Session Information
13 SES 06 A, Free Schools, the Third Term, and the Body
Paper Session
Contribution
In higher education programs, students not only learn a broad array of knowledge and skills, but we also expect they will be transformed in some respects through the experience. This expectation is perhaps most explicit in the case of education for the professions, where we assume students will be transformed on the way to becoming economists, social workers or physiotherapists. What this transformation entails and how it is enabled through professional education programs is rarely made clear, however.
A central aspect of this transformation is that aspiring professionals learn to enact and embody professional practice in learning to be professionals (Dall’Alba 2009). Moreover, Martin Heidegger considers modes of knowing, such as architecture, history and physics, as ways of being human (1927/1962, p. 408). This means we embody our knowing in our ways of teaching, engineering, nursing and so on. Marjorie O’Loughlin points out that “our bodies are nothing less than our characteristic way of being in the world” (2006, p. 14). As students in professional programs learn to enact what they know, this involves constituting the body as (aspiring) professional, both individually and collectively as part of a profession. A key question, then, is how the body is constituted during and through the transformation from student to (aspiring) professional.
In this paper, we explore what is entailed in constituting the body as (aspiring) professional in the field of biotechnology. Our research is underpinned by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s (1962/1945) notion of the ‘lived body,’ which is not limited to the body as an interconnecting system of organs. Despite some limitations, the concept of the lived body provides a rich resource for exploring the ‘bodily grounds’ (Sheets-Johnstone 2015) of skilful performance in the practice of biotechnology. We bring into focus the bodily grounds of practice through exploring learning that occurs when students endeavour to enact their knowing for achieving particular purposes in the process of learning to be professionals.
In exploring how students learn to embody the practice of biotechnology, we draw upon a distinction Merleau-Ponty makes between ‘the body I am’ and ‘the body I have,’ which are “not disjoint but inherently related” (Sheets-Johnstone, 2015, p.26). As Merleau-Ponty explains:
"The experience of our own body … reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing … rooted in nature at the very moment when it is transformed by cultural influences, never hermetically sealed and never left behind. Whether it is a question of another’s body or my own, I have no means of knowing the human body other than that of living it, which means taking up on my own account the drama which is being played out in it, and losing myself in it. I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional sketch of my total being." (1962/1945, p. 198)
We pay close attention to this distinction in a manner that has particular relevance for learning by aspiring professionals, as they attempt to embody features of practice that are new and unfamiliar to them.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Dall’Alba, G. (2009). Learning to be professionals. Dordrecht: Springer. Dall’Alba, G. & Sandberg, J. (2014). A phenomenological perspective on researching work and learning. In S. Billett, C. Harteis, & H. Gruber (Eds.), Handbook of research in professional and practice-based learning (pp. 279-304). Dordrecht & New York: Springer. Heidegger, M. (1962/1927). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: SCM Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962/1945). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. O’Loughlin, M. (2006). Embodiment and education: Exploring creatural existence. Dordrecht: Springer. Sheets-Johnstone, M. (2015). Embodiment on trial: A phenomenological investigation. Continental Philosophy Review, 48, 23-39. Wolkowitz, C. (2006). Bodies at work. Thousand Oaks, Ca & London: Sage.
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