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What is formation? A conceptual discussion

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 Higher Education Research & Development

ISSN: 0729-4360 (Print) 1469-8366 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cher20

What is formation? A conceptual discussion

Molly Sutphen & Thomas de Lange

To cite this article: Molly Sutphen & Thomas de Lange (2015) What is formation? A
conceptual discussion, Higher Education Research & Development, 34:2, 411-419, DOI:
10.1080/07294360.2014.956690

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 Higher Education Research & Development, 2015
Vol. 34, No. 2, 411–419, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2014.956690

What is formation? A conceptual discussion

Molly Sutphena* and Thomas de Langeb
a
Center for Faculty Excellence, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA;
b
Department of Education, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo, Norway

This paper addresses the principles and connotations of the term formation. In our
discussion of formation, we draw on different disciplines in order to widen and
deepen our understanding of the concept of formation. We also mirror the
formation concept against comparable terms and draw on studies in which it has
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been applied in empirical research. By drawing on a different perspective on

formation, we argue for its relevance to higher education and invite discussion
on its potential uses in that field.
Keywords: academic development; academic identity; professional education

Introduction
Higher education educates students, develops knowledge and serves as an arena for
airing social critique. As they are part of this milieu, students are thus expected to
learn about and be prepared to engage actively in broad intellectual, moral, political
and cultural matters (Lagemann & Lewis, 2012). One question, however, is how
these matters (particularly individual morals) are addressed in programs and in teaching
in individual disciplines. More importantly, to what extent are we able to adequately
scrutinize these practices, or even to what extent do we have an adequate vocabulary
for addressing learning about broader moral, political and cultural issues in higher
education?
A major challenge in this respect is that these moral- and value-based issues and
obligations largely reach beyond the factual knowledge basis and into the realm of nor-
mative values and ideas. As scholars and teachers, regardless of faculty or discipline,
we are responsible, to some extent, for translating these normative features of higher
education into curricula and practices. These translations occur in and are central to pro-
fessional education (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2010; Foster, Dahill, Golemon,
& Tolentino, 2006; Hamilton, 2008). However, outside of professional education,
higher education does not have a generally understood vocabulary or conceptual frame-
work for such educational goals and practices. It is in the midst of this normative
responsibility that we introduce to higher education more generally a concept more
familiar to educators in professional education: the term formation.
As a starter, the term formation in professional education represents a process of
change based on critical self-reflection and reflection around students’ expectations
and responsibilities. It describes the roles of teaching and experiences in helping stu-
dents learn the knowledge, skilled know-how and professional responsibilities of
their field, including the moral dimensions inherent to a profession and the societal

*Corresponding author. Email: msutphen@email.unc.edu

© 2014 HERDSA
 412 M. Sutphen and T. de Lange

responsibilities of professionals. In this paper, we propose that the concept of formation

provides a valuable resource for academic developers and faculty in higher education
more generally as a means to explore these normative and moral dimensions.
In this paper, we use the word formation to describe the process of change that stu-
dents undergo in higher education, as well as the changes faculty members undergo as
they teach and pursue their scholarship (Colby & Sullivan, 2008). Drawing on the use
of formation in professional education, we suggest that the concept of formation gives
us a point of departure from which to analyze the changes students and faculty undergo.
We begin this paper with a discussion of formation generally and the ways it
has been used in professional education. We then compare formation to the well-
established concept of socialization. Our aim is to clarify how our suggested con-
ception of formation might add to the discussion of being in higher education,
whether as a student or faculty member. After this conceptual comparison, we
draw on the work of Jon Hellesnes, a Norwegian philosopher who investigates the
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differences between knowledge delivery and becoming educated. Hellesnes’ work

provides us with an illustration of how the notion of formation might be a part of
higher education teaching more generally. We follow with examples of the use of
formation in empirical studies, in order to illustrate how this concept can be operatio-
nalized. Finally, we conclude our paper by turning back to the challenges higher
education faces and how a notion of formation could be useful on a curricular
level, in practical teaching and research.

Notions of formation
Formation is not a common term in higher education, except in one part of professional
education – the education of the clergy. For students preparing for the clergy, the term
describes a process of theological and existential discernment that students undertake,
as well as the practices they must learn in order to attend fully to the needs of a
congregation or faith community. The notion of formation has been adopted more
broadly in a series of studies carried out at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance-
ment of Teaching on professional and doctoral education (Benner et al., 2010; Foster
et al., 2006; Walker, Golde, Jones, Bueschel, & Hutchings, 2008). For Benner and col-
leagues (2010), the term formation best describes the changes that students undergo in
their outlook, values, behaviors, ideals, goals and interpretations of experiences in the
course of being a nursing student. In their conception of the term, formation is a concept
that extends beyond graduation and best describes the ongoing change that individuals
undergo when they enter and remain in professional practice. It also describes the way
in which students and practitioners grasp the purpose, values and ethics internal to their
work, as opposed to the instrumental ways in which professionals are often expected to
approach their practice (Taylor, 1989). Barrow (2006, p. 359) contends that the for-
mation of one’s identity is ‘informed by social experience’ and develops in the histori-
cal milieu, amid cultural practices, as one uses ‘background practices to understand and
cope with people, institutions, and things’.
If we focus for a moment on professional education, there are currently several
common ways of describing the changes students undergo in the course of becoming
professionals. For example, these include ‘learning a role’, or taking on the identity
of a professional, and becoming ‘socialized’ into the field. We propose that the
concept of formation encompasses these features. As students learn different roles,
their identities change and they learn to function according to a social order. Of
 Higher Education Research & Development 413

these notions describing how students change in the course of ‘becoming’, the concept
of formation is most similar to the term socialization. Therefore, we must clarify differ-
ences and similarities between these two terms and we do so in the next section. The
sections following our discussion of socialization and formation provide examples of
the use of formation in an area of professional education: those who are becoming
teachers.

Socialization and formation

In general, socialization refers to the process of learning about, and becoming a part of,
one’s social surroundings (Giddens, 2009). In this sense, socialization concerns the
appropriation of norms, values, roles and behavioral expectations in various social set-
tings, as well as in society at large. Moreover, socialization may imply personal change
being necessary in order to be accepted by a community; individuals may feel pressured
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to conform to norms of behavior and adopt attitudes, goals and ideals not already their
own. Primary socialization occurring during childhood refers to development of the
first and most fundamental level of connectedness to our social surroundings, while sec-
ondary socialization is more of an ongoing process throughout our lives as we adapt and
respond to expectations and roles in various social surroundings (Kimmel, Dennis, &
Aronson, 2009). The term socialization describes the values and norms that appear
to be promoted in social settings, institutions or even societal systems.
Although socialization is similar to formation in the sense of being an ongoing and
lifelong process undertaken in societal systems, the question of how individuals are
changed by their experiences through critical reflection in response to, or in spite of,
socialization pressures is the area in which there are the most clearly marked differences
between these terms. We contend that the term formation allows for an awareness of
pressures that can contribute to improvements in how we participate in social practices
or even initiate social change. Where socialization describes how we become a part of
social entities, formation illuminates the ways in which we gain an awareness of our
participation in these social constellations. In this respect, when compared to socializa-
tion, formation holds a more explicit role and meaning with regard to education. We
want to underscore that we do not see socialization as passive imprinting, but as a
process of active participation in the social context. Both concepts have many dimen-
sions, with students experiencing different forces and pressures as part of becoming a
professional (Englund, 1996).
An illustration of this difference between the terms formation and socialization is
shown through the reflection of the Norwegian philosopher Jon Hellesnes. In his
1991 essay, A graduated person and an educated being, he addresses aspects that
closely resemble the notion of formation. We find his writing useful, as he explores
the conflict between knowledge as taught and knowledge as used in everyday life.
He approaches this by describing a continuous conflict between the world of specializ-
ation within scientific subjects, research and education versus the world of everyday
life. Although there are many types of science, each with its own internal logic,
Hellesnes points to the ways in which scientific abstraction and exactness as taught
in science courses may be presented in a relatively unambiguous and logically
ordered manner. However, although there are also many kinds of ‘everyday life’ that
are lived without ambiguity and according to a logic, as colloquially used ‘everyday
life’ is usually described as less structured, less schematized. In educating students
for the lives they will lead everyday while at the same time teaching the sciences in
 414 M. Sutphen and T. de Lange

abstract ways, Hellesnes suggests students can face a confusing situation. The student
may take away that she must make everyday life situations fit into an idealized schema,
while leaving out messy and contradictory aspects that fall short of the world of scien-
tific concepts. Characteristics and happenings in real life that go astray of these schemas
tend to be defined as unimportant. Moreover, as Hellesnes points out, in many types of
scientific analysis some phenomena are highlighted and prioritized, while others are left
in the background. This creates a danger for the student learning the world of science,
where there is a selective and absolutist image of the everyday world; that is, scientism,
or a view of the everyday world through absolute measurements and categories. This is
the schematized world of norms to which many students in the sciences are socialized.
Learning to handle these categories is part of the process of becoming a graduate.
According to Hellesnes, absolutist views also exist in everyday life, but the type of
absolutism taught as scientism typically advances narrow, limited and discriminating
attitudes toward alternative views. This is generally perceived as naïvety – a tendency
to ignore diverging perspectives – often surfacing in ideological, cultural or ethnic nar-
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rowness. Scientism and everyday absolutism are closely related in the sense that they
both represent reductionist and naïve perspectives. However, while it is possible to
be naïve in an everyday sense without falling into scientism, scientism presupposes
naïvety.
We suggest that formation is the process through which a student’s academic and
real-life experiences might be mutually informing, and that these experiences influence
each other. According to our interpretation of Hellesnes’ work, he explores the ways in
which everyday life experiences may inform a student’s understanding of an academic
subject, in this case the sciences. In our view of formation, the concept represents a deep
respect for, and awareness of, how students might incorporate views from the sphere of
everyday life in their academic lives, and calls for a mindfulness of this relationship
between a subject area, such as science, and everyday life. Formation consists of the
awareness of this difference between and connection of scientific – to continue with
Hellesnes’ example from science education – and everyday life-worlds. Education
that misses out on or ignores this respect also loses its contact with everyday life,
and is reduced to the delivery of formal knowledge only. This promotes simplistic
and ‘deformed’ education as a kind of meaningless achievement. On the basis of
recognizing the insufficiency in a one-sided interpretation of reality though scientific
categories, formation presupposes mutuality between the scientific and the everyday
world.
Here, formation is related to the notion of a hermeneutic spiral of relating categories
to real life and vice versa. It also stands in contrast with socialization, which is more
about the ongoing process of becoming a societal member, compared to formation as
a reflection on this membership, including how to engage in membership as a part of
our education. A vital ingredient in the process of formation is helping students gain
self-knowledge and a sense of their responsibilities to others in society. In the follow-
ing, we suggest a simplified illustration of what is involved in reflection in education.
Nerland (2006), in Exploring conditions for reflective practice, maintains that the
word reflection originally consisted of two words, re (back) and flectere (to bend). In
the humanities and social sciences, this primarily denotes how thoughts are negated
or confirmed by other thoughts, or how they are compared to phenomena in our
environment (Nerland, 2006, p. 50). She suggests three ways of considering reflection,
starting with reflective thinking (Dewey, 1933), which concerns how repertoires of
action are extended and reconstructed through practical experimentation. Second, the
 Higher Education Research & Development 415

concept of reflection in action (Schön, 1987) emphasizes how previous and new experi-
ences are related through methodical and systematic examination in developing
professional awareness. Finally, epistemic reflexivity (Bourdieu & Waquant, 1992) is
concerned with reflection about more fundamental norms, values and knowledge
systems that reside in our actions.
The three types of reflection described above embody different layers of how we
can mirror our thoughts and actions in practice. These types of reflection represent
opportunities guiding the formation process to extend awareness; make implicit fea-
tures more explicit and available for discussion and thought; enable us to approach
and handle problematic aspects in various settings in more elaborate ways and
provide an opportunity for individuals to consider participation from more expanded,
or macro, perspectives. Nerland (2006) also explores the ways in which reflection
are not necessarily productive, and can lead to negative consequences, such as provid-
ing firmer arguments for existing pathological practices or depriving persons of spon-
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taneity in performing situations.

The above descriptions of formation, reflection and socialization have thus far been
presented in a rather abstract and de-contextualized way. In order to gain a more con-
crete view of the term formation, the next section explores the ways in which other
researchers use the term.

Formation in student and teacher education

A recent study on education in secondary school illustrates what we mean by formation
in the light of Hellesnes’ (1991) position. Arthur, Deakin-Crick, Samuel, Wilson, and
McGettrick (2006) explore how 16–19-year-old students perceive moral issues, which
appears to be important in establishing their values and virtues, and the role that orga-
nized education can play in their formation. Here, the authors’ approach to formation
does not refer to changing behavior or achieving behavioral control; rather, they are
more concerned with students’ personal transformation on the basis of their partici-
pation in the particular school setting. The study was conducted among sixth-form
students in three schools located in the southwest of England. Methodologically,
the report is based on a mixed qualitative and quantitative design, organized in a
cumulative step-wise data collection process. The step-wise approach implies that
the first phase of data collection sets the premises for forthcoming data collection,
thereby creating a platform for follow-up interviews and questionnaires.
The researchers highlight three findings in their report. First, the study shows that
direct relationships and factual conversations around moral issues and virtues play an
important role in the process of formation. Immediate, proximate and respectful
relationships between students and teachers, and between students and students, are
likely to influence student formation. Second, the findings suggest that the curricular
areas designed to address character formation through structured and organized teach-
ing are, according to students, the least beneficial. However, teachers consider explicit
teaching to be more important and influential than do students. Evidence in the report
suggests that pedagogic approaches based on explicit curriculum are more or less inef-
fective and unsuccessful regarding students’ character formation. Instead, the authors
suggest approaching this goal in a more immediate sense. For example, they suggest
that it is better to take opportunities to discuss virtues and moral issues as they
appear in ongoing classroom teaching and learning activities. The researchers also
suggest that teachers approach these situations through open dialogue and mirror
 416 M. Sutphen and T. de Lange

these discussions against both the students’ role in the school context and in their roles
as members of society at large. The main argument for this approach is connecting
moral values and issues to actual events and social conventions.
The authors conclude that formation is best achieved in a more holistic and dynamic
manner, where values and moral issues are hooked onto thoughts, feelings and actions
related to students’ and teachers’ immediate life-worlds, both in and out of school. The
researchers also underline the urgent need to more comprehensively address character
formation in school-based education, and they emphasize that their suggestions with
respect to pedagogy should be thoroughly explored in forthcoming research.
This example from secondary education illustrates a clear focus on values and on
how to engage in the formation of values and attitudes through explicit goals and
active engagement. We introduce a second example that draws on a different context
and is based on a case study analyzing how teachers’ professional identities are
formed through the early stages of professional life. The focus of this study (Patrick,
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2007) is to elaborate on how teachers’ professional knowledge can be understood as

an ongoing negotiation and discourse between factual knowledge about school sub-
jects, teaching, educational policy and practical experiences in current professional
work. Here, the formation of professional knowledge is closely related to the identity
formation of the teacher and how this is shaped through a recursive negotiation
through which the teacher faces actual challenges in the classroom in the course of
becoming a teacher. The contrast between factual knowledge, policy and the practice
is here perceived as the source from which the teacher reconceptualizes ways of think-
ing about the teaching profession, accounting for the complexities of practice that tend
to escape both policy documents and the curricula of teacher education programs.
The analysis in this research is based on a qualitative design, which methodologi-
cally seeks to explore teachers’ deeply rooted individual processes and experiences as
they enter the profession. One conclusion drawn from this study is that, in their early
career, teachers are strongly influenced by practical experiences in a way that, to
some extent, overrides factual knowledge and arouses a range of critical perspectives
related to policy. Practical experiences are closely tied to a sense of local community
membership in a way that resembles organizational socialization. Here, engaging in dis-
course and continuous negotiation about practice is an ingredient in formation – in this
aspect as the development of a critical and conscious professional identity. For
example, a student in a teacher education program might teach a large math class
and report to his mentor that he is unprepared to cope with the wide variations in
levels of academic preparation in his class. In making sense of his experience, he
might initially question what he has learned about managing a large class, as well as
policies about class size and composition. In Hellesnes’ (1991) schema, this situation
illustrates how a tension between the worlds of specialization in formal teacher edu-
cation contrasts with practice in the everyday life of teaching geometry to underpre-
pared students in a particular classroom. This example of a teacher’s professional
identity formation also resembles Hellesnes’ notion of hermeneutics through reciprocal
negotiation and discourse in order to foster critical thinking and reflection.

What is formation and what can it add?

The short answer to the question is that the word formation hints at the creation of new
ways of being for students. For example, when they enter professional education, such
as teacher education, students change who they are and are changed by their
 Higher Education Research & Development 417

experiences, both of which create new possibilities for seeing their practice in new
ways. As is the case with those engaged in professional practice, students are constantly
changing, developing and growing, all of which the word formation, as an ongoing act
of change, describes. So, too, are faculty members, who undergo formation when they
enter graduate or professional school and start to teach (Walker et al., 2008).
Geologists use the word formation to describe a layer of matter – rocks formed by
physical forces. In this sense, rock or sand is stratified and molded by strong natural
forces. Whether in professional education or higher education more generally, students
experience strong forces that deeply influence their formation. The geological sense of
the word serves to remind us of these forces and of the difficulties students face in
making sense of them, as well as of the fact that what a student learns in classes or
through experiential learning can become stratified, resembling geological formations.
It is too often left up to students to integrate their different experiences from stratum to
stratum. Many undertake such integration on their own, without the guidance needed
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for reflection or interpretation (Benner et al., 2010; Colby & Sullivan, 2008), when a
better approach for integration is through a community of practice or learning
(Foster, 2008; Wenger, 1998).
Students never undergo formation alone. They learn from their experiences, teachers
and fellow students the knowledge, skills, know-how and responsibilities of a field. The
last of these – responsibilities – are more explicitly stated and taught in professional
education than in other disciplines in higher education. Educators of the professions
are expected to guide students and to help them decide how to uphold the ideals and
values in their community of practice (Colby & Sullivan, 2008; Foster, 2008). They
serve as sounding boards for students, helping them make sense of positive and negative
experiences in light of the telos of their profession. To return to Nerland (2006), in pre-
paring students for a profession, educators engage students in all three types of reflection.
For example, the student in a teacher education program who despairs of teaching a
crowded geometry class might be asked by a faculty member to reenact the situation
but with questions from academically better-prepared students. Here, the student
teacher is asked to engage in reflective thinking where the conditions of the class –
fewer students – are different. Or this same student might be asked how they teach in
their current overcrowded class compared to the much smaller class they taught the
last term. An example – from the same milieu – of reflection in action might be the
student teacher in the class systematically reviewing their various experiences with under-
prepared students. Finally, the student teacher might engage in epistemic reflexivity in the
course of a discussion with colleagues about what constitutes overcrowding in the class-
room. We also suggest that, regardless of whether the students are reflecting on their
negative or positive experiences, an important part of their formation is the help educators
give them through the three types of reflection that Nerland (2006) describes. All experi-
ences, whether they occur in the course of their reading or through interactions with edu-
cators, classroom learning or experiential learning, contribute to individual formation as
professionals, and it is in their reflection on these experiences that they begin to decide
how they will practice and live out the good internal to that practice.

Conclusions
As a concluding remark, we would like to draw some parallels to the field of edu-
cational research. Research on higher education has, during the past three decades, con-
tributed significantly to insights in curriculum development, support for student
 418 M. Sutphen and T. de Lange

learning, and good teaching (Fry, Ketteridge, & Marshall, 2009). However, these
contributions are to a large extent centered on cognitive content and learning. Paradoxi-
cally, while selections of content frequently evolve into emotional discussions,
sentiments and sympathies, ethical values and moral stances are rarely – if ever
– expressed openly to students (Delvin & Samarawickrema, 2010; Nygaard, Højlt, &
Hermansen, 2008). Consequently, value dimensions of higher education are more
likely to inhabit the space of a hidden curriculum. The concept of formation has the
potential to bring such hidden perspectives into the open. It is potentially an analytical
tool to identify concrete values-based features of higher education practices as well as
provide the means for a more focused debate about specific normative choices faculty
make in their teaching. It might also allow for a more inclusive means of judging out-
comes from higher education and, ultimately, its value.
The purpose of this paper has been to explore the meaning of the term formation and
suggest what might be gained from using the term. As this examination is presented
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mainly through the lens of the individual learner as a process of self-awareness, we

also believe that this concept holds promise in terms of further explorations on a curri-
cular level and in practical teaching. This would doubtless benefit from further research
and elaboration on how to use the concept in higher education.

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