Year: 2010
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This is a conceptual thesis about how both learning in relation to professional practice, \nparticularly learning from practice, and the production and use of professional \nknowledge, can be understood. The work of the thesis is an attempt to address the issue \nof how to conceptualise an onto-epistemological framework for inquiry in the field of \nsocial sciences that consists of learning, practice, learning from practice and producing \nand using knowledge; a framework that fits more productively with practitioners’ \nexperience in these areas than the one we currently use. \nThe traditional ontological perspective, that frames the way in which concepts such as \npractice and learning are conceptualised, imposes significant limitations on their \nunderstanding and use. This traditional framework is substantialist in form. That is, it \nreflects a model of the world in which substances or entities have prime ontological \nsignificance. Because of this, the relations between entities are commonly either treated \nthemselves reductively as additional entities, or are ignored. I argue that it is this \nrelational reductionism of the traditional substantialist ontology that is problematic \nwhen considering human processes such as practice and learning. \nThe thesis has its experiential origins in the lack of fit between espoused theories of \nlearning and theories-in-use as related to professional practice. To illustrate this I use \nthe claims of Evidence-based Medicine to function as a theory of medical practice and \nas a medical epistemology. I argue that its limitations in both areas follow from its \ndevelopment within the traditional substantialist, or entity-based, framework which \nshapes these claims. The limitations of Evidence-based Medicine serve as an example \nof the way in which applying relationally reductive manoeuvres to the complex relations \nof lived experience, while to some degree a necessary aspect of all human social \nfunctioning, is problematic if not done in a critical or reflective manner. \nThe body of constructs and theories known as ‘complexity’ offers a more encompassing \nonto-epistemological framework for considering human processes. It does so because it \nis relation-based. In such a framework, systems and processes are conceptualised as \nbeing constituted by their relations, rather than built up of their composite entities. In \nthis thesis I draw on several already current theories and bodies of concepts which are \nconsistent with a complexity perspective, to support the use of complexity as a \nframework in re-formulating learning and its relation to practice. \nThe first of these is the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey’s formulation of living \nfunctionality which has ‘trans-actional’ relations as a central feature. I argue that if these \nrelations are understood as an exemplar of complex living relations, then complexity \nhas a capacity to account for the generativity (the emergence of the radically new) and \nthe indeterminacy (the unknown unknowns) of human functioning, neither of which can \nbe done within the traditional substantialist framework. \nThe second is a body of concepts derived from psychoanalytic thinking and other \ntheories of psycho-biological functioning which relate to human affective functioning. \nHuman affective needs act as a driver of social processes and activities and human \nexperience that is affectively shared between individuals and socially processed. \nproduces meaning. What these concepts have in common is an understanding of human \npsycho-social function as having a relational basis at multiple levels, for which transactional \nrelating can function as a model. These psycho-biological concepts, with \nsociologist Niklas Luhmann’s theories of social functioning as emerging from interpersonal \ncommunication, allow for distinctions to be made between aspects of human \nfunctioning at biological, psychological and social ‘levels’, levels that are both \ndifferentiated and mutually dependent, allowing a re-formulation of learning, its relation \nto practice and the production of knowledge. \nWith these theories in mind, I take the ‘co-present group’ as central to an exploration of \nhow practice and learning might look from a complexity perspective. The human copresent \ngroup is a group, such as a work group, where individuals are each known to the \nothers as specific individuals. It functions as a complex system (the group) of complex \nsystems (the participating individuals). I argue that the co-present group functions as the \nsite of both human learning and of the origin, development and modification of all \nsocial and cultural phenomena, both of which depend on the group processing of human \naffective states. \nBecause humans have the capacity to ‘share’ the processing of affective states with \nother specific individuals, this processing function is not co-terminous with the \nbiological human individual but can be considered as an aspect of co-present group’s \nfunctionality. Learning, for the individual, emerges from co-present group processes \nthrough the bio-psychological individual. In contrast, and following the work of \nsociologist Niklas Luhmann, ‘communications’ emerge from complexity-reducing \ninteractions between individuals, thus having a social origin, and are available for \nelaboration into social and cultural phenomena through repeated use and re-use in \nmultiple contexts. \nI draw conclusions to this thesis in two areas. The first is that if complexity is \nunderstood broadly as being based on complex living relations as exemplified by John \nDewey’s trans-actions, it can function as an onto-epistemological framework for inquiry \ninto living human processes. The second area, which follows as a consequence of using \nsuch a framework, is that human processes are re-conceptualised in functional terms and \ncan be seen as being based in, and emergent from, co-present group function. This, in \nturn, has consequences for how we understand learning, its relation to practice and the \nproduction and use of knowledge.
Author: JE Lancaster
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2289975623