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Abstract

Emergency managers are specialists who coordinate emergency management activities for communities and organizations. Canada’s distributed approach to emergency management encourages provinces and territories to structure emergency management based on their own contexts. This approach creates a complex professional landscape of overlapping job titles, functions, and skillsets with no standardized educational pathway for new professionals creating challenges for newcomers entering practice. Supporting emergency management students in forming professional identities supports them understanding the goals of the broader emergency management community while being seen as legitimate practitioners. A focus on professional identity formation strengthens the alignment between education programs and real-world practice enhancing the quality and consistency of services offered by emergency managers to the public. This research aims to identify evidence-informed pedagogical principles supporting professional identity formation in emergency management students. Engaging a social constructionist perspective, this research explores the questions: (a) What are the professional characteristics of Canadian emergency managers? (b) How do Canadian emergency managers develop and express professional identities? (c) How can education be designed to better support professional identity formation in Canadian emergency managers? This research followed an exploratory, two-phase, mixed methods design. In Phase 1, a purposefully selected group of Canadian emergency managers were engaged in individual, phenomenologically based, semi-structured interviews. Interview data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis aligned with certain approaches of grounded theory. Findings were used to develop questions for an online survey to gain further insight into the experiences of emergency managers, which was then administered in Phase 2 to a broader population of emergency managers. Findings were organized into three categories: The Function and Structure of Emergency Management, describing how practitioners understand emergency management as an area of practice; Navigating Entry into Emergency Management, exploring ways professionals experience membership; and Being an Emergency Manager, exploring the social construction of identity as an emergency manager. Five principles were then presented to guide the development of curricula and educational redesign: organize curriculum to support increasing immersion in real world practice; design for identity-in-practice; create boundary-crossing experiences; promote development of professional networks through mentoring relationships; and position program participation as entry into professional community.