Identity, tools and existential spaces

Publication date: Available online 10 May 2018Source: Learning, Culture and Social InteractionAuthor(s): Federica RaiaAbstractIn this article I investigate the emergence of existential spaces during collaborative team work and learning practice. Within Advanced Heart Failure (AdHF) medical training and care I show how participants engage simultaneously in multiple synchronous activities of patient care and teaching and learning and how they make meaning across these spaces about what it means to be/become a learner, and practitioner - developing practice-linked identities (Nasir & Hand, 2008), as moment-to-moment oscillating synchronous identities. Building on Heidegger’s ontological structures of world and care, I develop an operational definition of existential spaces. In the social context of teaching and learning in practice where asymmetrical power and knowledge distribution situations are in place, it is important to understand how the negotiation of different identities through these spaces can be safely operated to support learners develop practice-linked identities. Through a microethnographic multimodal analysis I make visible at the interactional level the phenomenon of negotiating through these spaces, expanding Heidegger’s concept of breakdown to a social activity initiated in order to teach novel form of practice and to support the Other to safely develop an identity congruent and integrated with others.

Source: Learning, Culture and Social Interaction - July 10, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research