines. Meaning then is not only negotiated in social interactions with others but also in relation to cultural contexts, and what is communicated as valued within the given context (Dahl, 2020; Peach et al., 2025; Wenger, 1998). Communities of practice demonstrates the social component of meaning-making and learning as groups share interests and practices, as well as associated expectations and norms for what counts as participation and legitimate, competent membership (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Salo et al., 2024; Wenger, 1998). However, people do not only partake in single, isolated communities of practice, but are constantly moving between such communities across landscapes of practices (Salo et al., 2024; Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2014). As each community has their own norms, expectations and understandings of what counts as competent participation which must be continuously negotiated across the landscape. Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner (2014) employ knowledgeability to capture how people navigate these landscapes, how they relate to practices and communities they are not fully a part of, how they learn what matters where, and how they position themselves in relation to different expectations.

Furthermore, Billett (2001) emphasises how learning opportunities are co-produced through affordances – the activities, interactions, guidance and access – and individual engagement, agency, and interpretations. Learning and meaning-making, then, are positioned as co-participation dependent on how social practices invite participation and how individuals choose to engage (Bernhard et al., 2026; Billett, 2001). Thus, experiences can become meaningful through active interpretive work by noticing what is expected of them, interpreting what is valued participation in that context, and making sense of feedback or recognition (or the absence of it) as indicators of competent participation. Affordances are, however, neither neutral nor equally distributed, they are shaped by norms and judgement related to trust and readiness, affecting who is granted access (Billett, 2001; Chue & Billett, 2024). Similarly, the act of meaning-making is largely contingent on individual engagement, as people must invest effort, take initiative and connect what happens to their goals or the overarching context.

Within WIL-research, a recurring assumption is that participation in WIL-related experiences is not by itself a guarantee for learning as students often struggle to interpret and find meaning in what ‘counts’ as competence, what is valued, and how different experiences may connect to who they are becoming (Areskoug Josefsson et al., 2025; Björck & Willermark, 2024). Within the sociocultural perspective there is not a distinction between learning and participation per se, thus in this study this claim of experience not being ‘enough’ relates to articulating and recognising said learning. A substantial amount of research underscores the importance of structured opportunities for reflection to support students’ recognising their learning. This becomes especially relevant in light of recent arguments that WIL should be understood as a phenomenon rather than a fixed set of practices as students’ professional learning or meaning-making cannot be assumed to automatically follow from participation in activities labelled as WIL (Areskoug Josefsson et al., 2025). Ferns et al. (2025) stress that WIL inherently requires intentional integration across settings, and that the key challenge is supporting students’ sensemaking across contexts. Similarly, Winchester-Seeto and Rowe (2019) demonstrate how facilitated debriefing may aid students’ reflections and meaning-making, and help them construct relevance from their experiences for learning and professional becoming. However, they also foreground encouraging autonomous, self-directed learners and avoiding over-reliance on instructor-led approaches. Deliberate feedback structures, for instance ‘plan-do-review’ cycles, have in turn been suggested to strengthen these feedback and reflection opportunities (Peach et al., 2014). Similarly, ePortfolio-based approaches are also frequently framed as ways for students not only to curate and articulate their competencies for employers, but as reflective processes that help them acknowledge, name, and legitimate their skills and experiences for themselves (Carter, 2021).

Across the literature, authenticity, engagement, reflection, and meaning-making are repeatedly highlighted as conditions for transferable knowledge and professional becoming (Areskoug Josefsson et al., 2025; Jackson & Dean, 2023). Relatedly, the importance of purposeful support before, during, and after WIL-activities, like structured reflection and feedback activities, is continuously emphasised for students’ professional learning (Ferns et al., 2025; Winchester-Seeto & Rowe, 2019). Yet feedback and reflection have also been topics of contention within WIL, as students may have different opportunities for receiving feedback and meaningfully reflect over their experiences (Peach et al., 2014).

The study is situated at a Norwegian university. Norwegian HE is an egalitarian system, predominantly publicly funded, offering both discipline-based and profession-based programmes, and, of relevance for this study, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and five-year integrated master’s programmes (Sandsør et al., 2021). Admission to study programmes is regulated through a national system largely based on grade point averages from upper secondary education (Samordna opptak [NUCAS], 2025). The distinction between profession-based programmes leading toward specific occupational titles or formal authorisation, such as teaching or engineering, and disciplinary programmes, like informatics or pedagogy, is very prevalent in the Norwegian HE system. In the context of this study, this seems particularly relevant as the participants from the profession-based programmes have work placement embedded in their degrees, whereas the discipline-programmes do not.

The study employs a qualitative design with individual semi-structured interviews to explore how students construct meaning for their professional becoming across diverse contexts and experiences, including how they interpret and legitimise these experiences. Semi-structured interviews were chosen as the method for data collection because it enables detailed attention to the participants’ reflections and accounts, allowing for a participant-driven design, which appeared fitting for this study and its aims. The interviews were conducted during the autumn semester of 2022 with 24 students across four different programmes at the university: bachelor’s in pedagogy, bachelor’s in informatics, five-year integrated master’s in teacher education, and five-year integrated master’s in cybernetics and robotics engineering. These four programmes were chosen to represent the distinction between discipline and profession-based programmes – with the two former representing discipline-based programmes and the latter being profession-based programmes – as well as representing both STEM and humanities and social science (HSS) programmes.

Participants were recruited through faculty who distributed a digital sign-up form and information about the project, creating a largely self-selected sample based on voluntary participation (Sterba & Foster, 2008). The recruitment and sampling strategy was not aimed at statistical representativeness, but rather recruiting students who could offer rich descriptions of experiences across different contexts. The decision to interview first- and final-year students was grounded in an interest to access the early anticipatory accounts of first-year students, as well as the final-year students’ retrospective reflections. As the first-year students were interviewed first, within their first couple of weeks at university, the interview guide was slightly adjusted before interviewing final-year students to allow for exploring prevalent topics brought up by the first-year students that were not originally included. For both groups, the interviews asked questions such as “When do you most feel like a [e.g., engineer]?” and “In what ways has your study programme/future profession become relevant in everyday situations?”. Additionally, the final-year students received questions explicitly asking about the role of their student organisations in their university lives due to it being brought up by many of the first-year students.

Interviews lasted 45-130 minutes and were audio-recorded. Though some variation in length, this does not directly translate to interview quality, and all interviews contribute to the findings. The variation can instead be attributed to the participants’ engagement with the topic and general talkativeness. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, removing all identifying details to ensure anonymity and confidentiality, and the study follows established ethical guidelines, such as voluntary participation and informed consent, as well as the data being handled in accordance with data protection guidelines. The project was reviewed and approved by the Norwegian Agency of Shared Services in Education and Research (SIKT).

The sample consists of 24 students, 12 first-year and 12 final-year students, 11 women and 13 men, from the four mentioned programmes. The participants ages range from 19 years old to mid-thirties, and they have varied educational and work backgrounds as some have gone directly from upper secondary school into a university degree, some have taken a year (or more) off to work, go to folk high school or complete military service, and some have completed or dropped out of other degrees before enrolling in their current one. Thus, the participants represent many different backgrounds and perspectives that can support the study’s multivocality and nuanced discussions (Tracy, 2010).

Interview transcripts were analysed inspired by a reflexive thematic analysis approach, where themes are understood as patterned meanings developed through active interpretive engagement with the data (Braun & Clarke, 2006). Progressing through the phases of familiarisation with the data, coding, theme development, review and refinement, and the final articulation of themes in relation to the research questions, the coding and result presentation have remained primarily inductive and close to the participants’ accounts. Although the author conducted the interviews and performed the analysis, the research process was still influenced by the surrounding research environment and colleagues functioning as ‘critical friends’ offering opportunities for discussions, reflection, and developing the analysis and findings (Costa & Kallick, 1993).

Qualitative interviews can be regarded as dialogic spaces where meaning and accounts are co-constructed between the interviewer and the participants. They also have the potential to allow participants to organise and reflect upon experiences, make connections, and retrospectively acknowledge aspects they were not explicitly aware of previously due to the open nature of questions and encouragement to talk freely (Nardon et al., 2021; Pessoa et al., 2019; Way et al., 2015). Although the interviews were not designed as reflective pedagogical interventions nor reflexive or dialogic interviews, in retrospect after the analysis one can draw parallels between the accounts and reflections in the data material and the aims of such reflective pedagogical interventions. Scholars, however, underscore that dialogic interviews can elicit participant self-reflexivity and facilitate reflection influencing how they think about their experiences – even when this was not pre-intended. In the context of WIL, the interviews can be positioned as a structured opportunity for reflection, which will be elaborated on in the discussion section.

The first theme illustrates how students appear to construct meaning for their professional becoming through enacting their distinct disciplinary or professional competence in contexts they feel require it. In turn, acting in ways that they can recognise or articulate as in line with expectations for their future professional roles seem to contribute making their competence and professional becoming recognisable. Throughout the interviews the participants describe professional becoming as something they cannot simply think or read themselves to achieve, but that they make sense of who they are becoming through what they do. Opportunities for such enactment is, however, not limited to formal initiatives, according to the participants, although many of them seemingly hold these experiences in high regard.

One of the first-year cybernetics students says the following with regards to professional enactment within the formal structures of the university:

This student emphasises how connecting theory to practice is important for his professional becoming and making sense of theory, especially related to seeing that there is a ‘purpose’ to it. Through participating in course activities enabling him to reify abstract theoretical concepts into something he can use physically, his competence and knowledge appear to be experienced as professionally relevant. Accordingly, he seems to be able to align his performance in these contexts with what is expected of a future engineer, forming a bridge between theory and (professional) practice.

In contrast to this positive perspective by the engineering student, one of the first-year pedagogy students reflects on the formal opportunities for acting out his future professional role within his programme when he explains:

The student provides a somewhat bleak perspective on the coming three years, as he appears to not think he will be able to recognise himself as a pedagogue by the end of his degree. As the first-year students were interviewed within their first month of their degree, their perspectives may change over the next three years, however, the previous engineering student was also interviewed within his first weeks at the university, and he had already gotten a positive impression of such opportunities within his course. Still, the pedagogy student also acknowledges that if he were to get authentic opportunities to act out his pedagogical competence, that may aid him in his professional becoming as it facilitates him feeling worthy of a title and legitimised as a professional.

Formal work placement is not a part of the bachelor’s in pedagogy, nor the bachelor’s degree in informatics, but it is an inherent aspect of the integrated master’s degree in teacher’s education. The integrated master’s in cybernetics and robotics engineering also has a work experience requirement, although not ‘traditional’ work placement like the teacher’s education. Most participants discussed work placement as either highly influential for their professional becoming – the teacher and engineering students – or something they really missed in their programme – the informatics and pedagogy students. One of the fifth-year teacher students says:

As with most of the teacher and engineering students, this participant positions work placement as valuable for her identification as a teacher and for constructing meaning in her experiences. She describes how work placement has provided an opportunity for understanding and enacting the theory she has learned through her courses, as well as for recognising the theory as meaningful for her professional becoming. Telling how once she finished work placement she felt like she had completed everything teacher-related in her degree, she demonstrates how (repeated) meaningful enactment and participation can contribute to professional becoming and feeling competent and secure in their professional role.

Similarly, one of the third-year pedagogy students who does not have any formal work placement his programme reflects upon how his part-time work has shaped him as a pedagogue and contributed to his professional becoming, saying:

This third-year student seems to confirm some of the fears presented by the previously quoted first-year pedagogy student as he claims to have had few meaningful moments related to his professional becoming within the formal realms of his degree. Rather, he points to how his part-time work as a martial arts instructor enabled him to act out and use knowledge and skills he can trace back to his degree. When he says that he never saw himself as a leader previously, it is possible to interpret him as not only experiencing that the part-time work has provided a structure for meaning-making in relation to his degree, but also that he felt secure and confident to take on this position because of the competence acquired through his programme. He does not dismiss the study programme entirely in relation to his professional becoming, but he seems to see it as a foundation for the enactment that he must find opportunities for in other contexts – demonstrating how meaning-making is contingent on students’ interpretations and initiative.

Another context repeatedly highlighted as meaningful by the STEM students is the student organisations. These organisations have a prevalent role within the STEM programmes and their associated campus at the university, whereas they are not as prominent within HSS environments. Rather, many of the HSS students express a longing for student organisations that they can be more involved in. One of the fifth-year cybernetics students explains:

The student seems to place volunteering in the student organisations as a high-affordance site for enacting his professional role and using his knowledge practically to “see the bigger picture”. He shows how partaking in this organisation, which he positions as an authentic ‘simulation’ of being a professional engineer, makes it possible to recognise that he is “good enough”. He also emphasises how students have agency when saying that if you want to do something you can, underscoring how learning is co-produced between affordances and individual engagement. As the HSS students do not have student organisations in their everyday practices to the same degree as the STEM students, this may reflect different opportunities for meaning-making and professional becoming within the university.

Relatedly, a first-year informatics student reflects upon his emotions when not getting into any of the committees in the student organisation¹, expanding on the social value of student organisations:

This quote does not only highlight the perceived social value of student organisations within the STEM programmes, it also emphasises how they seem to hold some professional and academic value as the student says he wanted to invest time and energy into his coursework to have something to ‘show for’ during the time he was not a part of the student organisation. When faced with exclusion from such an opportunity for community and acting out his disciplinary competence, he appears to have reoriented his focus to another task he deemed authentic and relevant for his professional becoming.

Another fifth-year cybernetics student elaborates on how different types of student organisations serve as opportunities for trying out their professional and disciplinary competencies. He says:

This, again, reiterates the prominent role of student organisations in STEM students’ everyday lives, as the participant says that “all” his friends are a part of these organisations. At the same time, he explains the different types of student organisations where the technical organisations appear to be centred around acting out professional competence and putting theory into practice, whereas other kinds may be focused on social connection. As he likens his learning in the student organisation to what he has learnt during his degree, he seems to position the programme as a formal anchor for his professional becoming, while the student organisation appears more aligned with working life and life post-graduation. Thus, participating in the student organisation makes his professional becoming more intelligible, and meaning-making seems to arise from both practice and belonging in these contexts.

Student organisations evidently take up a lot of the everyday lives of the STEM students partaking in this study, and in the interviews it becomes apparent that the HSS students draw on other kinds of experiences within their everyday lives. This becomes particularly salient with the pedagogy students as they do not have any formal work placement embedded into their degree either. One of the third-year pedagogy student reflects upon several experiences in her daily life where she has been able to act out her role as a pedagogue in informal settings, such as visiting a friend’s family in another country and social gatherings with her own extended family:

The participant demonstrates how professional becoming can be recognised in seemingly mundane interactions. Suggesting that the ‘pedagogue in her’ automatically switches on when she is in the presence of children appears to reflect that this identity is embodied and habitual – even if she does not explicitly think about acting in a certain way because she studies pedagogy. Thus, the meaning she constructs from these experiences and the relevance she identifies for her professional becoming does not hinge on external recognition or expectations of what a pedagogue is supposed to do from others but appears dependent on her own retrospective interpretation of how a pedagogue should act. She also implies that formal work experience may not be the end all be all of her professional becoming, saying that although she has had summer jobs, it is through interactions with children in her everyday life that she is able to truly recognise her pedagogical competence.

When students find themselves in contexts and communities that require their professional judgement and they experience that they can partake in a proper manner, it appears to make their competence more recognisable and tangible. Experiences where theory can be ‘tested’, connected to concrete consequences, and used for a purpose is repeatedly underscored as important for experiencing authenticity. However, it is important to note that these competencies are not something the students are always explicitly cognisant of but through interpreting what is asked of them and (re)acting they are able to recognise their professional becoming either in-action or retrospectively.

Where the former theme illustrates how the participants can recognise their professional becoming and construct meaning through enacting their competence in various contexts, this theme foregrounds how that competence seems to become legible through recognition and feedback. Across the interviews, professional becoming is repeatedly argued to be difficult to articulate and become aware of strictly through self-reflection, and the students seem to actively seek out and interpret feedback and recognition as benchmarks for whether they are ‘good enough’ across various contexts. Thus, recognition and feedback become not only encouragement or assessments but also interpretive resources for meaning-making and reconstructing ambiguous experiences into valuable understandings of one’s professional becoming. Many of the participants specifically seem to find formal assessments and feedback from the university insufficient, forcing them to seek alternative reference points.

In this first quote, a first-year pedagogy student shares his reflections related to what the university communicates, or does not communicate, in relation to expectations of students’ professional becoming. He says:

The student appears to put most – if not all – of the responsibility of identifying professional trajectories on the university. He highlights how meaning-making can falter when students experience the institutional contexts as providing little clues to what is expected of them, while he can also be interpreted to undermine the active role that the students have in their own learning and identity constructions. A first-year pedagogy student who has previously completed a degree in social work expands on this lack of clarity from a slightly different angle:

Both of these first-year pedagogy students have previously studied something else, where they first changed programmes after a year, and the latter has completed a different degree already. While the first student appears to put most of the responsibility onto the university, the second pedagogy student frames it differently, underscoring how the lack of ‘confirmation’ has affected her confidence and reflects upon how – or whether or not – the university and the programmes are capable of affording the opportunities she would need to feel competent as a professional. One could interpret this as the student thinking the university is not able to provide this confirmation because she would need to enter the workforce to be able to gain that in action-confidence, but she could also align more with the first-year student arguing that the university offer too little opportunities for feedback and recognition, which in turn leads to her not feeling confident in her professional competence.

A fifth-year cybernetics student elaborates on the feedback offered by the university and his study programme, saying:

This quote further reinforces how students, across different programmes, experience institutional assessments and communication as weak signals of their competence and professional becoming. Through approved/not approved assessments, graded exams without explanations, and little contact with professors, the participant appears to be left unsure about both whether his performance and competence align with expectations of a (future) engineer. Although he refutes that there is one single standard for being an engineer, he still seems to long for clearer and more consistent cues and feedback from the programme or university regarding what is expected of his professional competence. In the absence of such cues, he appears to seek out other sources for feedback and recognition, such as his peers.

Similar to the previous theme, work placement and recognition from supervisors is also a recurring topic within this theme as sources for recognition and feedback. One of the fifth-year teacher students says:

In this account, the student argues that feedback has been most valuable when it has linked his actions to specific consequences, inviting reflection rather than prescribing a ‘correct’ way of acting. As the supervisor has provided feedback it has guided the teacher student’s participation and enactment in his work placement, highlighting how recognition and feedback not only serve as introspective, interpretive resources but may also affect later actions. Importantly, receiving “credit” is not interpreted as mere praise, but as something the student uses as a socially credible signal that he performed in a way that reads as legitimate in terms of being a teacher. Furthermore, when he says that he has been given opportunities to try things out by himself, this can also be understood as a form of feedback and acknowledgement that he is doing something ‘right’ by being gradually afforded more opportunities for independence and legitimate participation.

Another teacher student, in her first year, demonstrates how recognition and feedback is not limited to professionals or ‘higher-ups’ like supervisors. Recounting an experience she had with her peers, she says:

This quote highlights how peers can be an immediate and consequential source of recognition despite not being in positions of authority. The participant paints a dual picture where she both appears to feel validated in her competence because she was able to break down a seemingly complicated theory into understandable pieces, as well as the acknowledgement and positive feedback from others reinforcing her professional identification. Feeling “warm” by receiving the acknowledgment also signals the affective dimension of professional becoming, emphasising how meaning-making can be catalysed by ‘small’ moments of social validation.

A third-year pedagogy student continues this topic of less formal and structured sources for recognition, saying:

The student demonstrates how recognition and feedback may not be expressed explicitly by others but can be interpreted through others’ (re)actions – i.e., her seeing that her brother understood what she explained signalling that she had acted in a competent, pedagogical manner. She also highlights the interwoven nature of identity as context-dependent and relational, not as distinguishable different identities, as this interaction made her feel competent and acknowledged as a decent pedagogue and sister. Later in the quote she also reflects on the dynamic between her internal identification as a pedagogue and how she regards her diploma as a credential that serves as a confirmation for other people, not something that provides her with meaningful feedback in terms of her professional becoming or competence.

Relatedly, a third-year informatics student recounts his experiences of not receiving recognition from family and others, and how he has handled these experiences:

The student discusses how he feels explicitly not acknowledged and to some extent interpreting his dad’s or others reactions as negative in light of his professional becoming. The quote foregrounds not the absence of feedback or competence, but rather the difficulty of making professional becoming intelligible for others. Through the account, the student seems certain of what he is not, an engineer, and secure in that a degree in informatics provides him with plenty of work opportunities. Thus, one can argue that his professional competence becomes crystallised in having to correct his father. However, he can also be interpreted as uncertain of his professional becoming and that this is reinforced through others’ misinterpretations of the ‘end goal’ of his degree, saying that he does not really know what a degree in informatics means.

Similarly, a first-year pedagogy student, discusses her varied experiences with both feeling like her competence is not acknowledged, while also receiving recognition in other settings, she says:

This account reflects a throughline in the theme, as recognition and feedback are not consistent across contexts, and may contribute in different ways to what becomes meaningful for the participant. The pedagogy student here, who has completed another degree previously, first recounts experiences where her competence and professional abilities were undermined based on other norms and judgement of readiness or (in)competence, i.e., her age or not having children. Later, she reflectson experiences where others have given her feedback that she acted like a pedagogue when she has not been cognisant of acting in a pedagogical way. In the former example, the lack of acknowledgement seems to trigger an internal recognition of her own competence as she – at least internally – tries to disprove this ‘negative’ interpretation of her. Similarly, the latter example also highlights how recognition and feedback may make previously tacit dispositions and values evident, demonstrating how professional becoming can emerge indirectly through interpretation of different experiences.

It is apparent that the students value feedback that aids them in linking action and consequences, and prompt reflection. Recognition appears to facilitate legitimacy when the students seek out ‘proof’ that their actions resemble what other professionals would do, as external recognition, and in some settings, formal credentials, provide socially credible confirmation that can communicate competence beyond what their self-assessments are able to. Thus, the participants appear to construct meaning for their professional becoming by actively sourcing recognition and feedback that help them interpret competence and legitimacy across contexts.