The bodily practice of acquiring skillfulness

Abstract

One of the main topics in the field of reflection is the multitude of questions concerning practice and how skillfulness is developed within a professional field, and this has been the case for decades. As early as in Schön’s seminal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action, published in 1983, these questions were in focus more or less throughout the whole text. While Schön, however, besides dealing with reflection, also addresses the tools that a novice student uses to become familiar with a practice, he does not explicitly address the question of body skillfulness to any large extent. This is, however, the focus in this article. I establish Merleau-Ponty’s theoretical framework, and, via Dreyfus’s famous five-stage model, discuss professional competence and bodily learned skillfulness. Even if Merleau-Ponty’s perspectives have been well known for decades now, they have yet to be incorporated more fully into the development of reflective practices, as well as into theories that try to describe reflective practice.

Keywords:

• skillfulness
• practitioner
• body
• reflection
• Dreyfus
• Merleau-Ponty
• Schön

Notes

1. For a more developed discussion about Schön’s theoretical framework see, for instance, Erlandson (2006, 2008).

2. For an environmental approach to reflection, see, for example, ‘Landscapes for Critical Reflection,’ Brandt (2012, p. 278).

3. The fact that Cartesianism still has a major influence on Western culture makes Ryle (1949) call Cartesianism ‘the official doctrine.’ Also, I here interpret Merleau-Ponty’s proposal as a critique on Cartesianism in the sense that it differentiates between the existence of the body and the existence of the soul, and admits only a physical connection between the body and the world of things. However, I could instead read this critique as targeting representialism, but that would take my reasoning in the wrong direction in this text.

4. While the insect’s reciprocity with the world is purely instinct based this is, of course, not the case for human beings.

5. But it would obviously be totally wrong to argue that the skillful emergency nurse does not need ‘theoretical knowledge.’ In this case ‘theoretical knowledge’ is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition.

6. Originally, Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s five-stage model for skill acquisition was presented in ‘A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Directed Skill Acquisition,’ a report for California University Berkeley Operations Research Center in 1980. It is available online (see below). This model was later developed in Dreyfus and Dreyfus’s famous book: Mind over machine. The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of the computer (1986). In this paper, however, I follow Hubert Dreyfus’s updated and somewhat clarified version (Dreyfus, 1996), also available online (see below). For a fuller understanding of this model I strongly recommend two articles by H. L. Dreyfus from 2002 (2002a, 2002b) (see list of references). Dreyfus, H. L., & Dreyfus, S. E. (1980). http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=html&identifier=ADA084551, Dreyfus, H. L. (1996). http://ejap.louisiana.edu/ejap/1996.spring/dreyfus.1996.spring.html

7. See also Åsvoll (2012) for an attempt to integrate cognitive approaches with Dreyfusian perspectives.

8. In Sweden, this happened in 1977 for teachers and in 1993 for nurses.

9. Geerinck et al. (2010) discusses reflective practice as a steering discourse.

10. However, it would be unfair to suggest that this description covers all of Schön’s ambitions, or his project as a whole. Schön’s multidimensional discussions, for good and bad, seem hard to fully nail down conceptually.

11. PISA via Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (www.oecd.org/PISA).

12. PIRLS via International Association for Evaluation of Educational Achievements (www.iea.nl).