Experience, Intersubjectivity, and Reflection: A Human Science Perspective on Preparation of Future Professionals in Adaptive Physical Activity

ABSTRACT

The aim of this article is to show that and how philosophy and philosophical thinking can be of relevance for the preparation of future professionals in adaptive physical activity. To this end we utilize philosophical insights from the human science perspective on two central issues, namely experience and intersubjectivity, which are weaved together in an analysis of a reflective journal produced by an adaptive physical activity student. More specifically, by drawing on phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy, we show how the meaning of adaptive physical activity—as adaptive—is created through a complexity of individual and shared meaning making processes between adaptive physical activity educators, students, and the people they meet in their practicum. Through this article, we will show how the human science perspective can provide tools to understand the students, their learning, and their involvement in the educational program.

KEYWORDS:

• Experience
• human science
• intersubjectivity
• philosophy
• reflection

Notes

1. In this article we take philosophy to be far more specific than merely a general outlook on life (e.g., “my philosophy is …”). In the academic sense, philosophy “is a way of thinking about certain sorts of questions … [such as] religion, right or wrong, politics, the nature of the external world, the mind, science, and numerous other topics” (Warburton, 2004, pp. 1–2).

2. As Szostak points out in his article in this special issue, it is important for APA to embrace and encourage a broad definition of evidence in which no form of research or knowledge is a prior taken as superior. We wholeheartedly agree with this.

3. Note that skiing is a culturally significant activity in our context, both in the sense that being able to participate in skiing, as well as being able to teach skiing, can be seen as important compentences.

4. Granted, there are different phenomenological theories about intersubjectivity (Crossley, 1996; Zahavi, 2001), but at the level of detail that we can go into here, our presentation should be fairly uncontroversial.

5. This is often referred to as the problem of other minds (Zahavi, 2001). A classical solution to this problem is the “argument from analogy:” Since I do not have the same access to the other’s mind as I have to my own, my access to the other’s mind must be mediated by the bodily behavior that I can read off from the other. That is, if I see that you are crying, then I can, by extrapolating my own experiences with crying, infer that you are probably feeling sad. This solution is not adequate from a phenomenological perspective, because it underestimates the difficulties of self-experiences (i.e., the access that I have to my own self) and overestimates the difficulties of experiencing the other (Zahavi, 2001).

6. Note the embodied connotation of grasping experience. This points toward an epistemology of the hand (Brinkmann & Tanggaard, 2010) intimately connected to the pragmatist’s primacy of practice.