Synvändor : universitetsstudenters berättelser om kvalitativa förändringar av sätt att erfara situationers mening under utbildningspraktik

Abstract

The main purpose of this study has been to examine the questions: Do people experience view-turns? Can they describe them? What do the processes signify? A narrative method, with an open and dual-focussed interview question to students of medicine, nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy in their final term, was used to obtain accounts of university students’ experiences of changing ways of experiencing during educational placement. The accounts revealed that all interviewed students except one had found it meaningful and possible to describe experienced processes of changing ways of experiencing. The accounts were analysed phenomenographically and two qualitatively different main categories were discerned, which were drawn directly from the students’ descriptions: Addition of Something New, with subcategories Information and Result, and Restructuring of Awareness, with subcategories Figure/Ground, Difference/Similarity, Perspective and Whole/Part. Categorisation of the accounts was verified in a three-stage interjudge reliability test with three independent assessors. Significant difference between placing in the two main categories was found between accounts by students of medicine and those by students of nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy. Medical students’ accounts were categorised predominantly as addition of something new, whilst accounts from nursing, occupational therapy and physiotherapy students were categorised almost exclusively as restructuring of awareness. This difference was elucidated by theoretical and historical connection to the Natural Attitude and the Philosophical Attitude described within early phenomenology. The described view-turns were theoretically elucidated with phenomenology, pragmatic meaning formation theory and gestalt theory. The theories, which each give a partial understanding of view-turns, all fail however to explain fully the findings of this study. Contradictions amongst the single-dimensional theoretical understandings offered are suggested to be reconciled through the variation theory of learning, by the premise of co-constitution of experiencing and the experienced. An element of contradiction is seen to be integral to dynamic processes of learning. The research question’s simultaneous focussing on two ways of experiencing something appears to have been decisive in revealing dynamic processes of changing ways of experiencing as well as way of experiencing.