Max van Manen

Linking Ways of Knowing with Ways of Being Practical.

An interpretation of the concept of the practical for the field for curriculum must pay critical attention to the philosophies of knowledge in which the interpretation is grounded. The main traditions of social science (broadly conceived as the empirical-analytic, the hermeneuticphenomenological, and the critical-dialectical) each have associated with them quite distinct ways of knowing and distinct modes of being practical. This paper seeks to demonstrate that it is only through such critical reflection that the questions of greatest significance to the field can be adequately addressed.

On the Epistemology of Reflective Practice

Abstract Schon (1987) has suggested that professional education undervalues practical knowledge and grants privileged status to intellectual scientific and rational knowledge forms that may only be marginally relevant to practical acting. This is not just an issue of sociology of knowledge. The literature of teaching and teacher education has shown that professional practices of educating cannot be properly understood unless we are willing to conceive of practical knowledge and reflective practice quite differently. It is for this reason that I would like to raise some questions about the meaning and place of practical reflection in teaching and about the relation between knowledge and action in teaching, the kind of teaching that is educational or pedagogical.

Modalities of Body Experience in Illness and Health

How do we experience our body in illness or health? This is a question that can easily comprise a book-length study. In this article, a selection of basic distinctions is explored that may be especially appropriate for pursuing this question. Increasingly the health science professional is becoming aware that people require not only health care assistance, surgical treatment, or pharmaceutical treatment, but that the professional be much more involved in the way that people experience and live with their problems in a different, sometimes deeply personal and unique manner. It is argued that nursing especially is involved in helping the patient, the elderly, the disabled, or the person whofor reasons of circumstance is out of step with the body to recover a livable relation with his or her psycho-physical being.How do we experience our body in illness or health? This is a question that can easily comprise a book-length study. In this article, a selection of basic distinctions is explored that may be especially appropriate for pursuing this question. Increasingly the health science professional is becoming aware that people require not only health care assistance, surgical treatment, or pharmaceutical treatment, but that the professional be much more involved in the way that people experience and live with their problems in a different, sometimes deeply personal and unique manner. It is argued that nursing especially is involved in helping the patient, the elderly, the disabled, or the person whofor reasons of circumstance is out of step with the body to recover a livable relation with his or her psycho-physical being.

Writing Qualitatively, or the Demands of Writing

Have you ever said this or heard someone say this: “I have done all of my data analysis— I just have to write it down.” Or, “I just have to write it up”? I will suggest that within the context of phenomenological inquiry, it is not necessarily helpful to try to assist researchers learning “how to write down” their reflections or “how to write up” their results. What should be more helpful is learning “how to write.” Qualitative writing may be seen as an active struggle for understanding and recognition of the lived meanings of the lifeworld, and this writing also possesses passive and receptive rhetoric dimensions. It requires that we be attentive to other voices, to subtle significations in the way that things and others speak to us. In part, this is achieved through contact with the words of others. These words need to touch us, guide us, stir us.

The pathic principle of pedagogical language

Abstract This paper attempts to show how the pedagogical task of teaching involves cultivating pathic dimensions of the epistemology of teaching practice. Teacher knowledge is pathic to the extent that the act of teaching depends on the teachers personal presence, relational perceptiveness, tact for knowing what to say and do in contingent situations, thoughtful routines and practices, and other aspects of knowledge that are in part pre-reflective, pre-theoretic, pre-linguistic and, in a sense, non-cognitive.

The Pedagogy of Momus Technologies: Facebook, Privacy, and Online Intimacy

Through cable and wireless connections at home and at work, through Wi-Fi networks and wireless spots in hotels, coffee shops, and town squares, we are indeed connected to each other. But what is the phenomenology of this connection? Technologies of expression such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking technologies increasingly become like Momus windows of Greek mythology, revealing ones innermost thoughts for all to see. They give access to what used to be personal, secret, and hidden in the lives of its users, especially the young. In this article I explore the pedagogy of Momus effects of social networking technologies in the way they may alter young peoples experience of privacy, secrecy, solitude, and intimacy. In addition, I examine the forms of contact afforded by instant messaging and texting on wireless mobile technologies such as the cell phone (and its wireless hybrids) for the way young people are and stay in touch with each other, and how intimacies and inner lives are attended to.Through cable and wireless connections at home and at work, through Wi-Fi networks and wireless spots in hotels, coffee shops, and town squares, we are indeed connected to each other. But what is the phenomenology of this connection? Technologies of expression such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other social networking technologies increasingly become like Momus windows of Greek mythology, revealing one’s innermost thoughts for all to see. They give access to what used to be personal, secret, and hidden in the lives of its users, especially the young. In this article I explore the pedagogy of Momus effects of social networking technologies in the way they may alter young people’s experience of privacy, secrecy, solitude, and intimacy. In addition, I examine the forms of contact afforded by instant messaging and texting on wireless mobile technologies such as the cell phone (and its wireless hybrids) for the way young people are and stay in touch with each other, and how intimacies and inner lives are attended to.

Professional Practice and ‘Doing Phenomenology’

In 1975 Herbert Spiegelberg seized a title for a text on phenomenology that still speaks to the pragmatic sensibilities of many of my colleagues and graduate students. A visitor glances at my bookshelves and notices Spiegelberg’s title Doing Phenomenology; the book is pulled and perused. Some of the section headings make attractive promises: “A new way into phenomenology: the workshop approach,” “Existential uses of phenomenology,” “Toward a phenomenology of experience,” etc. But after a bit more browsing the book is returned to the shelf, without comment. Never has anyone asked to borrow it. And yet, Doing Phenomenology seems to be a text with commendable ambitions. In it Spiegelberg (1975, p. 25) decries “the relative sterility in phenomenological philosophy … especially in comparison with what happened in such countries as France and the Netherlands.”1 Presenting essays both on and in phenomenology, he suggests that what is needed is “a revival of the spirit of doing phenomenology directly on the phenomena.” And he asks: “What can be done to reawaken [this spirit] in a very different setting?” (1975, p. 25). Spiegelberg (1975, p. 26) sketches an example of the workshop approach consisting of “a small number of graduate students who would select limited, ‘bitesize’ topics for phenomenological exploration.” It is difficult not to feel the hope that speaks in the pages of this book.

The Phenomenology of Space in Writing Online

In this paper we explore the phenomenon of writing online. We ask, ‘Is writing by means of online technologies affected in a manner that differs significantly from the older technologies of pen on paper, typewriter, or even the word processor in an off‐line environment?’ In writing online, the author is engaged in a spatial complexity of physical, temporal, imaginal, and virtual experience: the writing space, the space of the text, cyber space, etc. At times, these may provide a conduit to a writerly understanding of human phenomena. We propose that an examination of the phenomenological features of online writing may contribute to a more pedagogically sensitive understanding of the experiences of online seminars, teaching and learning.

Transdisciplinarity and the New Production of Knowledge

I appears that universityand discipline-based forms of inquiry are giving way to new modes of knowledge generation. In The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, Michael Gibbons and his international group of colleagues (1999) argued that transdisciplinarity is a term of the discourse that describes changes in the way that research is increasingly practiced in contemporary societies. Whereas traditionally knowledge is developed in the scholarly context of academic disciplines, the new knowledge production is carried out within a context of application. The authors—Gibbons, Limoges, Nowotny, Schwartzman, Scott, and Trow—showed at the hand of many examples that the new scientists are less often occupied with basic or first principle research and more often with direct applications of knowledge to problems arising in technological, commercial, industrial, economic, communicational, and governmental sectors. The argument about the “new mode of knowledge production” is provocative because this new mode is not the result of simple borrowings, importations, and accumulations of existent disciplinary perspectives, concepts, and methodologies. Rather, the new mode of knowledge production transcends the disciplinary theories and paradigms from which it is in part derived. Gibbons et al. (1999) call this “mode 2 knowledge production.” What distinguishes this new epistemology of transdisciplinary and application is that it is more context sensitive, eclectic, transient, and inventive than traditional (or mode 1) interdisciplinary and crossdisciplinary research practices and methodologies. Gibbons et al. (1999) suggested that their examples and models are problem-solution oriented and often driven by considerations of marketability, social policy, and practical use. Yet they also see similar trends of transdisciplinarity and context-sensitive inquiry occurring in the humanities and the arts. For example, they cite the new uses of information technologies and computer science in qualitative research (see Table 1). Gibbons and colleagues described and advocated a way of thinking about knowledge and knowledge production that is quite reductionist and problematic from the perspective of the ethical value of human understanding. But it is important to be aware of the global trends to conceptualize knowledge in management and marketplace terms. In a sequel study Rethinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty, Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons (2001) explored how the re-

Phenomenology in Its Original Sense

In this article, I try to think through the question, “What distinguishes phenomenology in its original sense?” My intent is to focus on the project and methodology of phenomenology in a manner tha...