In the theoretical framework developed by Y. Lenoir and his colleagues, Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is fundamental to explaining the tacit aspect of teaching practices. This article takes a critical look at the connection the framework makes between the concept of habitus and that of embedded skills, which is derived from French ergonomic psychology. Our primary objective is to examine the relevance and the limitations of this connection, with specific focus on its methodological implications. Our results indicate that a (...) cognitive interpretation of the concept of habitus may contribute significantly to understanding the implicit aspect of professional practices. Dans le cadre théorique élaboré par Y. Lenoir et ses collègues, le concept bourdieusien d’habitus joue un rôle central pour expliquer la dimension tacite des pratiques enseignantes. Cet article propose de porter un regard critique sur le rapprochement proposé dans ce cadre entre le concept d’habitus et celui de compétence incorporée issu de psychologie ergonomique francophone. Notre objectif principal est d’examiner la pertinence et les limites de ce rapprochement, en portant une attention particulière à ses implications méthodologiques. Nos résultats indiquent la pertinence d’une interprétation cognitive du concept d’habitus, contribuant de façon significative à la compréhension de la dimension implicite des pratiques professionnelles. (shrink)

This paper will explore the relationship between Mezirow's concept of reflexivity and Bourdieu's theory of habitus in order to develop a more robust framework within which critical reflection can take place. Nurse educators have sought to close the theory practice gap through the use of critical reflection. However, we are not convinced that this has produced the depth and quality of reflection required. Furthermore, the contexts in which critical reflection takes place is often sidelined or erased so that the whole (...) impetus in the literature is to educate nurses in reflection rather than empower nurses to understand the complex circumstances and barriers that obstruct critical reflection. This paper argues that the reason for this position is that nurse education does not always acknowledge the role that personal and cultural values systems have on reflective practices. The literature search was undertaken using CINHAL and MEDLINE. Keywords included: values systems, habitus, and critical reflection. Inclusion criteria were determined by the theoretical approach and included seminal texts, from as far back as 1956, to identify key themes. Although critical reflection is a potentially powerful way of enhancing care it has often failed to do so. It is suggested that this is because nurse educators have frequently used models of reflection without considering the impact that student's personal values systems has on their perceptions of care and subsequently care delivery. The purpose of this paper is to promote deeper levels of reflection and is part of a programme of research aimed at developing a more robust approach to reflection in educational practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Cognitive Error and Contemplative Practices:The Cultivation of Discernment in Mind and HeartWesley J. WildmanBrains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors (...) can be diagnosed and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.The term "error" is a potentially problematic one in that it misleadingly suggests that there might be a uniquely correct way in which cognition should work. I do not wish to suggest such a binary opposition. After all, biases exist in the human cognitive system either because they have been selected in the evolutionary process for their survival benefits or because they are side effects of other traits selected for their usefulness. My concern is with the wondrous human discovery that we can analyze [End Page 61] our behaviors and beliefs with such precision that we can sometimes detect when our cognitive biases produce mistaken beliefs and self-defeating behaviors. This forms the basis for my contention that cognition can often work better than it does—more accurately, less self-destructively—when tendencies to cognitive error are diagnosed, corrected, and perhaps even systematically resisted.The profound irony here is that the very same social groups (secular and religious) with an obvious vested interest in resisting such enlightenment in some respects can also promote processes of discernment and insight in other respects. Existing literature in the cognitive psychology of religion rarely bothers with such subtleties. It is common to assume that simply to notice the operation of cognitive biases in religion—say, in supporting belief in supernatural entities who providentially interact in human affairs, or in establishing and reinforcing people's willingness to defer to certain kinds of religious authority—is at the same time to establish the presence of rampant cognitive error, massive resistance to diagnosing and correcting it, and thus the infliction of pernicious cruelties on young children who have no way of escaping the resulting irrational indoctrination.This moral reflex to condemn religious groups because of their characteristic reluctance to acknowledge the role of cognitive biases in their beliefs and practices is understandable given the irrationality, ignorance, or denial that such reluctance suggests. I frankly acknowledge that I share this moral concern. But the actual complexities of religious practice demonstrate that the situation demands a subtler evaluation. Resistance to awareness of cognitive biases exists both inside and outside religious groups; economic and political practices in all eras and of all types have every bit as much to gain from neglecting to enlighten people about their cognitive operations as religious groups do—just consider the techniques employed in commercial advertising and political campaigns. Moreover, religious groups also promote methods of discernment and self-awareness that have historically been, and continue to be, the dominant method by which... (shrink)

Over the past 50 years decision making research in team invasion sport has been dominated by three research perspectives,information processing,ecological dynamics, andnaturalistic decision making. Recently, attempts have been made to integrate perspectives, as conceptual similarities demonstrate the decision making process as an interaction between a players perception of game information and the individual and collective capability to act on it. Despite this, no common ground has been found regarding what connects perception and action during performance. The differences between perspectives rest (...) on the role of stored mental representations, that may, or may not facilitate the retrieval of appropriate responses in time pressured competitive environments. Additionally, in team invasion sports like rugby union, the time available to players to perceive, access memory and act, alters rapidly between specific game situations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to examine theoretical differences and the mechanisms that underpin them, through the vehicle of rugby union. Sixteen semi-elite rugby union players took part in two post-game procedures to explore the following research objectives; (i) to consider how game situations influence players perception of information; (ii) to consider how game situations influence the application of cognitive mechanisms whilst making decisions; and (iii) to identify the influence of tactics and/or strategy on player decision making. Deductive content analysis and elementary units of meaning derived from self-confrontation elicitation interviews indicate that specific game situations such as; the lineout, scrum or open phases of play or the tackle situation in attack or defence all provide players with varying complexity of perceptual information, formed through game information and time available to make decisions. As time increased, players were more likely to engage with task-specific declarative knowledge-of the game, stored as mental representations. As time diminished, players tended to diagnose and update their knowledge-in the game in a rapid fashion. Occasionally, when players described having no time, they verbalised reacting on instinct through a direct connection between perception and action. From these findings, clear practical implications and directions for future research and dissemination are discussed. (shrink)

Many notions of interprofessional collaboration appear to aim for the ideal of trouble‐free co‐operative communication between healthcare professionals. This study challenges such an ideal as too far removed from the complex and contested relations of power that characterise the albeit skilful everyday social interactions which take place within healthcare practice, along with the associated pragmatic compromises made by disempowered practitioners. It is noted that these may be facilitated by modes of comforting myth and denial. To underline this point, psychiatric (...) illness diagnosis is used as an illustrative example of how a historically powerful societal discourse can become thoroughly entrenched. The influence of a paradigmatically dominant discourse is shown to extend beyond the repetition of narrative within open dialogue and debate and to continue as tacitly reflected patterns within unconsciously habituated behaviour and durable artefacts that crystallise future affordances and limitations on action. However, the authors conclude by introducing optimistic theoretical speculation around the dynamic social mechanics of reflexive awareness and creativity, as these emerge within moments of significant dissonance between dialectically interacting layers of individually internalised and contextually embedded discourse, conversation and direct experience. (shrink)

The use of case-based reasoning in teaching professional ethics has come of age. The fields of medicine, engineering, and business all have incorporated ethics case studies into leading textbooks and journal articles, as well as undergraduate and graduate professional ethics courses. The most recent guidelines from the National Institutes of Health recognize case studies and face-to-face discussion as best practices to be included in training programs for the Responsible Conduct of Research. While there is a general consensus that (...) case studies play a central role in the teaching of professional ethics, there is still much to be learned regarding how professionals learn ethics using case-based reasoning. Cases take many forms, and there are a variety of ways to write them and use them in teaching. This paper reports the results of a study designed to investigate one of the issues in teaching case-based ethics: the role of one’s professional knowledge in learning methods of moral reasoning. Using a novel assessment instrument, we compared case studies written and analyzed by three groups of students whom we classified as: Experts in a research domain in bioengineering. Novices in a research domain in bioengineering. The non-research group—students using an engineering domain in which they were interested but had no in-depth knowledge. This study demonstrates that a student’s level of understanding of a professional knowledge domain plays a significant role in learning moral reasoning skills. (shrink)

Learning disabilities are highly prevalent on college campuses, yet students with learning disabilities graduate at lower rates than those without disabilities. Academic and psychosocial supports are essential for overcoming challenges and for improving postsecondary educational opportunities for students with learning disabilities. A holistic, multi-level model of campus-based supports was established to facilitate culture and practice changes at the institutional level, while concurrently bolstering mentors’ abilities to provide learning disability-knowledgeable support, and simultaneously creating opportunities for students’ personal and interpersonal development. Mixed (...) methods were used to investigate implementation of coordinated personal, interpersonal, and institutional level supports for undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students with learning disabilities. A one-group pre-test post-test strategy was used to examine undergraduate outcomes. Participants included 52 STEM undergraduates with learning disabilities, 57 STEM graduate student mentors, 34 STEM faculty mentors, and 34 university administrators and personnel as members of a university-wide council. Enrolled for two years, undergraduates were engaged in group meetings involving psychoeducation and reflective discussions, development of self-advocacy projects, and individual mentorship. Undergraduates reported improved self efficacy (p =.001), campus connection (p <.001), professional development (p ≤.002), and self advocacy (p <.001) after two academic years. Graduate student mentors increased their understanding about learning disabilities and used their understanding to support both their mentees and other students they worked with. Council members identified and created opportunities for delivering learning disability-related trainings to faculty, mentors and advisors on campus, and for enhancing coordination of student services related to learning and related disorders. Disability-focused activities became integrated in broader campus activities regarding diversity. This research explicates a role that college campuses can play in fostering the wellbeing and the academic and career development of its students with developmental learning and related disorders. It offers an empirically tested campus-based model that is multilevel, holistic, and strengths-based for supporting positive outcomes of young people with learning disabilities in STEM. Moreover, findings advance the knowledge of supports and skills that are important for self-regulating and navigating complex and multi-faceted disability-related challenges within both the post-secondary educational environment and the young adults’ sociocultural context. (shrink)

_Riassunto_: Questo lavoro intende offrire una prospettiva sulla filosofia della mente implicita nell’opera di Pierre Bourdieu. Propongo di organizzare e analizzare le questioni psicologiche che si dipanano nella teoria della pratica di Bourdieu su due diversi piani descrittivi della sfera del mentale: quello ontologico e quello architettonico. Nella prima parte del lavoro chiarirò il concetto di habitus sulla base della sua costituzione schematica. Poi, definito l’habitus come “super-schema psicosociale”, esplorerò il suo funzionamento incarnato alla luce della teoria cognitiva della metafora. (...) Nella seconda parte del lavoro, intendo chiarire l’architettura del mentale che emerge dalla relazione che Bourdieu teorizza tra conoscenza pratica e conoscenza riflessiva. Qui, vorrei prima sottolineare come Bourdieu faccia uso di un’architettura duale della mente, segnata da una particolare doppia-opacità riflessiva, per sostenere poi che le affermazioni metacognitive di Bourdieu ben si adattano agli approcci contemporanei della parità sé-altro della conoscenza di sé. Infine sosterrò come il funzionamento inconscio dell’habitus sia coerente con una visione cognitiva dell’inconscio. _Parole chiave_: La filosofia della mente di Bourdieu; Habitus; Schema; Dualità della mente; Parità Sé-Altro; Inconscio cognitivo _The ontology and architecture of the mind in Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice_ _Abstract_: This article provides an outline of Bourdieu’s hidden philosophy of mind. I propose to organize and analyse the psychological themes that flow trough Bourdieu’s theory of practice using two different levels of description of the mental, the ontological and architectonic. In the first part of the article, I clarify the concept of habitus on the ground of its schematical constitution. Conceptualising habitus as a “psychosocial super-schema”, I explore its embodied functioning in the light of cognitive metaphor theory. In the second part, I clarify the architecture of the mental as it emerges from the relationship Bourdieu theorizes between practical and reflexive knowledge. Here, I first stress that Bourdieu employs a dual architecture of mind marked by a peculiar reflexive double-opacity, and then I argue that Bourdieu’s metacognitive claims fit the contemporary self-other parity accounts of self-knowledge. Finally, I claim that the unconscious functioning of habitus is consistent with a cognitivist theory of the unconscious. _Keywords_: Bourdieu’s Philosophy of Mind; Habitus; Schema; Duality of Mind; Self-Other Parity; Cognitive Unconscious. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one (...) that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

Theorists have used the concept of habitus to explain how skilled agents are capable of responding in an infinite number of ways to the infinite number of possible situations that they encounter in their field of practice. According to some perspectives, habitus is seen to represent a form of regulated improvisation that functions below the threshold of consciousness. However, Bourdieu argued that rational and conscious computation may be required in situations of ‘crisis’ where habitus proves insufficient as a basis for (...) our actions. In the current article, I draw on a range of evidence which indicates that conscious intervention (including self-reflective sensory consciousness) is required not only at points of crisis but also as skilled performers engage in the mundane actions/practices that characterize their everyday training and performance regimes. The interaction of conscious learning and unconscious schemata leads to the development of a reflexive habitus which allows performers to refine and adapt embodied movement patterns over time. (shrink)

[Andy Clark] What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to 'sensorimotor models' (O'Regan and Noë 2001, Noë 2004) is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between (typically) movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, (...) and that it fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, dis-integrations, and special-purpose streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving. /// [Naomi Eilan] The strong sensorimotor account of perception gives self-induced movements two constitutive roles in explaining visual consciousness. The first says that self-induced movements are vehicles of visual awareness, and for this reason consciousness 'does not happen in the brain only'. The second says that the phenomenal nature of visual experiences is consists in the action-directing content of vision. In response I suggest, first, that the sense in which visual awareness is active should be explained by appeal to the role of attention in visual consciousness, rather than self-induced movements; and second, that the sense in which perceptual consciousness does not happen in the brain only should be explained by appeal to the relational nature of perceptual consciousness, appeal to which also shows why links with action cannot exhaust phenomenal content. (shrink)

Consider the following three situations: learning to perform a complex skill such as gymastics (a stunning demonstration of which participants to ICP 2004 experienced during the opening ceremony), learning a complex game such as the ancient Chinese game of Weichi (more widely known as Go), or learning natural language. What these situations have in common, beyond the sheer complexity of the required skills, is the fact that most of what we learn about each appears to proceed in a (...) manner that does not depend so much on the acquisition of explicit, declarative information or on the deployment of intentional strategies, but instead critically depends on repeated practice: Developing the skills needed to execute complex movements in gymnastics, to. (shrink)

Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical (...) orientation so that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.V. (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century, the debate around the process of professionalization of higher education has been characterized by two extreme positions. For some critics the process carries the risks of instrumentalizing knowledge and of leading the university to succumb under the demands of the market or the state; for other theorists it represents a concrete opportunity for the university to open up to the real needs of society and for reorienting theoretical and fragmented disciplines towards the resolution of concrete (...) and challenging problems. This article pursues three objectives. Firstly, we show that the debate is usefully informed not only by ideas of what a university is, but also by ideas of a profession. We suggest that both ideas help to overcome the conflict between the two afore-mentioned antagonist perspectives. Secondly, we demonstrate that a certain understanding of a profession can prevent the risk of viewing knowledge exclusively as scientific expertise and reducing training to the acquisition of technical skills. The position on professions adopted here is inspired by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work is instructive in understanding professions as “rational practical activities”, embedded in a social context with their own internal goods. Our third objective, therefore, is to argue, with MacIntyre, that the presence of professions within the university opens up the opportunity to rescue forms of rationality that are oriented towards action and, by implication, promotes spaces of training that are resistant to exclusively corporate or governmental interests and criteria of mere effectiveness. (shrink)

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a (...) set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations, experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks, process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring, or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article. (shrink)

Since the nineteenth century, the debate around the process of professionalization of higher education has been characterized by two extreme positions. For some critics the process carries the risks of instrumentalizing knowledge and of leading the university to succumb under the demands of the market or the state; for other theorists it represents a concrete opportunity for the university to open up to the real needs of society and for reorienting theoretical and fragmented disciplines towards the resolution of concrete (...) and challenging problems. This article pursues three objectives. Firstly, we show that the debate is usefully informed not only by ideas of what a university is, but also by ideas of a profession. We suggest that both ideas help to overcome the conflict between the two afore-mentioned antagonist perspectives. Secondly, we demonstrate that a certain understanding of a profession can prevent the risk of viewing knowledge exclusively as scientific expertise and reducing training to the acquisition of technical skills. The position on professions adopted here is inspired by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, whose work is instructive in understanding professions as “rational practical activities”, embedded in a social context with their own internal goods. Our third objective, therefore, is to argue, with MacIntyre, that the presence of professions within the university opens up the opportunity to rescue forms of rationality that are oriented towards action and, by implication, promotes spaces of training that are resistant to exclusively corporate or governmental interests and criteria of mere effectiveness. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one (...) that lies at the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of integrity as the capacity to deliberate and reflect usefully in the light of context, knowledge, experience, and information (that of self and others) on complex and conflicting factors bearing on action or potential action. Such an account of integrity seeks to encompass the moral complexity and conflict of the professional environment, and the need for compromises in professional practice. In addition, it accepts that humans are social beings who must respect (...) and engage with the moral position of others. This account is contrasted with a more traditional view of integrity as the rigid maintenance of consistency between professional practice and deeply held, but inflexible, moral principles. While this strong sense of moral conviction may be valuable as a source of moral motivation, e.g. in the case of whistle‐blowers, it is equally likely to lead to dogmatism and hubris. Professionals and their organizations are encouraged to foster the more complex and reflective form of integrity. (shrink)

The situated potentials for action between material things in the world and the interactional processes thereby afforded need to be seen as not only constituting the possibility of agency, but thereby also comprising it. Eo ipso, agency must be de-fused from any local, "contained" subject and be understood as a situational property in which subjects and objects can both participate. Any technological artifact should thus be understood as a complex of agential capacities that function relative to any number of (...) social and material factors. Keeping in mind that we are co-constituted by webs of relations involving increasingly complex collections of artefacts, networks, niches, and communities of practice, our investigation will be guided by interrogating the functional potential of a thing that in the last fifteen years has seamlessly worked its way into the everyday life of millions of human agents. This "thing," the smartphone, is merely a nodal point in a highly complex network. Recognizing this massive "collective," we nevertheless want to show some of the ways in which something as seemingly mundane as a smartphone can reflexively alter the range of actions available to a cognitive agent (Latour 1994). Specifically, we hope to shed light on some of the social-cognitive consequences of technological mediation by looking at the complementary, if not mutually implied, domains of memory and knowledge. (shrink)

To investigate the unique kinds of mentality involved in skilled performance, this paper explores the performance ecology of the Māori haka, a ritual form of song and dance of the indigenous people of Aotearoa New Zealand. We respond to a recent proposal to program robots to perform a haka as ‘cultural preservationists’ for ‘intangible cultural heritage’. This ‘Robot Māori Haka’ proposal raises questions about the nature of skill and the transmission of embodied knowledge; about the cognitive and affective (...) experiences cultivated in indigenous practices like haka; and about the role of robots in the archival aspirations of human societies. Reproducing haka, we suggest, requires more than copying physical actions; preserving the ‘intangible’ entails more than programming postures and movements. To make this case, we discuss the history of European responses to the haka, and analyse its diverse performance features in cultural context. Arguing that indigenous movement practices incorporate genuinely embodied knowledge, we claim that skilled performance of haka is deeply mindful, embodying and transmitting dynamic, culturally shared understandings of the natural and social world. The indigenous psychologies incorporated in haka performance are animated by a shared history integrated with its environment. Examining haka performance through the lens of 4E cognitive skill theory for mutual benefit, we discuss the effects of synchrony in collective action, the social and environmental scaffolding of affect and emotion, and the multilayered relations between past and present. Culturally-embedded systems of skilled movement like the Māori haka may, we suggest, constitute specific ways of thinking and feeling. (shrink)

One of the challenges of modern healthcare ethics practice is the navigation of boundaries. Practicing healthcare ethicists in the performance of their role must navigate meanings, choices, decisions and actions embedded in complex cultural and social relationships amongst diverse individuals. In light of the evolving state of modern healthcare ethics practice and the recent move toward professionalization via certification, understanding boundary navigation in healthcare ethics practice is critical. Because healthcare ethics is endowed with many boundaries which often delineate (...) concerns about professional expertise and authority, epistemological reflection on the relationship between theory and practice points toward the social context as relevant to the conceptualization of boundaries. The skills of social scientists may prove helpful to provide data and insights into the conceptualization and navigation of clinical ethics qua profession. Empirical ethics research, which combines empirical description (usually social scientific) with normative-ethical analysis and reflection, is a way forward as we engage and reflect upon issues which have implications for practice standards and professionalization of the role. This requires cooperative engagement of the descriptive and normative disciplines to explore our understandings of boundaries in healthcare ethics practice. This will contribute to the ongoing reflection not only as we envision the professional role but to ensure that it is enacted in practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drama on the Run:A Prelude to Mapping the Practice of Process DramaPamela Bowell (bio) and Brian Heap (bio)In the current educational climate prevailing in a number of countries, increased emphasis is being placed on the concept of "the artist in schools." Funding is being channeled to support a range of initiatives and schemes that are designed to bring arts professionals from all the art forms into the classroom where (...) they place their artistic talents, knowledge, and insights alongside the pedagogic skills of the teacher.We see exciting projects in which artists work with children in school—visual artists to create murals, musicians to compose and perform operas, dancers to choreograph new ballets, and actors and directors to devise plays. Many of the outcomes are of high quality, and the children who have been fortunate enough to be involved have enjoyed the experiences and have gained a great deal from them. This would seem to be a state of affairs to be applauded unreservedly, as such projects surely enrich the lives of the pupils and schools in which they take place. In one sense, of course, this is undeniably true, and we have no intention of suggesting otherwise. However, in reality, this is a much more complex situation. It raises a number of key issues for us as educational practitioners who work in the field of applied theatre, sharing with others, as Judith Ackroyd describes, "a belief in the power of the theatre form to address something beyond the form itself."1The most critical issue is the perceived separation of the artist from the teacher that can sometimes be encouraged by artists in schools projects. We sense a dangerous precedent here. It becomes all too easy for two erroneous assumptions to be made, namely that teachers cannot be considered to be artists in their own right, while artists on the other hand can be accorded [End Page 58] the status of teacher. In our own experience too, the nature of educational funding can be extremely volatile, subject to all kinds of shifts in the prevailing political and economic climate, as well as adjustments to the ways in which funding is applied according to the social and educational priorities of the time. Too frequently, education falls victim to what might be described as "the-flavor-of-the-month syndrome."Those who are involved with teacher education, both pre- and in-service, make superhuman efforts to respond with alacrity to the new demands as courses are reviewed and reorganized accordingly. The trainees of the next generation find themselves with a new "party line" to toe as their courses conform to the new priority. This is all well and good—until the priority changes and gaps suddenly appear in the knowledge or skills or understanding of teachers. What was received wisdom becomes a deficit model as focus changes, and the circle is now expected to be squared.Under these circumstances, it would seem a more prudent policy to train teacher-artists who would have the ability to meld their pedagogical understanding and skill with an aesthetic craft and sensibility than to rely on visiting artists as the "natural" or "normal" providers of arts education. This would ensure not only that teachers would make better, more informed use of visiting artists but also that children's expertly guided engagement with the arts would be a permanent and enduring aspect of their regular schooling rather than a "special" event subject to the vagaries of arts funding or policy. This might seem an easy statement to make for people such as ourselves, who have spent whole careers working as teacher-artists within the field of drama in education. But it might seem an altogether more daunting prospect for teachers, or intending teachers, who are not specialists in the arts.Having spent a great deal of our respective careers working in teacher education, we are very conscious of this possibility. To this end, our research collaboration has been centered on exploring and coming to understand more fully, clearly, and precisely how the teacher functions as an artist within the particular genre of applied theatre known as process drama. Embedded within the increase of our... (shrink)

Learning to write in a foreign language is a complex cognitive process. The process-genre approach is a common instructional practice adopted by language teachers to develop learners’ writing abilities. However, the interacting elements of procedural knowledge, linguistic knowledge, and generic knowledge in this approach may exceed the capacity of an individual learner’s working memory, thus actually hindering the acquisition of writing skills. According to the collective working memory effect, it was hypothesized that teaching writing skills (...) of English as a foreign language by adopting a process-genre approach in collaborative conditions could lead to better writing performance, lower cognitive load, and higher instructional efficiency. The reported experiment compared learning writing skills of English as a foreign language in individual and collaborative instructional conditions from a cognitive load perspective, a rarely adopted approach in this field. The results indicated that the collaborative instructional condition was more effective and efficient than the individual instructional condition in improving the quality of written products as well as in optimizing the cognitive load experienced by the learners. Measures of cognitive load were used to support the cognitive load theory’s interpretation of the results, which is the unique contribution of this research study to the field. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes (AIR) approach?a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices? research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)

In this response to my critics, I amplify the conceptual clarification and methodological stipulation of habitus begun in ‘Homines in extremis’ to help us move from a sociology of the body as socially construc-ted object to a sociology from the body as socially construc-ting vector of knowledge, power, and practice. The specification of habitus by membership in collectives, attachment to institutions, and analytic purpose makes it a flexible multi-scalar notion with which to construct the epistemic individual and account for (...) both reproduction and change, conformity and creativity, as well as self-revision. For this, we must reject theological interpretations that rigidly lock habitus into Bourdieu’s framework; avoid conflating the formal properties of the notion with its concrete features in specific settings and cases; and distinguish between the rhetorical invocation of his concepts (‘speaking Bourdieuese’) and their effective deployment in the construction of the empirical object. As embodied and embedded capacity, habitus brings temporality, depth, and desire to the analytic epicenter. It reminds us that the social world is not transparent, open-ended, and instantaneous, but endowed with gravity, opacity, and asymmetry. Treating the sentient and skilled organism as fount of both social intelligence and sociological acumen can help historical social science connect with enactive psychology and recover the carnality of action that conventional accounts of social life routinely erase. (shrink)

The tertiary industry development has increased researches on service relationship and professional skills needed in relational professions. Universities and education fields have also adapted their programs to ensure students acquire these new skills. However, knowledge on the topic is still incomplete. At the same time, professions are required to rationalize their outputs. To meet this requirement, the use of reflexive approaches has become common. Despite the increase of these approaches, few data are available on how they are conceived (...) and used. In order to identify the current perspectives, this article presents the results of a scientific literature analysis on reflexivity in four relational professions : social work, education, nursing and psychology. After presenting these perspectives, the results will be then discussed. (shrink)

Measuring and evaluating a learner’s learning ability is always the focus of every person whose aim is to develop strategies and plans for their learners to improve the learning process. For example, classroom assessments, self-assessment using computer systems such as Intelligent Tutoring Systems, and other approaches are available. Assessment of metacognition is one of these techniques. Having the ability to evaluate and monitor one’s learning is known as metacognition. An individual can then propose adjustments to their learning process based on (...) this assessment. By monitoring, improving, and planning their activities, learners who can manage their cognitive skills are better able to manage their knowledge about a particular subject. It is common knowledge that students’ metacognitive and self-assessment skills and abilities have been extensively studied, but no research has been carried out on the mistakes that novice developers make because they do not use their self-assessment abilities enough. This study aims to assess the metacognitive skills and abilities of novice software developers working in the industry and to describe the consequences of awareness of metacognition on their performance. In the proposed study, we experimented with novice software developers and collected data using Devskiller and a self-assessment log to analyze their use of self-regulation skills. The proposed study showed that when developers are asked to reflect upon their work, they become more informed about their habitual mistakes, and using a self-assessment log helps them highlight their repetitive mistakes and experiences which allows them to improve their performance on future tasks. (shrink)

The material in "TCU," as we've come to refer to this volume, began as a Master's Thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over a fifty-plus year span, became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. TCU brings together several dozen scientists from a variety (...) of backgrounds and presents a broad (and deep) overview of how the exploration of the cognitive unconscious grew from that first study to a domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modelers, social and organizational psychologists, sport psychologists, primatologists, developmentalists, linguists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and measurement and assessment researchers. The core message seems fairly straightforward. Unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. The implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. The volume has contributions from over 30 distinguished authors from nine different countries and gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, a bit over a half-century since the first experiments were run. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somatic Knowledge and Qualitative Reasoning:From Theory to PracticeRichard Siegesmund"Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with" is how my undergraduate student, Cheyenne, opened her final essay on The Arts and the Creation of Mind. After a semester of using his text in my art education methods class, reckoned seemed an apt word. The dictionary gives the definitions of reckoned as to settle accounts, make calculation, judge, and (...) take into consideration.1 The ideas in The Arts and the Creation of Mind are challenging on multiple levels, and Eisner does not provide any easy answers. There are no pithy how-to-do-it bullet points in the text. The issues he addresses are complex: nonlinguistic meaning, somatic knowledge, qualitative reasoning, the arts as habits of mind that guide experience and inquiry into the world — just to name a few. Nevertheless, in this text he brings these ideas into a format that is accessible to undergraduates entering the profession of teaching and experienced professionals, who wish to reflect on their own practice.The lucidity of Eisner's text can belie the complexity of the issues he addresses. Regrettably, some students only saw the outer shell of the content: the discussion of conceptual approaches to arts education or the delineation of the developmental stages of children's drawing. Yet for these aspects alone, they considered the text to be valuable; however, I was disappointed that they did not go deeper. Some just could not synthesize the big point: that the arts are not simply about mastery of technical skills, but that technical skills are merely a gateway into non-linguistic thinking. Educational objectives that are limited to content and skills are mundane.However, for more thoughtful and reflective students like Cheyenne, who was in her last semester of course work before student teaching in Guadalajara, the book was an inspiration. It provided a more robust conception of arts education that spoke to her feelings that compelled her to be a teacher. She reflected on what she read in The Arts and the Creation of Mind, and saw how an arts educator was more than an activities manager. She discovered she was embarking on a calling that could change minds — and [End Page 80] by changing minds, transform lives. For a young idealist, Eisner articulated her passion to serve. He said what up until that moment she had only felt. She discovered what she had previously sensed — known in her bones — but had not articulated. Eisner was a voice she wanted to take for her own. He provided a vision of the teacher she hoped to be. Indeed, Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with.Two ideas that my art students want to discuss when they first encounter The Arts and the Creation of Mind are the concepts of somatic knowing and qualitative reasoning. Somatic knowledge is a felt reaction of rightness within an experience. Qualitative reasoning is the ordering of relationships of qualities. Qualitative reasoning produces somatic knowledge. Using my students' questions and classroom discussions as inspiration, I want to explore these ideas for I believe they represent the essence of what is distinctive about learning in the arts. Furthermore, I share Eisner's belief that they provide the foundation on which to make an enduring case for the importance of the arts in education. These ideas reside at the heart of the process of education, which is, as he states, "learning to create ourselves."2It is immensely satisfying as a teacher to see the ah-ha moments in class discussion when students begin to integrate Eisner's ideas into their own experience. It is an even greater satisfaction to work with teachers who find these ideas illuminating for their educational aims and objectives and to see them played out in real classrooms where students flourish. In this essay, I want to try to build on my own experience with these moments to more deeply explore the significance of Eisner's work.To begin, I will briefly revisit the work of John Dewey. I will then discuss how Eisner's previous thinking sets a foundation for The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Finally, on a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Somatic Knowledge and Qualitative Reasoning:From Theory to PracticeRichard Siegesmund"Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with" is how my undergraduate student, Cheyenne, opened her final essay on The Arts and the Creation of Mind. After a semester of using his text in my art education methods class, reckoned seemed an apt word. The dictionary gives the definitions of reckoned as to settle accounts, make calculation, judge, and (...) take into consideration.1 The ideas in The Arts and the Creation of Mind are challenging on multiple levels, and Eisner does not provide any easy answers. There are no pithy how-to-do-it bullet points in the text. The issues he addresses are complex: nonlinguistic meaning, somatic knowledge, qualitative reasoning, the arts as habits of mind that guide experience and inquiry into the world — just to name a few. Nevertheless, in this text he brings these ideas into a format that is accessible to undergraduates entering the profession of teaching and experienced professionals, who wish to reflect on their own practice.The lucidity of Eisner's text can belie the complexity of the issues he addresses. Regrettably, some students only saw the outer shell of the content: the discussion of conceptual approaches to arts education or the delineation of the developmental stages of children's drawing. Yet for these aspects alone, they considered the text to be valuable; however, I was disappointed that they did not go deeper. Some just could not synthesize the big point: that the arts are not simply about mastery of technical skills, but that technical skills are merely a gateway into non-linguistic thinking. Educational objectives that are limited to content and skills are mundane.However, for more thoughtful and reflective students like Cheyenne, who was in her last semester of course work before student teaching in Guadalajara, the book was an inspiration. It provided a more robust conception of arts education that spoke to her feelings that compelled her to be a teacher. She reflected on what she read in The Arts and the Creation of Mind, and saw how an arts educator was more than an activities manager. She discovered she was embarking on a calling that could change minds — and [End Page 80] by changing minds, transform lives. For a young idealist, Eisner articulated her passion to serve. He said what up until that moment she had only felt. She discovered what she had previously sensed — known in her bones — but had not articulated. Eisner was a voice she wanted to take for her own. He provided a vision of the teacher she hoped to be. Indeed, Elliot Eisner is a writer to be reckoned with.Two ideas that my art students want to discuss when they first encounter The Arts and the Creation of Mind are the concepts of somatic knowing and qualitative reasoning. Somatic knowledge is a felt reaction of rightness within an experience. Qualitative reasoning is the ordering of relationships of qualities. Qualitative reasoning produces somatic knowledge. Using my students' questions and classroom discussions as inspiration, I want to explore these ideas for I believe they represent the essence of what is distinctive about learning in the arts. Furthermore, I share Eisner's belief that they provide the foundation on which to make an enduring case for the importance of the arts in education. These ideas reside at the heart of the process of education, which is, as he states, "learning to create ourselves."2It is immensely satisfying as a teacher to see the ah-ha moments in class discussion when students begin to integrate Eisner's ideas into their own experience. It is an even greater satisfaction to work with teachers who find these ideas illuminating for their educational aims and objectives and to see them played out in real classrooms where students flourish. In this essay, I want to try to build on my own experience with these moments to more deeply explore the significance of Eisner's work.To begin, I will briefly revisit the work of John Dewey. I will then discuss how Eisner's previous thinking sets a foundation for The Arts and the Creation of Mind. Finally, on a... (shrink)

In this paper, I address only one small parallel between one subsection of Western epistemology and cognitive theory and Native American epistemology. I draw the connection between the recent theories of embodied cognition and distinctive Native modes of embodied implicit procedural knowing, such as blood memory, vision questions, and non-binary logical systems. My reason for doing so is twofold. First, I show how these distinctive ways of knowing within Native worldviews are not mere mystical claims that can be cast (...) aside in favor of more ostensibly “rational” knowing practices. To do so, I utilized Mark Johnson’s account of the cognitive unconscious to demonstrate how and that Native embodied knowing practices and knowledge sources are easily explicable when examined though a phenomenological cognitive lens. Second, I highlight one small respect in which Native epistemologies are conceived of procedurally. Embodied forms of knowing are merely one facet of the procedural performative nature of Native American epistemology but they are highly demonstrative of the fact that procedural ways of knowing—knowing-how—account for deeply implicit ways of knowing that are lacking from other procedural knowledge accounts that are often hamstrung without such an accompanying account of knowing-how beyond counterfactual knowledge. (shrink)

What is the relation between perceptual experience and the suite of sensorimotor skills that enable us to act in the very world we perceive? The relation, according to ‘sensorimotor models’ is tight indeed. Perceptual experience, on these accounts, is enacted via skilled sensorimotor activity, and gains its content and character courtesy of our knowledge of the relations between movement and sensory stimulation. I shall argue that this formulation is too extreme, and that it fails to accommodate the substantial firewalls, (...) dis-integrations, and specialpurpose streamings that form the massed strata of human cognition. In particular, such strong sensorimotor models threaten to obscure the computationally potent insensitivity of key information-processing events to the full subtleties of embodied cycles of sensing and moving. (shrink)

Expert skill in music performance involves an apparent paradox. On stage, expert musicians are required accurately to retrieve information that has been encoded over hours of practice. Yet they must also remain open to the demands of the ever-changing situational contingencies with which they are faced during performance. To further explore this apparent paradox and the way in which it is negotiated by expert musicians, this article profiles theories presented by Roger Chaffin, Hubert Dreyfus and Tony and Helga Noice. For (...) Chaffin, expert skill in music performance relies solely upon overarching mental representations, while, for Dreyfus, such representations are needed only by novices, while experts rely on a more embodied form of coping. Between Chaffin and Dreyfus sit the Noices, who argue that both overarching cognitive structures and embodied processes underlie expert skill. We then present the Applying Intelligence to the Reflexes approach—a differently nuanced model of expert skill aligned with the integrative spirit of the Noices’ research. The AIR approach suggests that musicians negotiate the apparent paradox of expert skill via a mindedness that allows flexibility of attention during music performance. We offer data from recent doctoral research conducted by the first author of this article to demonstrate at a practical level the usefulness of the AIR approach when attempting to understand the complexities of expert skill in music performance. (shrink)

Cognitive neuroscience increasingly relies on complex data analysis methods. Researchers in this field come from highly diverse scientific backgrounds, such as psychology, engineering, and medicine. This poses challenges with respect to acquisition of appropriate scientific computing and data analysis skills, as well as communication among researchers with different knowledge and skills sets. Are researchers in cognitive neuroscience adequately equipped to address these challenges? Here, we present evidence from an online survey of methods skills. Respondents (n= 307) (...) mainly comprised students and post-doctoral researchers working in the cognitive neurosciences. Multiple choice questions addressed a variety of basic and fundamental aspects of neuroimaging data analysis, such as signal analysis, linear algebra, and statistics. We analyzed performance with respect to the following factors: undergraduate degree (grouped into Psychology, Methods, and Biology), current researcher status (undergraduate student, PhD student, and post-doctoral researcher), gender, and self-rated expertise levels. Overall accuracy was 72%. Not surprisingly, the Methods group performed best (87%), followed by Biology (73%) and Psychology (66%). Accuracy increased from undergraduate (59%) to PhD (74%) level, but not from PhD to post-doctoral (74%) level. The difference in performance for the Methods vs. non-methods (Psychology/Biology) groups was especially striking for questions related to signal analysis and linear algebra, two areas particularly relevant to neuroimaging research. Self-rated methods expertise was not strongly predictive of performance. The majority of respondents (93%) indicated they would like to receive at least some additional training on the topics covered in this survey. In conclusion, methods skills among junior researchers in cognitive neuroscience can be improved, researchers are aware of this, and there is strong demand for more skills-oriented training opportunities. We hope that this survey will provide an empirical basis for the development of bespoke skills-oriented training programs in cognitive neuroscience institutions. We will provide practical suggestions on how to achieve this. (shrink)

Did Beethoven and Mozart have more in common with each other than Clapton and Hendrix? The current research demonstrated the widely reported Mozart Effect as only partly significant. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from 16 professional classical and rock musicians during a standard 2 stimulus visual oddball task, while listening to classical and rock music. During the oddball task participants were required to discriminate between an infrequent target stimulus randomly embedded in a train of repetitive background or standard (...) stimuli. Consistent with previous research, the P3 and N2 ERPs were elicited in response to the infrequent target stimuli. Own genre preference resulted in a reduction in amplitude of the P3 for classical musicians exposed to classical music and rock musicians exposed to rock music. Notably, at the pre-attentive stage of processing beneficial effects of exposure to classical music were observed for both groups of musicians. These data are discussed in terms of short and long-term music benefits on both conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. (shrink)

The goal of this book is to help the reader gain knowledge on ethical and legal issues in the field of student affairs and develop competency to follow the profession’s principles and standards of conduct. The significance of the book is due to its focus on the practical value of ethics and legal issues and its aim to address the knowledge, skills, and dispositions required of student affairs educators to develop and maintain integrity in their life and work (...) as described by the ACPA/NASPA. The text offers readers a number of major unique features: It offers multiple ethical decision-making models to guide student affairs educators in their ethical decision-making process. It proposes that ethics is not an individual but an organizational responsibility. It offers that ethical decision making is a professional skill that can be practiced and applied in student affairs educators’ day-to-day practice. It presents the reader with the most current legal issues in student affairs and higher education. Finally, it reflects three themes: integration of ACPA/NASPA competency areas; development of professional identity; and application of knowledge and theory to practice. The book is critical and timely. A book that focuses on ethical and legal issues in student affairs is needed for faculty in preparation programs, new professionals navigating their identity as student affairs educators, and a resource for mid- and senior-level professionals facilitating ongoing professional development. The book begins to address what it means to have a professional identity, which is ground in the shared ethical and legal values espoused within the profession and academia. Each chapter uniquely contributes to the complexity embedded in the study of ethics and how that is applied to practice. Additionally, the volume is a balance of procedural knowledge, case illustrations, and guided practice exercises to facilitate the reader’s ability to translate the theory and research discussed into professional decision making and application. (shrink)

This special issue offers a multidimensional perspective on the recent inquiries into knowledge representation. Multidimensionality exposes the complexity of knowledge representation and helps distinguish between different approaches and research tools. On the one hand, the presented research focuses on the theoretical and empirical aspects of knowledge representation (taking into account cognitive processes and capacities, including linguistic skills needed to generate and express knowledge); on the other, the articles included in the issue discuss the practical discourse, (...) analyzing actions from the point of view of cognitively oriented semantics and the scientific practice broadly understood. The issue consists of five papers that show how certain ideas in the research area of knowledge representation inspired the authors to look for new approaches to modelling concepts and practical reasoning, constructing theory of signs using the tools of data science, and dealing with cognitive artifacts in scientific practice and its dynamics. What these approaches have in common is their attempt at capturing the multidimensionality of knowledge representation in such a way that integrates them. Our goal is to emphasize some innovative aspects of those approaches with respect to the dynamics of knowledge representation in both the cognitive system and scientific practice. (shrink)

In comparison with the creation of language, translation from one language to another offers greater challenges for those working with languages, be the text for translation concerned with philosophy, literature or law, all of which are arguably highly professional domains. When it comes to the translation of legal fiction, a highly interdisciplinary genre, even experienced practicing translators tend to fall short of being well equipped with sufficient legal knowledge and terminologies, not to mention the capacity to detect the (...) subtleties that are inherent in a legal term. All of the problems above account for the often less-than-satisfactory quality of legal fiction in translation, misleading or confusing the potential target audience. After making the prior theoretical investigations, this paper attempts to analyze some problems in the current Chinese translation of such legal novels as Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and then take a corrective stance, hoping to arouse the translators’ awareness of the importance of this genre, as well as their awareness of the essential professional skills they still need to acquire, so that they can reach equivalent accuracy in legal technicalities, as well as subtlety and nuance that reflect the legal spirit. (shrink)

Knowledge how to do things is a pervasive and central element of everyday life. Yet it raises many difficult questions that must be answered by philosophers and cognitive scientists aspiring to understand human cognition and agency. What is the connection between knowing how and knowing that? Is knowledge how simply a type of ability or disposition to act? Is there an irreducibly practical form of knowledge? What is the role of the intellect in intelligent action? This (...) volume contains fifteen state of the art essays by leading figures in philosophy and linguistics that amplify and sharpen the debate between "intellectualists" and "anti-intellectualists" about mind and action, highlighting the conceptual, empirical, and linguistic issues that motivate and sustain the conflict. The essays also explore various ways in which this debate informs central areas of ethics, philosophy of action, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Knowing How covers a broad range of topics dealing with tacit and procedural knowledge, the psychology of skill, expertise, intelligence and intelligent action, the nature of ability, the syntax and semantics of embedded questions, the mind-body problem, phenomenal character, epistemic injustice, moral knowledge, the epistemology of logic, linguistic competence, the connection between knowledge and understanding, and the relation between theory and practice. This is the book on knowing how--an invaluable resource for philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and others concerned with knowledge, mind, and action. (shrink)

This paper is dedicated to the first universities and mendicant schools, where thousands of students began to converge during the thirteenth century. Logic played an unpreceded role in basic and higher education. A “Parisian logical model” of education was shaped at the University of Paris, adopted by mendicant Orders in their schools of logic, diffused in all disciplines, and progressively spread in Southern Europe. Medieval education became heavily based upon logical, and even “logician” practices, with the “syllogization” of exegetical, disputational, (...) and evaluation practices.The notion of logical skill conveniently captures this unique situation for the discipline of logic, as well as the way medieval thinkers conceived of logic as a universal, transdisciplinary method, a natural operation of the mind, a modality of knowledge, the very form of teaching and graduating, a “habitus,” a technique and a science.The divisions of Aristotelian logic, the “artificial logic,” were for the first time naturalized and projected on the very structure of human mind, which was thereby “logicalized” and ascribed a “natural logic.” A strong anthropological dimension was bestowed on logic. The discipline of logic was deemed a necessary instrument in the philosophical “perfection” and the Christian “reparation” of man as an intellectual creature by a group of logically skilled, professional philosophers and theologians, whereas men deprived of logical education were described as “logically disabled,” and stuck into inferior forms of humanity.The world of medieval intellectual elites displayed a variety of social uses of logic, beyond academic circles, especially in the performance of pastoral duties. The possible historical records of the social usefulness of logic are explored: for students, the majority in medieval universities, who left university without a degree, but with a solid logical education, for ordinary mendicant friars, dedicated to preaching and confession, who frequented logical schools, and for members of the parish clergy sent to the faculties of arts. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition into an evolutionary context. Implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently of awareness of either the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. Characterized this way, implicit learning theory can be viewed as an attempt to come to grips with (...) the classic epistemological issues of knowledge acquisition, representation and use. The argument is made that the process, despite its seeming cognitive sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and that it antedates awareness and the capacity for conscious control of mentation. Various classic heuristics from evolutionary biology are used to substantiate this claim and several specific entailments of this line of argument are outlined. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the concept of Cognitive Fitness (CF), identify its key ingredients underpinning both real-time task performance and career longevity in high-risk occupations, and to canvas a holistic framework for their assessment, training, and augmentation. CF as a capacity to deploy neurocognitive resources, knowledge and skills to meet the demands of operational task performance, is likely to be multi-faceted and differentially malleable. A taxonomy of CF constructs derived from Cognitive Readiness (CR) (...) and Mental fitness (MF) literature maps into phases of operational cycles from foundational to advanced, mission-ready and recovery. Foundational cognitive attributes, such as attention, executive control and co-action, were hypothesized to be trainable at the initial Cognitive Gym phase. More advanced training targets at the CR phase included stress and arousal regulation, adaptability, teamwork, situation awareness (including detection, sense-making and prediction) and decision making (de-biasing and confidence calibration). The mission-ready training phase is focused on tolerances (to sleep loss, monotony, pain, frustration, uncertainty) and resistance (to distraction, deception or manipulation). Operational Augmentation phase relies on support tools such as decision aids and fatigue countermeasures, while the Recovery phase employs reflexive (e.g., mindfulness), and restorative practices (e.g., nutrition and sleep hygiene). The periodization of cognitive training in this cycle is hypothesized to optimize both real-time cognitive performance and the resilience that enables life-long thriving. One of the most promising avenues of validating this hypothesis is by developing an expert consensus on the key CF ingredients and their relative importance in high-performance settings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Embedding Creativity in Teaching and LearningHoward Cannatella (bio)IntroductionCreative teaching ranges from the view that creativity is necessary for a changing knowledge economy to a more individualized view that encompasses a person-centered approach. None of these views are advanced in this essay, as I feel that there are important weaknesses in taking either position. Instead, my main purpose is to discuss how certain kinds of creative activity can substantially (...) transform educational practice without necessarily succumbing to any of the above conceptions of creativity. My educational approach to creative activity relates to one aspect of Alasdair Macintyre's, After Virtue; the notion that creativity only flourishes via a devotion to a particular practice.1 For such practice to flourish it has to immerse itself in a type of personal address that revolves and combines in various ways what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as "self-others-things."2Any claim to suggest that education should engage creativity more than it currently does can stir some reasonable criticism, for there are clearly a plethora of other important factors to consider in student learning. Yet, to a degree, the practice of creativity is, I think, being dissipated and weakened, where ambivalence and ill-informed ideas are increasingly obscuring its place. My own thinking on this displacement which has some connections with John White's view and in a different sense with Howard Gardner's, is that if we offer via teaching situations geometrical puzzles, visual problem solving exercises and the like, such exercises although perhaps amusing in themselves are hardly taking up the same refined order of creative display exhibited by those most credited as being creatively talented.3 Indeed, to surmise that creativity is a construal of left hand side verses right hand side brain activity; that one can show different color cards on a monitor or play a short excerpt of Beethoven's Pastoral symphony in order to accelerate student learning are at the very least questionable creative assumptions. In [End Page 59] contrast, what I aim to show from one perspective as a crucial distinction is how creativity is involved in fundamental painstaking ways with the phenomenological. When the landscape of this kind of learning presupposes the opening of oneself to the world, the stretching of a mind, the thickening of one's perceptions, and the discovery of a deeper and richer self through living, one will tend to experience as life enhancing more of nature, previously unfelt and articulated modes of being in the world.Clearly, as a lecturer one has to inspire students. One of the best ways I know of doing this is through satisfying and intensifying students' creative appetite. Although I will not discuss it here there is some evidence to suggest that the need for creativity is biologically, physically, and psychologically an essential part of human nature, necessary for human-reproduction, growth, and cultural striving.4 The lecturer who fails to stimulate students' creativity, their being in the world, may be unwittingly inhibiting their cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being; preventing them from realizing their potential. Indeed, some learning problems can be attributed to the unconscious or deliberate stifling of creativity in student lives. We can see this happening when one feels emotionally or intellectually repressed, unable to express oneself openly, to take delight in what one has achieved, to note one's own unique sensitivity, and to experience personally the many wonders in the world. Although we may not articulate it, without a modicum of creative outlet, life can appear very cruel. Further, some of the benefits of creativity can be seen in studio teaching situations in which, as Charles Bingham and Alexander Sidorkin imply, the dynamics of aesthetic creativity encourage power-sharing and the fostering of non-dominated pedagogical relationships.5 As both Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller realized two centuries ago, creativity has the capacity to foster educationally a particular kind of freedom essential to sustaining an alert, liberal, and questioning mind.6 There is also much empirical evidence, at least in the arts, to show how creative practice can assist the clarification of ideas, advancement in thought, and concentration in learning. The notebooks, papers, and recordings of Mozart... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Embedding Creativity in Teaching and LearningHoward Cannatella (bio)IntroductionCreative teaching ranges from the view that creativity is necessary for a changing knowledge economy to a more individualized view that encompasses a person-centered approach. None of these views are advanced in this essay, as I feel that there are important weaknesses in taking either position. Instead, my main purpose is to discuss how certain kinds of creative activity can substantially (...) transform educational practice without necessarily succumbing to any of the above conceptions of creativity. My educational approach to creative activity relates to one aspect of Alasdair Macintyre's, After Virtue; the notion that creativity only flourishes via a devotion to a particular practice.1 For such practice to flourish it has to immerse itself in a type of personal address that revolves and combines in various ways what Maurice Merleau-Ponty refers to as "self-others-things."2Any claim to suggest that education should engage creativity more than it currently does can stir some reasonable criticism, for there are clearly a plethora of other important factors to consider in student learning. Yet, to a degree, the practice of creativity is, I think, being dissipated and weakened, where ambivalence and ill-informed ideas are increasingly obscuring its place. My own thinking on this displacement which has some connections with John White's view and in a different sense with Howard Gardner's, is that if we offer via teaching situations geometrical puzzles, visual problem solving exercises and the like, such exercises although perhaps amusing in themselves are hardly taking up the same refined order of creative display exhibited by those most credited as being creatively talented.3 Indeed, to surmise that creativity is a construal of left hand side verses right hand side brain activity; that one can show different color cards on a monitor or play a short excerpt of Beethoven's Pastoral symphony in order to accelerate student learning are at the very least questionable creative assumptions. In [End Page 59] contrast, what I aim to show from one perspective as a crucial distinction is how creativity is involved in fundamental painstaking ways with the phenomenological. When the landscape of this kind of learning presupposes the opening of oneself to the world, the stretching of a mind, the thickening of one's perceptions, and the discovery of a deeper and richer self through living, one will tend to experience as life enhancing more of nature, previously unfelt and articulated modes of being in the world.Clearly, as a lecturer one has to inspire students. One of the best ways I know of doing this is through satisfying and intensifying students' creative appetite. Although I will not discuss it here there is some evidence to suggest that the need for creativity is biologically, physically, and psychologically an essential part of human nature, necessary for human-reproduction, growth, and cultural striving.4 The lecturer who fails to stimulate students' creativity, their being in the world, may be unwittingly inhibiting their cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being; preventing them from realizing their potential. Indeed, some learning problems can be attributed to the unconscious or deliberate stifling of creativity in student lives. We can see this happening when one feels emotionally or intellectually repressed, unable to express oneself openly, to take delight in what one has achieved, to note one's own unique sensitivity, and to experience personally the many wonders in the world. Although we may not articulate it, without a modicum of creative outlet, life can appear very cruel. Further, some of the benefits of creativity can be seen in studio teaching situations in which, as Charles Bingham and Alexander Sidorkin imply, the dynamics of aesthetic creativity encourage power-sharing and the fostering of non-dominated pedagogical relationships.5 As both Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller realized two centuries ago, creativity has the capacity to foster educationally a particular kind of freedom essential to sustaining an alert, liberal, and questioning mind.6 There is also much empirical evidence, at least in the arts, to show how creative practice can assist the clarification of ideas, advancement in thought, and concentration in learning. The notebooks, papers, and recordings of Mozart... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe seeming distinction between motor and cognitive skills has hinged on the fact that the former are automatic and non-propositional, whereas the latter are slow and deliberative. Here, the physiological and behavioral phenomenon of long-latency stretch reflexes is used to show that “knowing-that” can be incorporated into “knowing-how,” either immediately or through learning. The experimental demonstration that slow computations can, with practice, be cached for fast retrieval, without the need for re-computation, dissolves the intellectualist/anti-intellectualist distinction: All complex human (...) tasks, at any level of expertise, are a combination of intelligent reflexes and deliberative decisions. (shrink)

This paper explores Dilthey’s radical transformation of epistemology and the human sciences through his projects of a critique of historically embodied reason and his hermeneutics of historically mediated life. Answering criticisms that Dilthey overly depends on epistemology, I show how for Dilthey neither philosophy nor the human sciences should be reduced to their theoretical, epistemological, or cognitive dimensions. Dilthey approaches both immediate knowing (Wissen) and theoretical knowledge (Erkenntnis) in the context of a hermeneutical phenomenology of historical life. Knowing (...) is not an isolated activity but an interpretive and self-interpretive practice oriented by situated reflexive awareness (Innewerden) and self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung). As embedded in an historical relational context, knowing does not only consist of epistemic validity claims about representational contents but is fundamentally practical, involving all of human existence. Empirically informed Besinnung, with its double reference to sense as meaning and bodily awareness, orients Dilthey’s inquiry rather than the “irrationalism” of immediate intuition or the “rationalism” of abstract epistemological reasoning. (shrink)

Cognitive science has recently moved toward action-integrated paradigms to account for some of its most remarkable findings. This novel approach has opened up new venues for the sport sciences. In particular, a large body of literature has investigated the relationship between complex motor practice and cognition, which in the sports domain has mostly concerned the effect of imagery and other forms of mental practice on motor skill acquisition and emotional control. Yet recent evidence indicates that this relationship is (...) bidirectional: motor experience also influences higher cognition, with a broad range of cognitive abilities being impacted in various ways. In this paper, I review the latest research exploring the effect of complex motor practice on spatial cognition. After emphasizing the versatility of processes that are recruited in the acquisition of complex motor skills, I present further experimental evidence to suggest that the process of acquiring new motor skills triggers specific adaptions in the brain, which in turn can be critical in numerous aspects of daily life. Finally, I propose a mechanistic explanation to account for motor-induced improvements, within an embodied framework of cognition. (shrink)

Within a perspective that views groups as communities of practice and sites of construction of knowledge, learning, and identity, this article aims to explore the contribution that participation in different groups over the course of one’s life provides to the development of the professional practices of psychotherapist trainees enrolled in the C.O.I.R.A.G. school, an Italian graduate program in group psychotherapy. Through qualitative analyses of 10 semi-structured interviews, our study empirically shows that by participating in groups, the trainees not (...) only learn the practices of that group but also develop a sort of meta-learning which takes place across groups. The results highlight that: Transversality, duration, and informality are found to be the group properties with the highest formative value; and Learning practices across different groups have common characteristics: are organized around complex topics of group life, began in early group experiences, are in continuous evolution, are associated with a critical event, and a negative affect. At the same time, it seems that these critical events are exactly what triggered and sustained the learning practices. Data from the interviews also showed how professional identities are constructed as the outcome of learning in different communities of practice. The study outlines how the experience made in different groups is elaborated in and through meaningful self-narratives, highlighting them as a fundamentally collective and culturally shaped sense-making process. Overall, these results contribute to a better understanding of learning processes as situated and jointly constructed through multiple group participations over time. Furthermore, they contribute to highlighting the role of self-narratives as a primary way through which trainees shape their identity as self-reflexive professionals who are competent in reading group dynamics. Directions for future research and suggestions for psychotherapist training paths are outlined in the conclusions. (shrink)