David Beckett

Embodied Competence and Generic Skill: The emergence of inferential understanding

© 2004 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK EPAT ducational Philosophy and Theory 0013-1857

Holistic Competence: Putting Judgements First

Professional practice can be conceptualised holistically, and in fact during the 1990s the ‘Australian model’ of integrated or holistic competence emerged empirically. This piece outlines that story, and then develops a more rigorous conceptual analysis of what it is to make competent practical judgements, through inferences, in context-specific and accountable ways (such as to one’s peer group of professionals, or to the public). Current research interest in the Schonian swamp-like messiness of judgements (e.g. in clinical medicine) is drawn upon to advance a new epistemology of practice, which takes seriously the ‘know how’ of real work situations, as the basis for a revival of Aristotelianphronesis.

Perceptions of professional identity: a story from paediatrics

How can teaching construct professional identity? In a large Australian teaching hospital, a support program for trainee paediatricians who themselves conduct clinical (bedside) tutorials for groups of medical students invites them to focus on their professional identities as teachers, separately from their identities as clinicians, and to critically reflect on contemporary approaches to workplace‐based medical education. The notion of the Guide emerges in the findings, as the paediatricians meld their clinical and their pedagogical expertise in highly relational and situational judgements.

Learning for/at work:Somali women “doing it for themselves”

This article draws on the understanding of the lives and experiences of two Somali women, as case studies, to examine the relationship between identity, work and language learning. It begins with a brief discussion of embodied knowledge, with a view to exploring how “know how” intersects with literacy and identity. The article then moves to the two case studies to illustrate how certain experiences of work, and of seeking work, embody vital knowledge. The article concludes by considering how this practical embodied knowledge can be confirmed and harnessed to enrich adults’ learning for the workplace.

Just‐in‐time training: techne meets phronesis

Assisted by new software and driven by internal budgets, managers’ “just‐in‐time training” is emerging as an interesting aspect of workplace learning, not least because it provokes re‐consideration of adult learning principles, and perhaps of educative understanding itself.

Straining training: the epistemology of workplace learning

Learning in, and from, the workplace has moved centre‐stage. In this paper, arguments and insights from the humanities, in particular philosophical psychology, are developed to show that generic, higher‐order human qualities are demanded and cultivated by managerial work. What was traditionally regarded as a great epistemological divide between high‐status intrinsic education, and low‐status instrumental training (with work‐based knowledge in the latter area) is now dissolving. New workforce requirements of creativity and initiative are now regarded as essential to an evolving national and international enterprise culture. Close analysis of the psychology of decision‐making reveals both a paradox and a powerful metaphor for a more appropriate model of workplace knowledge.

Workplace Learning as Postmodernist Enactment: A Model from Dementia.

Abstract Workplace learning confronts much traditional educational thinking, since it engages the local, informal and capricious nature of the workplace experience, and tries to make these educatively worthwhile. Using staff learning experiences in certain dementia units in Melbourne as empirical data, the paper builds up a model of workplace learning, utilizing insights from postmodernist scholarship. It confronts in this way some of the central notions of truth and knowledge explicit in more modernist epistemologies, whilst adhering to a modernist ontology – that is, to the assumption that a mind-independent reality persists. If the analysis is successful, educators can be encouraged to develop a new epistemology of (workplace) learning, which has much to contribute to the arrival of vocational education at the centre of lifelong education theorisations and practices, especially research practices.

Learning to Be – At Work

When professionals learn what it is to be a professional, they are already involved in a reflexive and reflective process which brings daily challenges to their sense of Self. In asking how doctors think, Montgomery (How doctors think: clinical judgement and the practice of medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) unearths an Aristotelian phronesis – a practical wisdom – which drives increasingly efficacious judgments, in clinical cases. This chapter will explore the conceptual basis for such workplace experiences, analysing their emergent quality, their perceptual intensity (‘paying attention’ as Luntley, a Wittgensteinian, puts it), their reliance on embodiment, and, throughout, their holism (following Dewey). Thus, the chapter will establish a solid conceptual basis for ontological and epistemological relationality, such that our professional identities can be both found in, and developed by, meaningful workplace learning. We learn to be, by doing

Expertise, pedagogy and practice

The articles in this special issue continue the development of what might be called the ‘anti-cognitivist’ movement in philosophy, cognitive science, psychology and philosophy of education. The issue provides several innovative analyses which advance a more experientially holistic approach to the characterization and growth of human expertise, through practices which, in this issue, are exemplified in sport, the arts, workplaces and other sites where humans strive to do well. Until recently, in the various cognitive sciences and associated fields, cognitivism has been an attractive model for research. Arguably it remains the dominant conceptual and research framework, and it is not hard to see why. In the aftermath of behaviourism, and in light of the perceived anti-scientific nihilism of a psychoanalytic framework, cognitivism seemed to promise a rigorous and productive research paradigm, backed by Chomskian linguistics, Fodor’s modularization of the mind, and the mainstream of psychological research and practice. Furthermore, the intellectualist and individualist presuppositions that lie at its core sit comfortably with liberal ideology, and in the area of education it has meshed well with dominant approaches to the treatment of formal education, and with popular conceptions of the development of the self. For example, in education research, the prevalence of developmental psychology, as a disciplinary basis for learning (especially children’s learning), has been most alluring to the general public when it has claimed that ‘good parenting’ results from children’s attachment and bonding from birth (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2012). This pursuit of an ideal relationship——as it ‘develops’ over time——assumes an atomistic view of the world, where individuals can become what they most want to be. And so we have the ideologies of self-direction, personal growth and affective well-being, where these are constructed in market-driven cultures and consumer preferences: the Project of the Self driven by endless choice-making; the ideal worker, first and foremost, the subject of cognitivism——capable of choosing her or his destiny, even amidst the sociality that almost all workplaces generate (Beckett, 2010, 2012b, 2012c). It can be argued (though not in this issue) that positive psychology, a rapidly emergent phenomenon in education, needs to divest itself of its individualistic ‘happiness’ agenda, in favour of Educational Philosophy and Theory, 2014 Vol. 46, No. 6, 563–568, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2013.779470

Ontological Distinctiveness and the Emergence of Purposes

In their wide-ranging analysis of scholarship on human agency, Emirbayer and Mische (Am J Soc 103:962–1023, 1998) claim: