Great cartoon

This is a great cartoon that seems to have captured most of my feelings over the last 5 years of being a PhD student http://thilinah.posterous.com/perception-of-science-in-popular-culture-vs-a

How people in science see eachother

Great fun!

Trying to write well

Why is it that the more I spell things out, the more lost I feel? I'm unearthing tacit knowledge and it's a difficult process.I know what I mean, why don't others see it? I guess that's the skill of writing well.

The hardest thing is translating the gut feelings I get when I read books and articles, into something intelligible for my thesis. I read things all over the place (mostly to do with Heidegger nowadays) and frequently get a kind of twinge that signals 'hmm, I could use this, it adds an extra certain something'. However, how can I capture that in words? I move away from the page I'm reading and the feeling's gone.

Turning a jungle path into an urban street

I've been labelling each paragraph of my thesis with a claim, hoping that it might help to organise the narrative. My thanks go to Thomas Basboll for sharing his insights on this. At the moment, the first few chapters reads like a journey along a roughly cleared jungle path rather than a well-mapped trip along well-lit streets, which is more the aim. So, the challenge is to get from this

 

and this 

to this

  

and this

  

While staking the claims for each paragraph seems simple enough, it is rather painstaking and leads rapidly to boredom in a thesis of some 80,000 words. However, I am starting to see how the path has been constructed so far and how I can improve on it.

Applying Dasein to workplace learning

Dasein is based on the idea that we understand our world through the way we interact with it, as a world of purposes and underlying mood, in which we are usually absorbed in coping. Care is an overarching theme of human existence. This means that we cannot help but care, and even when we profess not to care it implies caring. Our engagement with living and the meaning of such engagement is predicated on care.

Work is a special kind of activity, because it involves engagement with predefined practices - 'the way we do things here'. This sets up and limits the space of possibilities that an understanding Dasein faces. For example, when a qualified nurse encounters a change in a patient's condition she/he can autonomously amend the care plan and give instructions to the team accordingly. A health care assistant encountering the same situation would have a different space of possibilities, which is likely to include reporting the change to the responsible nurse and then taking instructions from the nurse as to the required changes in care. In a workplace, then, individuals interpret situations depending on their work role or identity and their capacity to act.

The reason why Dasein is a useful frame for understanding workplace learning is at least fourfold:

1. If we are to accept that 'doing nursing' and 'being a nurse' are part and parcel of the same thing, knowledge is nothing without the familiarity with practice. It calls for a practice epistemology that questions any preoccupation with transfer of knowledge from mentor to student.
2. Skill teaching and skill learning are fundamental aspects of workplace learning. However, most skill is tacitly employed, in what Heidegger called 'ready-to-hand' absorption in practice.Reading a patient's body language and noticing that their dosage of pain medication is overly conservative might happen in an instant, but unpicking the knowledge involved might be impossible. However, there in the moment, the nurse inteprets subtle changes in the patients' appearance and being familiar with the normal doses of analgesia and perhaps having been involved in previous conversations about the patient and knowing the prescribing doctor was quite junior, makes the connection. How can we understand this better to help mentors support learning?
3. When we talk about practice, we are representing it in some way. Talk, as an existential feature of Dasein, could be the 'idle talk' of the inauthentic Dasein using language as a signification of what is happening. For example, the nurse might say the patient is in pain and needs more medication, but that is idle talk,which glosses over the lived experience of knowing and interpreting the situation.However, we are also dependent on language as a sense-making device. Can awareness of the use and role of language in practice help mentors to sharpen their educational practices?
4. Practice and equipment are joined in meaning making. The syringe driver delivering analgesia to an epidural catheter is full of meaning in terms of the patient's pain control, the risks of the procedure, knowing what to do if the machine alarm sounds, and so on. The same equipment on the shelf of the storage cupboard is devoid of such situational meanings and is seen as a very poor substitute in terms of teaching potential. Moreover, the patient's body as part of the practice situation, brings further parameters that impinge on the space of possibility for the nurse. Understanding practice situations as having certain existential possibilities could be a fruitful line of thought.

What I said earlier about the differences between a nurse and a health care assistant is also important when debating the merits or otherwise of student nurses learning practice by working alongside health care assistants.

Time-Manner-Place

It's a silly thought really, but it occurred to me than in German, Time–Manner–Place states the general order of adpositional phrases in its sentences: "yesterday", "by car", "to the store". It is apparently common among languages with Subject-Object-Verb word orders.

An example of this appositional ordering in German is:

Ich fahre heute mit dem Auto nach München.
I drive today with the car to Munich.

I'm travelling to Munich by car today.

Then, I thought, well, Martin Heidegger was German and he came up with the idea that time was the horizon for human being-in-the-world. I wonder to what extent this was mediated by the language he was embedded in?

Video on Heidegger

Our being is really a process of becoming. We are pulled ahead of ourselves in tasks that we need to fulfil. The human being is always projected ahead of himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRm6dElRZqQ

Video on Heidegger's structure of being-in-the-world

http://vdownload.eu/watch/4569330-heidegger-39-s-being-and-time-lawrence-cahoone.html

(Lawrence Cahoone) Dasein is a being that is thrown into and open to the world. The structure of existence is being-in-the-world. Dasein is in the world by definition. Heidegger calls this the worldhood which we constantly project as we move through our experience. The core phenomenon of being-in-the-world, apart from worldhood, is being-in. Only Dasein is in the world having experiences (being open to it and disclosing it). A person, as Dasein, is like a clearing in the woods. We have capacity to experience, in other words, things get revealed. As we move around, things get revealed around us. Heidegger is reinterpreting notions of experience and consciousness through this notion of clearing, or lichtung.

Human beings always understand things - that's how we experience the world. We carry around with us and project around us a network of meanings in which the objects of experience are revealed. For example, we can understand a chair in terms of what can be done with it. Possibilities have to do with the future. Understanding is oriented to the context of possiblities that point towards possible actions.

Facticity: we are thrown into the world, open and vulnerable to it. Dasein is always already characterised by a state of mind or mood. We are in some state or another at every moment. We carry that mood (from the past) into the next moment of experience.

Falling: the inauthentic identification of Dasein with things within the world. Dasein typically understands itself through present objects and people in the world. In falling, we submerge ourselves into what Heidegger called 'das Man', translated as the 'they self'. In everyday existence, we are overwhelmed by what 'they' think, whatever the newspapers say, and the objects of desire (money, for instance).  Most of us live according to the they, rather than our own authentic phenomena of existence. Dasein flees into the they-self, with absorption in entities.

Dasein wants to avoid angst or anxiety. Angst is the proper response to the finite open-ended nature of human existence. It's only when we feel it that we begin to recognise the truth of human existence.

Sorge (care): the fundamental truth about everyday human being is that we are 'care'. Dasein existentially cares - it cannot not care. To care is to be anxious. In care, Dasein is 'ahead-of-itself, in always being-already-in-the-world, as being-alongside entities.'

For authentic Dasein, facticity and understanding are reconceived as follows.
Future (understanding): Dasein is the only being that knows it is going to die. Recognition that my being is always moving towards a finite end.
Past (facticity): Dasein has the potential to be guilty, or 'recognising what I am not'. This is an awareness of a kind of existential guilt. It is not just about feeling guilty about acts you've done, but also that I am full of 'nots' or absences - what I haven't been and won't be. This can lead to 'anticipatory resoluteness', an acceptance of my guilt in the anticipation of my death. In hearing the call of authentic existence, Dasein is no longer falling.

Temporality unifies the whole structure of being. Time is the authentic self coming towards itself as always already having been there. One recognises it has always been there in the act of making entities present.

Fragments and hope

I'm currently re-working my two findings chapters on the themes 'working with fragments and having a sense of the whole' and 'having hope for the nursing profession'. Whereas the theme of being aware of high stakes was analysed according to 'being-already-in',the fragments theme is focusing on 'being-amidst' and the hope theme is focusing on 'being-towards'. At a distance, it has a very logical feel, but when digging into the data and vocative texts with these analytical filters it becomes a very hard task. Discussing narrative accounts of concrete events and more general dispositions towards mentoring relies on the use of data that is already spoken and representative of the experience. It is already removed from the actual experience. so, I have to consider whether a description of an event or of practice is really showing Dasein's falling, as in being-amidst or whether it is something else.

If working with fragments indicates being absorbed in coping, which is what I am hoping to demonstrate, then I need to find clues in the data that point towards a state of transparent, taken-for-granted practice, getting the work done. It also points towards inauthenticity in terms of Heidegger's Dasein. There is little room for the authentic self when being absorbed in coping.

Staring at a blank page

I'm all fired up about re-working my findings chapters, so why am I sitting here staring at a blank page? I'm starting with a theme called "Being aware of high stakes". This seems to relate to Dasein in the temporal dimension of the past.In other words, it represents the fact that mentors are already-in a world of high stakes. An alternative way of expressing it is that they are 'thrown' into this world. It is already given to them in this way, colouring their moods, and their moods also colour the way they experience the high stakes. Mood seems to be the pivot around which the lifeworlds of mentors, as a particular Dasein, are thrown.

This picture seems to represent the idea of diversely different stakeholders, vibrant use of colour that can represent mood and the tensions arising when the stakes really matter.  If mentoring can be compared to a game of cards, then everyone knows the rules, but perhaps they don't all always play by the rules, and perhaps some people feel more vulnerable than others.  At any particular time, the stakes might matter more to some than others.  One might be dealt a poor hand or a good hand. So it can be in the mentor lifeworld

Being deep in thought

why should we need to know the answer of the Life, Universe, and Everything. The giant supercomputer "Deep Thought" has already spent six and half million years to get the answer for us. But nobody understands what the answer means. http://benchu.com/blog/?cat=9
Based on FluidityTheme Redesigned by Kaushal Sheth

My first run through my three Findings chapters was literally just that - or at least a brisk jog to gather together the data and developing understandings under the main themes. It was a way of 'getting it all together' as simultaneously as possible in order to be able to grasp the whole. The 'whole' was not just my interpretations of the mentor experience, but also the underlying philosophy that underpinned the research. It was a mad dash to have the 'whole' in my hands before being freed up to consider the parts again. I felt subject to considerable momentum, always wishing I was writing the next chapter.

Now that I'm writing about what I actually did, and am still immersed in doing, I'm suddenly paralysed and thrown into a state of deep thought. I read about the experiences of other phenomenological researchers and how the very act of putting 'what you did' into words becomes paradoxical because of the very unmethodical nature of coming to grasp the essence of experiences. I revisit my findings and themes - how did I get to that point? No amount of accounting for ways of working with the data can quite represent my mental processes and the experience of intutively feeling one's way through.

Heidegger: out of the fog

Reading Heidegger does't plunge me into fog in quite the same way as it used to. There must be some understanding of phenomenology percolating its way into me. I'm thinking of using these two extracts to head up my chapter on using phenomenology in my research:

The question of the meaning of Being is the most universal and the emptiest of questions, but at the same time it is possible to individualize it very precisely for any particular Dasein. If we are to arrive at the basic concept of ‘Being’, and to outline the ontological conceptions which it requires and the variations which it necessarily undergoes, we need a clue which is concrete. (Heidegger, 1962: 63)


Thus, to give a phenomenological description of the ‘world’ will mean to exhibit the Being of those entities which are present-at-hand within the world, and to fix it in concepts which are categorical. (Heidegger, 1962: 91)

From vagueness to distinctness

I'm glad I read Robert Sokolowski's book "Introduction to Phenomenology".  I can feel myself moving from a position of vagueness to a position of distinctness, although I am still on that journey - I haven't arrived yet.   Vagueness can be characterised by half-formed thoughts that are inchoate - somewhere between ignorance and error.  "Contradiction deals with the form of judgements, incoherence deals with their content, and both can occur in the fog of vagueness" (p107). The good thing about this is that it is normal to move from a position of vagueness on the way to distinctness. As one continues to grapple with a domain of knowledge, the contradictions and incoherences are flushed out and one's thinking and reasoning becomes distinct.

Different data types telling different stories

As I was preparing a presentation talking about my use of "rich pictures" in my PhD research, it occurred to me that I had a good example of an event that was represented in quite different ways by the different methods of data collection.  My participant had described what happened in writing in her event diary. She had also drawn a picture of the event, in which she had drawn herself and the other parties along with some of the details of what the event was about.  I also had interview data in which she re-told the story of what happened as well as explaining the contents of the rich picture.    Putting extracts of all three data sources side-by side gave quite an astonishing contrast between them. The event diary entry was quite factual and matter-of-fact in the way the event was described.  The interview revealed a few hesitancies over whether or not a colleague could be fully trusted to carry out a certain delgated responsibilty.  It made the situation as originally described not quite so clear cut.  The picture presented the event from quite a different perspective.  It revealed even more misgivings about the situation. 

The other thing I've noticed when looking at the rich pictures is that the participants drew themselves in the picture.  This wasn't at all a surprise, as they were all clearly part of these events, but it does offer unexpected opportunities to consider what this might tell me about their personal and professional identities, and also that of their colleagues sometimes.  It also brings the body into focus.  the body is often overlooked when people talk about their practice, but it is clearly visible in the pictures I've been given.

Space and place

Yi-Fu Tuan is a human geographer and philosopher who caught my attention for the first time last summer when I picked up his 1997 book "Space and Place: the perspective of experience" in the Open University library. As I've been considering the experiences of my mentor research participants in terms of spaciality in the context of the lifeworld existentials, this seemed an important text for me to study, and it didn't disappoint.

The play between emotion and cognition have never been far from my mind, and in this book Tuan provides a comforting, very simple, model for understanding how these "ways of knowing" help us to make sense of the world. I like the way he said that "emotion tints all human experience, including the high flights of thought" (p8). And likewise, physical sensations such as pleasure pain, heat, or cold are qualified by thought.

The orientation of the human body can also be significant when thinking about the experience of space and how time comes into the picture. Tuan said "on a temporal plane frontal space is perceived as future, rear space as past." (p40) . He goes on to talk about dignity being signified at the front and the human face commanding respect. In this one idea concerning the orientation of the human body, one can see the convergence of spatiality, temporality, corporeality and relationality. One really needs to take a pause for thought here at the interconnectedness of this human geography perspective with lifeworld studies. I have found so many useful ideas in the book. Another idea that resonates well for me in terms of understanding the place of spaciality in lived experience, is this "The world feels spacious and friendly when it accommodates our desires and cramped when it frustrates them" (p65). I know that I've heard many tales of frustration in the process of data collection, so this provides another way of understanding and expressing feelings of frustration. There are other elements of space and place that I know I'll find useful in my thesis, including the experience of distance and intimate experiences of place.

In his Dear colleagues section of his personal website Tuan said recently 'No matter how miserable or happy I am, someone “out there” has not only experienced it but has written it down and published' (http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm). In many ways, this sums up why I'm doing my research - to be able to write down and publish the lived experience of being a mentor for student nurses so that others can read it and know that they're not alone in their experience (which is a mixture of happy and miserable and much more, of course). It's the same, too, in my teaching role. I've recently recorded an audio resource in which students share their experiences of writing essays, and my main aim was to make the everyday, usually private activities of student writing open to others.

Husserl and Heidegger

Something that's bugging me at the moment is the idea that the rhetoric mostly assumes that if you go with Husserl you follow one discrete path and if you go with Heidegger you follow a completely different path, and so on. However, I don't see the two as mutually exclusive, but rather as giving two different sides of the story. So, in the context of my PhD looking at the lived experience of mentors, I could use a Husserlian perspective to say what mentoring students is (and isn't - I have some data where the participants have talked about other mentoring activities that are different) and to describe the lifeworld. Perhaps this is getting at the essence of the experience. Then, taking a Heideggerian approach, I can then get into what it means to be a mentor.

I'd always thought I would take a Heideggerian approach, or at least a hermeneutic or interpretive approach, which then brings me to Gadamer too. I've made heavy use of Max van Manen, who seems quite eclectic in how he draws on the different philosophers.

I've been reading Dan Zahavi's book "Husserl's phenomenology" which seems to be very clear in setting out how Husserl's thinking has progressed and where misrepresentations are sometimes made with regard to the transcendental nature of Husserl's phenomenology. The idea of transcendence comes in useful when talking about self and Other or objects, and moving from there to intersubjectivity. It is also useful for accounting for phenomena such as empathy. Surely when it comes to interpretive and hermeneutic phenomenology, transcendental intersubjectivity is part of the world we describe and interpret.

A way I sometimes use for myself to make sense of the different approaches is to say that with Husserl we are asking the question "how can I know the world" and with Heidegger it is more about "What is it like to exist or 'be' in the world ". My research question addresses the latter, but surely the path to finding this out is also to pay attention to the former.

I've used a number of different approaches to data collection - up to three interviews per participant, in which they lead on the description of their experiences mentoring, reflect on events they have written up (and/or drawn a picture of), guided by me, and reflect on an initial draft of themes. I've also applied a well-being measure in the form of a mood questionnaire for work, mentoring and the events.

I've done quite a bit of work mapping the data and ideas to the four lifeworld existentials temporality, spaciality, corporeality and relationality, and this does create a convenient way of thinking about the mentor lifeworld. But the whole notion of lifeworld seems to cross the boundaries between the different disciplines in phenomenology, so this also leaves me feeling slightly adrift when trying to nail my colours to the mast.

Reading about Husserl at the hairdresser

I've been trying to understand where Husserl is coming from, because until I've done that I'll find it difficult to explain how Heidegger and the existentialists differ. Even Husserl's transcendental philosophy is not as clear cut as I thought it was, having so far only really read research papers that skate in a fairly perfunctory way over the philosophical distinctions between Husserl and Heidegger.

Well, I'm working my way through Dan Zahavi's book "Husserl's Phenomenology" for which I have high hopes that it will reveal to me in plain English what so far has proved elusive: what are the ideas of Husserl's phenomenology based on, and why is bracketing as a technique applied in the epoche thought to be so fundamental to discovering the essence of an experience?

While I was at the hairdresser, I pulled out the book and resumed my place in the chapter covering Husserl's turn to transcendental philosophy. According to Zahavi, Husserl himself pointed out that "it is quite a puzzle how consciousness can be something absolute that constitutes all transcendence, including the entire psycho-physical world, and simultaneously as something that appears as a real part of the world" (p48) There is a distinction made between psychological reflection and transcendental reflection. The former is a kind of mundane self-consciousness in which one interprets an act as a psychical process occurring in the world, whereas the latter is not immediately available to us in our everyday thoughts. Transcendental reflection involves stripping a subjective awareness of its contingent interpretations. Basically, this is the process that is carried out in the epoche for the reduction to get to the essence of a phenomenon.

This still doesn't make complete sense to me, but there is much more to read yet.

Mapping intersubjectivity

I'm creating an "intersubjectivity map" at the moment. The eventual aim is to show changes over time in the mentor lifeworld - different people, groups of people or entities (e.g. organisations) and the different feelings, attitudes or values expressed by participants during the interviews and in the diaries.

It's all going into a table for each interview, with the headings

Focus (who are they talking about)

Narrative (what's the story - transcript extracts)

Past-present-future (saying which)

Feelings, attitudes, values (transcript extracts)

Relationality

Corporeality

Temporality

Spatiality (ticking these if they apply)

At the moment, in order to stay close to the data, I'm putting an edited down version of extracts from the interview transcripts into the table cells, although a short summary of what they said would make a neater table. It's a very long-winded process, but feels productive.

Using Rich Pictures

The idea of asking participants to create “rich pictures” developed from a general assumption that artwork can be a rich source of qualitative data.

Rich pictures are a technique used in technology that originated in Checkland’s 1981 Soft Systems Methodology as a way of identifying multiple viewpoints of a situation. They allow people to engage with problem solving or creative thinking “because our intuitive consciousness communicates more easily in impressions and symbols than in words” (Open University, 2005). In the systems context, a rich picture is used according to a well-defined framework of elements: pictorial symbols, keywords, cartoons, sketches, symbols, title. The conventions are that elements are chosen to represent a situation, using as many colours as are necessary, adding connections (e.g. with lines and arrows) and avoiding too much writing commentary. It would appear that the most benefit in creating rich pictures can be obtained with the support of a set of guidelines and in group situations (Open University, 2005). Rich pictures are becoming established in many educational contexts, where a university teaching environment seems ideal for teaching and supporting the technique. Campbell Williams and Dobson (1995) used rich pictures, along with encouraging exploration of novel metaphors, as an adjunct to learning journals with students pursuing a course of business computing and found it opened up new ways for students to express and represent themselves. As a tool for reflection, rich pictures have also been used with the purpose of promoting deep learning, which is said to be characterised by seeking meaning and establishing relationships between areas of knowledge (Horan, 2000; Vanasupaa et al., 2008).

The techniques of “rich picture” have evolved along a separate path from “artwork”. However, they share the fundamental aim of facilitating and encouraging potentially untapped wells of human experience by by-passing the everyday route of verbal expression that is shackled by a combination of vocabulary constraints, cultural backdrop and the natural limitations of self-awareness and self-expression. Rich pictures were appealing for the mentor study in the sense that they provided an opportunity for participants to acknowledge the different players and entities that they interacted with, and to focus on the relationships between them. One of the drawbacks of using the technique is that there was limited time to explain the rationale and guidelines for creating rich pictures, and the instructions had to be given amid a discussion of the event diary as a whole. Participants would be in a situation of having to take in a number of different instructions for completing their event diary, which they would be doing possibly in the course of a day’s work, and out of immediate contact with the researcher. The use of samples was identified as a quick way of passing on information about what a rich picture could look like and how one might be constructed. For this purpose, sample rich pictures were created by the researcher.




Introducing rich pictures to participants
Where an event is primarily constituted by people and interactions between them, the elements of pictorial symbols, keywords, cartoons, sketches and symbols can feel obscure and difficult to represent (drawing on personal experience of thinking and reading about rich pictures). Therefore, I set myself the challenge of creating a rich picture of a telephone conversation, where the only significant physical component was the telephone, but where there was an obvious emotional dimension to the event. I aimed to complete the picture in ten minutes and stopped after that time, so that I would feel able to present the task to participants as being manageable in that space of time. I decided not to use colour, due to the time constraints and because of the spontaneity of capturing the moment. I later created a second rich picture (also restricted to 10 minutes) of a more mundane situation, a meeting at work, which captured a completely different type of scenario (and incidentally revealed new insights for me into how people contribute and interact in meetings). I was subsequently able to take these two samples to the research interviews and use them as tools for introducing and explaining the rich picture.

In the interviews themselves, at the time I was explaining the event diary, I made sure that I had covered the event description and the feelings questionnaire thoroughly and checked that the participant had understood before moving onto the rich picture. It felt at the time that talking about pictures presented the danger of cognitive overload, given the other demands. I was also aware that participant responses to a request to draw tended to be laced with coyness or reticence, so I was keen to emphasise that the diary was quite acceptable without a picture, and that a picture was an optional, albeit desirable, extra. I played down the need for any particular skill in creating a rich picture, and for that reason approached the “rules” for rich pictures with a very light touch. The emphasis was on capturing the moment in whatever way they could.

Making the research accessible

Consideration needs to be given to how the researcher can do justice to the experience under study in order to communicate the findings to the appropriate audience. This communication should be at both intellectual and personal level, especially with phenomenology, where the described experience by necessity must connect with and speak to those who are part of the nurse-mentor lifeworld. As phenomenology historically has problems being accepted into mainstream psychology, for example, (Halling, S. 2002; Giorgi, A. 2008) it is important that the value of the phenomenological approach is made clear. However, in immersing oneself in the language and tradition of phenomenology, the research can easily become impenetrable to the ordinary person. By telling the story of the research, the process of discovery, readers can be taken along and helped through the rather dense concepts that have to be addressed when using phenomenology. In order to bring the reader into a close relationship with the subject matter, it is necessary also to include well-chosen examples and quotes. This has been part of the driving force of the data collection: obtaining a range of descriptive accounts that can illuminate the experience under study. One use of descriptions and examples is in the creation of anecdotes. Anecdotes (van Manen, M. 1997) appear to be an essential methodological device. Van Manen explains that the anecdote is a social product, a special kind of story that makes comprehensible abstract ideas that may be difficult to articulate. In my own research, I might, for example, look for an anecdote that can effectively illustrate the concept of frustration that participants frequently express either when faced with students don’t seem to grasp what nursing is about, or who don’t seem to take ownership of their learning, or other sources of frustration such as having to accept the constraints of limited time to teach and support. Or, an anecdote might illustrate the difference between the rewards of helping someone to learn and the rewards of getting the work done by the end of the shift. As a biographical incident, an anecdote can reveal something particular about a person’s character. For example, I might find I can use an anecdote derived from the transcripts to illustrate the participant’s profile on the ‘Trust’ trait.