Abstract
The co-construction of a psychology module for a postgraduate training course in orthotics/prosthetics is socially constructed for the first time in Southern African history. This paper elucidates the integration of theory and practice in a model for the development of a professional identity as orthotist/prosthetist. In creating a context where trainees can learn to develop their practice while also enabling them to deconstruct notions of ‘expert knowledge’, orthotist/prosthetists move from a position of scientist-practitioner to negotiating an alternative position of reflective practitioner. In the process of co-constructing knowledge, an alternative story of teaching and learning evolves. The result is a celebration of life as it is really lived by health professionals.
Notes
1. Critical psychology is a movement that challenges psychology to work towards emancipation and social justice, and opposes the uses of psychology to perpetuate oppression and injustice (Parker Citation1999). Austin and Prilleltensky (Citation2001) posit that it is a meta-discipline in that it enables the discipline of psychology to critically evaluate its moral and political implications. The diverse origins of critical theory can be traced to the first generation of Frankfurt school theorists (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Lowenthal, Pollock, and Fromm) who were critical of the denial of subjectivity found in positivism and sought to establish a social science that went beyond the positivist tradition (Geuss Citation1981). The second generation of critical theorists included Habermas, who identified three interests served by knowledge seeking: (a) technical control, (b) interpretive understanding, and (c) emancipatory interest (Sullivan Citation1984). According to Geuss (Citation1981), the emancipatory nature of knowledge, as identified by Habermas, is also inherent in critical/reflective theory. Klaus Holzkamp is known as the founder of German critical psychology that sought to improve psychology by developing an alternative ontological and epistemological foundation (Tolman and Maiers Citation1991). The Latin-American psychologist Martin-Baro (Citation1994) proposed a psychology that openly concerned itself with ending oppression and promoting emancipation. The advent of postmodernism introduced a critical analysis of the way power is used in the process of developing theories (Teo Citation1998), while concepts of poststructuralism were used to discuss how psychology's insistence on the split between individual and society has contributed to perpetuating oppression rather than promoting emancipation in psychology (Henriques et al. Citation1984). Community psychology developed in response to the growing sense of disempowerment and alienation and in doing so set the stage for contemporary critical psychology to emerge. Feminist psychology, recognized as another origin of critical psychology, critiqued mainstream psychology's exclusion of women as psychological subjects and creators of psychological knowledge (Wilkinson, Citation1997). Dei's (Citation1997) anti-racism theory ‘explicitly names the issues of race and social difference as issues of power and equity rather than as matters of cultural and ethnic variety’.