Experiential Knowledge

El saber de la experiencia en la formación inicial del profesorado 1 José CONTRERAS DOMINGO RESUMEN El presente artículo pretende resaltar la importancia del saber de la experiencia dentro del proceso de formación del profe-sorado. Pero para ello es necesario alejarse de la imagen de la experiencia como simple acumulación de saberes prácti-cos. El saber de la experiencia remite a un modo, siempre en movimiento, de preguntarse por el sentido de lo vivido y de lo que significa y supone la relación educativa, siempre atra-vesada por la cuestión de la alteridad. No es tanto un saber que se transmite, sino que es necesario ayudar a elaborar y a contar con él como bagaje y disposición fundamental en la tarea educativa. ¿Qué nos reclama el saber de la expe-riencia en los procesos formativos? ¿Cómo poner en juego los saberes de la experiencia, la disposición pensante ante lo vivido, como elemento nuclear de la formación? PALABRAS CLAVE: experiencia, saber de la experien-cia, formación inicial del profesorado. ABSTRACT This article aims to emphasise the importance of learning from experience in the process of teacher training. In order to accomplish this, we need to distance ourselves from the image of experience as a simple accumulation of practical knowledge. Knowledge gained from experience consists of a way, which is always changing, of wondering about the meaning of our experiences and the meaning of the educational relationship, always affected by the

Le premier fluide que le sein maternel émet pour le nouveau-né, dénommé en khmer teuk doh dambaung, signifie littéralement « lait du début ». Les mères au Cambodge ont longtemps jeté cette substance et attendu le lait dit « plus épais » pour mettre au sein leur nouveau-né. Cette pratique se perd avec le renforcement de la médicalisation des naissances depuis les années 1990. Le savoir biomédical sur le colostrum, axé sur ses bienfaits et la promotion de l’allaitement exclusif dès la naissance, est omniprésent dans les discours des mères. Cependant, dans la pratique, le colostrum est complété par des substituts au lait maternel. De nouvelles pratiques ni conformes aux anciennes ni conformes aux recommandations biomédicales se mettent en place au sein de la maternité, déterminées par une hiérarchisation et une hybridation des savoirs effectuées par les mères au cours de leur expérience de l’allaitement les premiers jours. Cette communication propose une reflexion sur le savoir expérientiel relatif au colostrum, sur ses différentes composantes (jugements sensoriels, techniques du corps, informations diverses transmises par l’entourage socio-familial), et le processus de décision qui conduit les mères à compléter par des substituts au lait maternel. Elle met en évidence le rôle central du contact direct de la mère avec le nouveau-né, l’environnement et l’entourage socio-familial dans la décision de donner ou non le colostrum de façon exclusive. L’étude, basée sur une enquête par questionnaires (auprès de 100 mères et 20 personnels de santé) et une enquête ethnographique à base d’observations et d’entretiens (20 mères, 3 pères, 4 personnels de santé), a été réalisée dans une maternité de Phnom Penh entre septembre et décembre 2014. Concernant les mères, l’enquête était conduite les premiers jours après l’accouchement.

The article explores the intuitive element of procedural knowledge in winemaking. It presents data on winemakers’ interpretation of intuition, specifically its relationship with sense-impressions and experience. Interviews were conducted with six winemakers and two winemaking consultants in South Africa. Four insights on intuition emerged from the interviews. According to the first, intuition is similar to artistic inspiration, the unique and subconscious flow of ideas and approaches that characterize creative instinct. The second insight emphasizes the role of the senses in knowing intuitively, and calls for an examination of the relation between intuition and the senses. The third insight views intuition as immediate knowledge that springs from a link between past experiences and current events. In the last, intuition is seen to occur when all the facts of a matter are considered and the missing pieces of the puzzle are filled in by sensory assessments.

An understanding of how our experiences shape the neural networks in our brains, which condition our subsequent actions and experiences, can be useful in explaining patterns found in art and design. This is the perspective of neuroarthistory, which can be applied at different levels, from the patterns unfolding in the works of a single artist/designer to the much wider epochal patterns discovered through archaeological studies. This article introduces the neuroscientific principles of "neural plasticity" and "neural mirroring," and demonstrates their application to explain the patterns found in prehistoric, medieval, and contemporary art and design expressions.

The definition of materials in design today is more extensive than ever. Designers add computational programmability to conventional materials like wood and plastics to develop material compositions that are more expressive in form and function (Vallgårda & Redström, 2007; Ishii, Lakatos, Bonanni, & Labrune, 2012). They collaborate with micro-organisms, guiding their growth and forging the conditions in which a material can be created (see for an overview, Myers, 2012; Camere & Karana, 2018). Inspired by how a plant root spreads to find light and nutrition, Diana Scherer directs the growth of plant roots to develop textile-like materials with a self-developed technique (Figure 1). The BioLogic project by the MIT Tangible Media Group (Yao et al., 2015) explores responsive clothing, whose dozens of tiny triangular flaps react to heat and humidity due to the trillion or so single-cell organisms embedded into the fabric. In the figure shown here, it is this bacteria that causes the garm...

State of the art van de kenmerkende elementen van ervaringsdeskundigheid en de daar bijbehorende competenties, en een voorstel voor een begrippenkader. Deze bundeling van informatie helpt bij het ontwikkelen van beleid rond zowel ervaringsdeskundigheid zelf, als ook rond opleidingen, onderzoek en inbedding in de praktijk.

This paper explores how personal experience acquires the status of knowledge and/or evidence in contemporary healthcare contexts that emphasise being both patient-centred and evidence-based. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three case studies-self-help and mutual aid groups; online patient activism; and patient feedback in healthcare service delivery-we foreground: a) the role that different technologies and temporalities play in how experience is turned (or fails to be turned) into knowledge or evidence; b) the role that experts-of-experience, in addition to the more frequently referenced experts-by-experience, play in mediating how, when and why experience is turned into an epistemic resource; and finally, c) how the need to be 'evidence-based' remains a persistent, yet at times productive, challenge to how patient and user experiences are incorporated in contemporary healthcare policy and practice. Throughout the paper, we argue that it is necessary to look at both democratic and epistemic imperatives for including patient and service users in healthcare services and policymaking based on their experience.

Title. Knowledge about social networks and integration: a co-operative research projectAim.  This paper is a report of a study investigating how knowledge of social network and integration influenced mental health professionals’ understanding and practice.Background.  Community mental health work focuses on people suffering from mental health problems as well as the consequences for the person involved and their family or network. There is a need to expand community mental health workers’ knowledge about social networks and their functions.Method.  A qualitative study using a co-operative research approach was used to develop participants’ knowledge of social network and social integration theory. Action research has the potential to facilitate changes in the field. Data were collected using focus groups. Qualitative content analysis was employed to develop the theme and categories. The data were collected in 2004–2005.Findings.  The main theme identified was the potential of experiential knowledge-based competence, which was characterized by the following categories: (1) increased knowledge, (2) awareness of social interactions, (3) cross-disciplinary professionalism and (4) potential for changes in practice. Participants’ knowledge and awareness of the potential of social integration as a tool for social network interventions were considerably strengthened. However, this knowledge needs to be implemented in practice.Conclusion.  Co-operative research is an approach that can be beneficial in the public sector. To achieve the best possible results, the whole team must be involved and play an active part in all areas of the research project. If the groups involved are too large, participants’ level of engagement may suffer.

Citizen science is a relatively young research field. Having ‘discovered’ it a conference workshop, I thought it might be the answer to solving a problem I had encountered during my PhD studies – how to scale-up efforts to record valuable experiential knowledge. I planned to train citizen scientists to conduct qualitative semi-structure interviews so that they could gather local knowledge of climate change and adaptation strategies in the Turks and Caicos Islands. Quickly, I realised that previous citizen science projects had primarily asked members of the public acting as citizen scientists to contribute to quantitative datasets, and rarely had academics attempted to use such individuals as interviewers. Referencing guidelines from a non-governmental organisation I designed my own methodology.
This case, a pilot study conducted in 2013, outlines the considerable challenges to conducting qualitative citizen science. Whilst it concludes that it is too early to tell how useful the methodology may be when it comes to scaling-up experiential knowledge research, it does outline steps that can be taken so that the approach has the best possible chance of success in the future.

Ireland’s inshore and coastal fisheries are little different to many worldwide, in that their management (supported by traditional fisheries science) is struggling to ensure their ecological, socioeconomic and cultural sustainability. This presentation begins to show how the knowledge of fishers could be mobilised to simultaneously tackle the threats to sustainability in each of these areas. Through conducting interviews with captains of vessels from the Galway and Aran fishery on Ireland’s west coast, we found that each fisher has a unique and never before recorded knowledge of marine biology, fish markets and offshore and onshore fishing operations. Much of this knowledge could and should be input straight into existing fisheries management as a useful and even essential support to existing science, which is known to sometimes be uncertain or lacking. However, we also discovered dimensions of knowledge that would not be easily integrated into existing management frameworks. This knowledge was that of fishers’ strategies and their own ideas for fisheries management. In fisheries where it was assumed by some scientists and managers that fishers were intent on maximising their fishing effort we actually found that over half of our interviewees were looking to downscale their operations. Their reasons for wanting to decrease fishing effort ranged from wanting to increase profits to wanting to spend more time at home in their local communities. Yet, in many cases market and policy inefficiencies were raising barriers to their ability to actually ‘trade-down’. They had a number of ideas (not yet suggested by fisheries managers) for facilitating this downscaling, but unfortunately there was no formal avenue through which they could express these. Undoubtedly fishers in Newfoundland possess the same dimensions of knowledge and human capital. If managers listened with more care to fishers in Ireland and Newfoundland it is likely they could better satisfy all stakeholders, using fishers’ knowledge to inform management that promotes sustainability for both fish populations and coastal communities.

State of the art van de kenmerkende elementen van ervaringsdeskundigheid en de daar bijbehorende competenties, en een voorstel voor een begrippenkader. Deze bundeling van informatie helpt bij het ontwikkelen van beleid rond zowel ervaringsdeskundigheid zelf, als ook rond opleidingen, onderzoek en inbedding in de praktijk.

A clear emphasis on the patient's view is discernible in the health services research literature of the past decades. Such a switch to patients' perspectives has been greatly facilitated by a wider acceptance and use of qualitative methods. In particular, focus groups are often used to uncover the range and depth of experiences of health services users and chronically ill individuals. Although this method contributes to a better understanding of patients' perspectives and practices, a number of analytical considerations have been overlooked. The aim of this paper is to consider how to conceptualise and analyse interactions in focus group research. We argue that focus groups are social spaces in which participants co-construct the "patient's view" by sharing, contesting and acquiring knowledge. Focus groups conducted with home care patients in Quebec, Canada (on antibiotic intravenous therapy, parenteral nutrition, peritoneal dialysis and oxygen therapy) are used to illustrate three interactive processes at work in focus groups: (1) establishing oneself as experienced and knowledgeable; (2) establishing oneself as in search of information and advice; and (3) validating or challenging one another's knowledge claims. We develop an analytical template focused on the subtle dynamics underpinning the various and at times competing claims of patients. This template acknowledges the processes through which participants attribute authority to the claims of others, including the focus group moderator. We find that focus group research does not derive epistemological authority simply from the identity of its participants. Rather, an emerging consensus about what constitutes the patient's view is the result of context-dependent social interactions that need to be scrutinised.

Within the evidence-based medicine (EBM) construct, clinical expertise is acknowledged to be both derived from primary experience and necessary for optimal medical practice. Primary experience in medical practice, however, remains undervalued. Clinicians’ primary experience tends to be dismissed by EBM as unsystematic or anecdotal, a source of bias rather than knowledge, never serving as the “best” evidence to support a clinical decision. The position that clinical expertise is necessary but that primary experience is untrustworthy in clinical decision-making is epistemically incoherent. Here we argue for the value and utility of knowledge gained from primary experience for the practice of medicine. Primary experience provides knowledge necessary to diagnose, treat, and assess response in individual patients. Hierarchies of evidence, when advanced as guides for clinical decisions, mistake the relationship between propositional and experiential knowledge. We argue that primary experience represents a kind of medical knowledge distinct from the propositional knowledge produced by clinical research, both of which are crucial to determining the best diagnosis and course of action for particular patients.

This paper aims to understand experiential knowledge in a community practice of making by expanding the definition of a designed-object, and design-authorship. It seeks to do so through an enquiry into the making of an object-tool used and made by a community of manual load-bearers in Delhi's vegetable and fruit markets. Tool-making requires an understanding of the task and body's capability. These load-bearers, over decades, have devised two distinct object-tools from understanding contextual differences in material-forms of load being carried, their bodily limitations and available material constraints. The repeated sensorial, kinaesthetic and embodied experience of carrying loads gives raise to a collective body of experiential knowing from individual knowing. It is a form of an open-authorship knowing. Any user-maker can try new iterations, if it eases the task of carrying loads; the adaptation becomes a standard and permeates through the community. Design iterations are made with availability of new raw-materials, change in task of loads to be lifted, thus, the experiential knowledge in object-tool is ever changing.

In this paper I begin unpacking the woodcarver’s experiences of working in green wood from a neurobiological perspective. The woodcarver’s experiences are often characterized as having an intense internal focus and an urge to overcome resistance. Previous research has discussed this overcoming of resistance as a preconscious and a conscious negotiation between maker and material. Recent research on neurobiology has increased our knowledge on the basic nervous system in humans. The aim of this paper is to try to bring together current neurobiological descriptions of the basis of what the wood carver do and experience. It is asserted that neurobiological knowledge on the woodcarver’s experience may open up a new and complimentary understanding of why or even if making matters. It is one in a series of three papers contributing towards developing a research-based hypothesis for a future possible interdisciplinary study.

In the main body of the text, I describe the neurons and neural circuits needed for moving and sensing. I also describe the cerebellum where data driven coordination of muscles takes place. Throughout the text, I discuss and relate these descriptions to the wood carver’s experience.

The paper ends with drawing up three tentative ideas for further exploration: 1) The overflow of information in cerebellum and the experience of intensity; 2) The function of cerebellum as generator of deliberate actions without the conscious self necessarily being aware and the pre-conscious element in the negotiation; and 3) the importance of the neural circuit between sensory input and muscle output at the cost of neural circuits between the cerebral cortex monitoring and self-reflection and the maker’s experience as being close to the material.

Keywords
Woodcarving, experience, neurobiology, moving and sensing, cerebellum