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How to turn professional experience into practical knowledge? How to reflect over one’s professional practice in order to improve it? How to further develop a practitioner’s responseAbility when facing challenging situations? Already Aristotle spoke of practical knowledge in terms of prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis), a notion which is also reflected in the term Bildung. In this podcast, the hosts prof. Michael Noah Weiss and prof. Guro Hansen Helskog are examining central aspects of this knowledge form and its relevance in professional studies by talking to different scholars who made significant contributions to the field. Listeners can get hands-on ideas on how to develop practical knowledge in their own professional contexts.
Hosts:
Michael Noah Weiss & Guro Hansen Helskog
Edited Podcast Transcript:
ResponsAbility
Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies
By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog
#3 Bildung and Reflective Practice Research | Anders Lindseth
00:00:03 Michael N. W.
Welcome to the Responsability podcast. Guro Hansen Helskog is our Co host today.
00:00:09 Guro H. H.
And Michael Noah Weiss is our host.
00:00:12 Michael N. W.
The guest of our today's episode is Anders Lindseth. You are professor emeritus. You
taught philosophy, ethics, research methods and practical knowledge at the
universities in Tromsø, Bodø, Gothenburg, Vienna, and at the Hochschule philosophy in
Munich. You are a pioneer in the field of philosophical practice. It was you who brought
this discipline to Scandinavia, and together with your colleagues at the Center for
Practical Knowledge at Nord University, you developed a specific approach of reflective
practice called reflective practice research. Welcome, Anders!
00:00:51 Guro H. H.
And in addition to this very impressive career, you were also one of the members in the
so-called Dannelseutvalget for høyere utdanning in Norway, a committee focusing on
Bildung, or edification as we like to translate it, in higher education - as a response to
the Bologna reforms. What is the role of Bildung in professional studies and research, as
you see it?
00:01:19 Anders L.
As I started my studies in the 60`s, what we call examen philosophicum was very
strong. And that was a situation that I appreciated very much because it gave a
perspective on what knowledge is in the western tradition. And also: How to understand
life? How to understand science? How to understand ethics? I think these are questions
that are raised in philosophy, and this background for critical knowledge is not so much
emphasized today. Rather, it is now very much a question of getting through studies in
shortest possible time, and to pass your exams and to have the knowledge that you
think you are able to apply. So I was very happy to be asked to be a part of this
committee to investigate how Bildung - how of real education - is part of higher
education you could say. It is not enough to have instructions to be a practitioner. You
also have to have experiences and be open to our yown reactions and to be able not just
to apply mechanically, but to realize how your actions are met in the practical
situations.
00:02:51 Michael N. W.
Anders, in that respect, I would like to ask you another question. In several publications
you used the term experiences of discrepancy and you already mentioned this
experience of the practitioner as a starting point for development, for learning, but also
for research, and my question would be what are such experiences of discrepancy and
how to investigate them in terms of research?
00:03:21 Anders L.
The experiences of discrepancy are experiences that there is very often a mismatch
between what you expect and what comes out of the expectation. Also, when you are
working in the practical context in social work, in nursing and teaching and so on, you
very often have more or less clear ideas about what you are doing and what should
come out of it. And then, something happens that you did not expect. Then there is a
discrepancy between expectation and reality, and I think that that is a fruitful starting
point for reflection, because then you have to reflect. What is this about? Why does it
come out all about or in in a different way? This experience of discrepancy is very often
an experience that is not very pleasant, but it must not be unpleasant. It can. It is an
experience that brings you out of the usual. You take something for granted, and then
you experience something else. And very often it is very problematic what you
experience, but it may also be not problematic in a negative sense. It may be something
that brings you to reflect in a different way.
If everything in practical life is just happening as we expect it, we don't need to reflect
very much. But that is not the case. We always come in situations where something
happened that we don't expect.
00:05:08 Guro H. H.
So this means that the personal is important also in research?
00:05:15 Anders L.
It depends upon what you mean by research. I mean very often you expect the research
to be some kind of observation and hypothesis that you try to test. But if you try to
understand experiences of this discrepancy, you don't have an hypothesis that you can
just test. This element of the person is very important. It is also very important, for
instance in mathematics. I have the pleasure in my study time to study mathematics
and it became very clear to me that if you don't understand personally what you are
doing in mathematics, you are not able to do anything. It is not just applying formulas or
something, you have to be acquainted with the mathematical landscape. You need to
understand how it how it works, how it is built up. So, yes, the personal is very important
in what we may call research.
00:06:30 Michael N. W.
Together with your colleagues from the Center for practical knowledge at Nord
university, you developed a research approach to investigate practice, and you called
this approach reflective practice research, consisting of three phases in the research
process. The first phase is the concrete reflection, second phase is critical reflection
and the third phase is theoretical reflection. Can you say a bit more about reflective
practice research, and can you also give some concrete examples of this research
approach so that our listeners have an idea how they could do their own reflective
practice research project?
00:07:11 Anders L.
One reason that we at the Center for Practical Knowledge developed this kind of
research came from the Research Council of Norway. It was regarded important that
researchers do practice near research, or research near to practice. One example for
research could for instance be What does it mean and what is it about to live alone? It is
a topic in Social Research. You can investigate how people are organizing their lives in
different communities, in different countries, and different cultures, and find out
patterns of living alone. Then you might find that in some countries people are almost
not at all living alone, while in other countries such as Western countries you have many
people living alone. OK, it is interesting, but then the question may come up: How may
that be relevant for practitioners for instance in the municipality? It has been a reason
why practice near research became regarded as important. Sometimes research is not
so close to practice in the municipality, for instance, where you have people living
alone. You do not see how social research on patterns of living may be very relevant for
your practical needs. Instead you may start a practice near research project where you
simply investigate how many people are living alone in the municipality. That is one kind
of practice near research. And then you have a reflective kind of practice near research
that is not asking how many, and how much, and how, but what does it mean to live
alone? And by raising these questions of meaning - what does it mean to live alone?
How is that experience? What does it mean to the people living alone? What does it
mean to people working with people living alone? Then you come into a kind of research
where you can say reflective practice research has very much in common with other
kinds of research that are very well known, such as phenomenology and hermeneutics.
You can say that if you are going to phenomenology and your interest is living alone, one
thing that is phenomenologically interesting is that living alone may lead to loneliness,
but it must not. It can also lead to what in English is called solitude. And while
loneliness is something problematic, something suffering -you may suffer very, very
much, solitude might be a very positive thing. So what is the essence of living alone? Is it
loneliness? Is it solitude? And when it comes to hermeneutics - you can gather stories
from people living alone, and it is not just about how many and how much are they
suffering, but what does it mean to them to live alone, and practice research is then very
close to this very well known research approaches. The only thing is that you take this
experience of discrepancy as a starting point. For instance, when people in the
municipality are doing social work, nursing and so on to help people living alone, they
very often experience discrepancies, and it is a problem these days that they have less
and less time, and the time is very structured. What they should do when they visit old
people, for instance, living alone? And that is not really working well and so on. So it is, I
think, a very necessary and fruitful starting point for research that you take these
experiences of discrepancy and investigate them.
00:11:45 Michael N. W.
If I understand you right, then you can use different methods in reflective practice
research like observation, autoethnography, interview, written material. Is that correct?
So that reflective practice research is kind of like the research approach, and then you
have different methodologies that you can use in order to get material? For example on
the question what does it mean to be alone?
00:12:17 Anders L.
We have tried to describe some steps in this kind of investigation. First you have to tell
what this experience of discrepancy is about. And I think telling is very important also if
you interview people; to make them tell about a situation. I developed with a colleague
of mine from Sweden a phenomenological- hermeneutical research methods based on
interviews with people. You make them tell. How is it to live alone? How is it to become
comfortable? There are very many studies done with this method. What is special in
this reflective practice research is that you may start as a researcher in your own
practice and that was very much the idea that the practitioner should do research
themselves and why then not start with your own experiences of discrepancies?
After telling the story, you take a step back and you ask yourself which topics do I find in
my story, or in the stories of others? What is the discrepancy about? Is it the scientific
knowledge that is not developed well enough? I think that is in some cases very much
the case. And could it be my customs, my personality that creates the discrepancy?
I have to reflect on it. Maybe it is hard for me to be in certain situations, and is it ethical
aspects you have to go into?
But this way of doing the search is that really science, is that real research? If I can say
something to that is what I already mentioned, it is not the kind of research where you
can test hypothesis. It is not about testability. Doing this kind of research is discussable
and it may also be very useful for practice, and in all kinds of research you have some
questions you always may raise, namely the questions of validity: Are the results of your
research valid? Are they reliable? And I would add a third aspect that is very important
also in this kind of research. That is the significance of the of the research you come to.
Is it interesting - what you have found out when you ask the question of meaning? So
what is the meaning of?
You're not asking so much, or maybe not at all- what is usual in science? You are not
asking what are the courses for these effects, or which structures do you have here in
the material? These are questions that you can test out you if you have a hypothesis of
the structure and where you have a hypothesis of the causal relation. Then you can
arrange tests where you try to find out if you really get the research of that you expect,
but if you are interested in the meaning of the phenomenon, what does it mean to live
alone. So the validity question is very positively answered in the most cases, as it is
obvious that what you try to understand is what you try to understand if you are
measuring and testing. Sometimes you may ask me about what you are testing. Is that
really what you want to test? I mean, one example is for instance the intelligence. If you
test if you try to find the intelligence of people by giving them an IQ test: Are you then
measuring intelligence, or maybe you are measuring the education levels? I mean that is
a very much known example from psychology from the United States, where they did
find out that black people were less intelligent than white people, and it was clear it had
nothing to do with biologically based intelligence. It had to do with the education
level. So the question are you really measuring what you want to measure? It is a
validity question. But if you try to understand experiences of discrepancy, the validity
issue is very much taken care of. The reliability question, on the other hand, is not so
easy as in science where you test things, because if you measure you can say exactly
how you measure, and then all the other people can do the same. But you have no
measuring in research where you try to understand the meaning of experience.
But you can make it reasonably understandable how you proceed in such research too.
00:18:38 Guro H. H.
You have mentioned a couple of times that the reflective practice research is obviously
rooted in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Can you say some more about these
roots? How is reflective practice research rooted in phenomenology and in
hermeneutics?
00:18:39 Anders L.
Yeah, it is. It is necessarily rooted in that because it was a reaction to science as it was
developed and came into the universities around 1850. Before that you had the
sciences developed in the scientific academies from 1600 and something in Italy and
then in London and in all countries. And then around 1850 natural sciences came into
the universities, and it was a very tough to process where you were able to develop a lot
of technology out of that. But then you also got a reaction to that, a reaction saying, “OK,
it is good that you may investigate the causal relations and how things are functioning
and the structure of the material materiality. But what does it mean to live in the world?”
You know, what does it mean to try to find orientation in this world. And so
hermeneutics came up. Hermeneutics was the tradition of understanding texts, and
then it became clear that you don't just understand text. You understand all kinds of
expressions. Also, actions are expressed, and we are expressing ourselves together in
societies. And it is a challenge to understand what that is about. So that was the
hermeneutic tradition that you necessarily have to stay within.
Then around 1900 Edmund Husserl founded phenomenology as a research method. The
reason why he did that was that he was a mathematician, and he realized that the
researchers would not find out how the brain is functioning by doing mathematics, not
just the brain, but also how psychologically may explain mathematics? Then Husserl
said to that. “Yeah, well, you can do that, but it is completely uninteresting for a
mathematician. He is not getting better as a mathematician by that kind of research
because mathematics is a landscape of it's own. It is a meaningful, understandable
landscape. This is the life world, also of human beings - this understandable meaning of
the world we are living in. He held this idea very strongly. It is structured quite similarly
to mathematics, so you should be able to investigate it very exactly. And that is a
discussion where you in the tradition of phenomenology and hermeneutics have come
much more in into this development, because you cannot just describe phenomena and
find the meaning. By doing so you are always trying to understand your own experience.
That is an important element to hermeneutics.
This is the case also for reflective practice research. We are in the same tradition, but
above all when you try to understand practical knowledge when you realize,” OK, when I
am acting in a practical situation and I'm working as a social worker or as a teacher, a
physician and so on, I am not just applying theoretical knowledge as maybe an engineer
is doing when he is building a fabric or he is building a bridge or constructing a
skyscraper and so on, which is very much a question of applying knowledge exactly. But
when you are working with people you cannot just apply knowledge. You have to
understand what you are doing, and then when you don't understand, that might be a
very fruitful starting point. And why look away from that? What is very much the case
today is claims that it is not scientific enough to look at your own experiences. You have
to look out outside and to find something -to do interviews, etc. That is OK, but you have
to understand it yourself. You cannot just look outside to understand mathematics.
00:23:52 Michael N. W.
In one of your articles, you take up the term svarevne in Norwegian. It could be
translated with answerability or responsibility, or also response-ability, something that
is not irrelevant for this podcast. So my question now is, how would you describe this
response-ability, and why is it important that professionals, like nurses, teachers and so
on - develop this ability?
00: 24:03 Anders Lindseth
When you as a practitioner are working with people, it is not enough to have
instructions. You have to understand what you are doing, and the first thing you have to
see is that you are responding to the situation. Let`s say you come into a situation to an
old lady living alone, or into a classroom or anywhere in nursing practices. And you are
in a situation where you have knowledge that you try to apply in the situation. But then
you see, it is not that easy that some people just tell you what to do. You have to stand
behind your action. You have to find out how to act in a good way to respond to this
challenge of the situation.
00:25:10 Michael N. W.
Do I understand you right that this form of response-ability that you are describing now
is also related to what Victor Frankel called the search for meaning or related to the
question that you bring into the second phase of a reflective practice research process -
the critical reflection phase: What is at stake? Is the response-ability related to that - to
ask yourself as a practitioner, what is at stake in the situation that I find myself in, or
what is the meaning of that situation?
00:25:48 Anders L.
Yeah, absolutely. That is the question: What is at stake in this situation? What is it really
about? Because you if you have got your instructions and you tend to think that you
should have the answer to that question of what is it about. Because you should know
beforehand what it is about. You're standing here and teaching for the school class. “I
know what to teach. I should be able to do that.” And then all kinds of disturbing things
happen, and then you have to ask how to understand that - What is the meaning here? A
colleague in the Center in Bodø, she said once humoristic that if a teacher stands
before a school class and is uncertain in this situation, the pupils can be like
“cannibals”. They eat the person immediately. How to get this certainty in the situation
that make these young “cannibals” friendly? You don't find out that by instructions.
00:26:57 Guro H. H.
The third phase in this reflective practice research process is the theoretical reflection
part. How is that also important? We talked a lot about the concrete reflection and also
the critical reflection where you ask what is really the meaning of this experience or
what is really at stake here. But the third phase is the theoretical reflection. What is this
about?
00:27:36 Anders L.
You Michael mentioned Victor Frankl and his book Man`s search for meaning, and I
think that the way Victor Frankl raised this question has very much to do what I said.
When you experience that living and being alone is not necessarily being lonely, it has a
deep meaning that you can live alone. You are not lonely and what is the meaning of
that, I mean. To understand what it is, it is fruitful to go to literature where such
experiences are described. Because in all cultures you have had attempts to realize life
by living alone. But if you are working with people who are in need for something, then
ethics comes in. And to understand ethics and what ethics is about - I have advocated
for a long time - it is not enough to regard ethics as an instruction how to act. What is
the duty? Which are the consequences of your actions? These are ways of thinking
particularly about action, how to relate to the situation, how to be in a good way. It is not
just acting, but being. How are we as human beings able to be in such a ways that we
can relate to people in need? And that is an ethical question. So there's a lot of literature
about that.
00:29:32 Guro H. H.
We are getting close to a closure here, but it is also interesting - since you talk about
living alone - you have been an ACEM meditation practitioner and instructor for a long,
long time in your life?
00:29:56 Anders L.
I have been practicing this meditation for 56 years. I did find out a couple of months ago
as I gave the course in Munich on meditation.
00:29:59 Guro H. H.
Wow, that is so interesting. And we'd really like to hear you reflect a little bit about the
relationship between reflection and meditation, and how this is connected to reflective
practice research as you practice it.
00:30:25 Anders L.
I think that is the reason why I so much like this example of living alone, because to me,
actually, it has been a clear experience of meditation experience that in all in these
retreats that are arranged by the Arkham schools of meditation, you come into a realm
of silence. Yet this meditation is not very silent, mostly because it comes a lot of
impulses and thoughts about daily life into it, and then you realize also that you have
experiences inside you that needs to come up and to be met again, but in these long
retreats, you also realize there is no science of silence and it is not science- silence.
And that that is the dimension of life that is enough in itself somehow. You could say I
don't know it enough with the right words. And then as I was examining in Copenhagen a
few weeks ago on a dissertation about open dialogue as an approach to working with
people, the student referred to Hanna Arendt and her concept of thinking. Because
Hanna Arendt says if you don't find this in the realm of silence, you are not thinking,
because you are lost in all kinds of impulses. I think that is a very contemplative
insight. If you do not have that starting point in inner silence, you are not really thinking.
You are lost in all kinds of considerations and calculations and so on. I mean, Arendt
was a student of Martin Heidegger and he is known for many things, but also for the
sentence that “science does not think”. And what the science then doing? It is
calculating, and it is very good at calculating, but to be able to think you have to find this
inner common realm of silence. And if you do not find that, you do not have any ground
in yourself from which you can really think. It is so much to say about that. It is very
interesting.
00:33:17 Michael N. W.
OK, I think that we are approaching the end of this episode. A big thank you to our guest.
It was a pleasure having you with us, Anders. Also a big thank you to our listeners. It
would be great to welcome you in some of our other episodes again. And with that, we
can only say. Goodbye and enjoy the rest of your day.