Employing an adapted Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis method, the experience of practicing Clinical Psychologists entering academia is explored. The article explores the recursive process between individual and institution as professional and academic identities develop in the context of a multiplicity of trajectories emerging at the intersection of professional and personal boundaries of identity, rhetoric and reality. The three authors, all of whom are practicing Clinical Psychologists new to academia and who constitute the focus of this study, engaged in a hermeneutic discussion (...) regarding their experience. Exploration of the data gathered from this discussion using the adapted IPA methodology evidenced three central themes, namely: The ‘nuts and bolts’ of academia; Surviving versus thriving; and It’s always personal. These themes are discussed in the context of contemporary literature exploring the experiences of new academics in general and Clinical Psychologists entering academia in particular. The pharmakon that carts the Clinical Psychologists interviewed in the study from professional practice to academia is positioned in the context of an emergent meta-theme where the questions are asked: “What is good and what is not good?” and “who will teach us these things?” In the process of contextualizing, exploring and analyzing the emergent themes, the researchers/participants gradually evidence a response that is less of an answer to the conundrum than it is a koan whereby the questions lose meaning as growth in identity has taken them to the point of the rhetorical response: “Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”. (shrink)

A trustful relationship between teacher and student is fundamental when it comes to the question of what makes teaching and learning work in the classroom. Most researchers have been content with simply examining teachers’ subject knowledge and teaching methods. The aim of this study is to highlight the trustful relationship between teacher and student from the teachers’ point of view. Taking both experience and bodily views into account allows for another way of understanding relationships in the classroom. This is accomplished (...) through the use of a lifeworld phenomenological approach and the concepts of the lived body, lived space and lived time described by Merleau-Ponty. The empirical material on which this article is based was collected by fieldwork in five different compulsory schools in Sweden. In this article I discuss how these lived aspects help to describe a multifaceted relationship. The article also shows that these lived aspects influence relationships through the organisation of activities in the classroom. The article discusses how these lived aspects influence the relationship between the teacher and the student, as well as how they influence the student’s opportunities to learn in school. This study shows that these lived aspects need to be taken seriously in order for teaching and learning to work. (shrink)

The field of positive psychology has burgeoned since its formal inception with Martin Seligman’s 1998 APA presidential address. Aimed at better baking the positive half of the psychology “cake”, the gains in research and practice over the past decade and a half have been substantial. Among the chief reasons for the rapid growth and development in this field is the express emphasis on a positivistic scientific methodology. While this methodology has undoubtedly contributed much to the evolution and growth of the (...) field, the empirical emphasis has arguably resulted in the concomitant neglect of the more qualitative complexities of optimal human functioning. The present paper contributes to the discussion regarding the role of method in the field of positive psychology and, using as case studies two papers from the field of phenomenology, argues specifically for the utility of phenomenological psychological methods in the baking of the metaphorical psychology cake. The case studies effectively serve to illustrate the manner in which phenomenological methods, through their focus on rich description and resistance to an interpretative framework, are condusive to contributing to methodological pluralism within positive psychology and thereby providing additional means whereby not only to continue the baking of the positive psychology cake, but, more particularly, to ensure that it is baked thoroughly by adjusting the oven’s heat to the optimal level. (shrink)

The relationship between body and mind is a classical ontological problem in the history of philosophy. To this problem can be added an epistemological question about the relationship between body and knowledge. In this article, I will discuss these questions delimited to one central area of education, that is, school. My point of view will be life-world phenomenology and in particular the theory of the lived body.