Experiential Paradigm Research Articles

Coaching and Mentoring in Bachelor′s Degree Programs for Social Workers and Teachers

Abstract This paper presents an analysis of coaching strategies used in the final stage of undergraduate programs for social workers and teachers for primary and preschool education in order to identify “best practice” of coaching and mentoring. To achieve this goal we used comparative analysis of models of coaching based on the following criteria: the satisfaction of university students, and trainers related to the methods used; the students/teachers′s perceptions of the effectiveness of the methods used; the consumption of resources (material, human and time). A comparison of coaching activities in the two specializations was made to identify innovation opportunities for training in undergraduate programs for teachers and social workers education. Professionals in these fields have in common the conditions of the agency and direct relationship with clients (adults and/or children) and the condition of people with training goals and empowerment. The assumptions from which we started the research were: (I1) a method is “best practice” when student satisfaction with the coaching method used positively correlated with satisfaction of his coach regarding the same method; (I2) there is a “best practice” if the student's perception of effectiveness is positively correlated with the perceived effectiveness of the method by coach, (I3) a method “best practice” implies reduced consumption of resources, time and human energy. Coaching labs are designed to develop individual skills for successfully performing the roles of professionals in social work and primary and preschool education. Analysis methods were made based on cognitive paradigm (efficiency and effectiveness of training methods is assessed by each participant in the coaching program by referring each event to his/her cognitions) and experiential paradigm (experiencing one method allows participants to express their own set of critical factors of satisfaction/performance indicators that constitute a frame of reference for establishing best-practice). The research is qualitative, exploratory; we used semi-structured interviews and surveys. Information was gathered from a sample of intent, unstructured, consisting of a group of 60 students and 3 coaches. The research results confirmed the first hypothesis, showing the conditions necessary for consideration of a method as “best practice”.

Exploring the conceptualization of the sensory dimension of tourist experiences

This paper aims to contribute to the conceptualization of the sensory dimension of tourist experiences by discussing its theoretical underpinnings. A multidisciplinary approach to the human senses shows their importance to the individual’s experience and perception of the surrounding world, recommending the appropriateness of a holistic analysis of sensescapes in tourism. A review of empirical studies conducted under the experiential paradigm of tourism on the five human senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) evinces the use of both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, which depends on research purposes, but also the practical implications of findings and data analysis to destination marketing and management. The paper discusses the role of the senses in designing tourist experiences, and identifies important topics regarding the study of the sensory dimension of tourist experiences, considering future research opportunities.

Inner experience and neuroscience: merging both perspectives

The study of consciousness has advanced rapidly over the last two decades. And yet there is no clear path to creating models for a direct science of human experience or for integrating its insights with those of neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. In Inner Experience and Neuroscience, Donald Price and James Barrell show how a science of human experience can be developed through a strategy that integrates experiential paradigms with methods from the natural sciences. They argue that the accuracy and results of both psychology and neuroscience would benefit from an experiential perspective and methods. Price and Barrell describe phenomenologically based methods for scientific research on human experience, as well as their philosophical underpinnings, and relate these to empirical results associated with such phenomena as pain and suffering, emotions, and volition. They argue that the methods of psychophysics are critical for integrating experiential and natural sciences, describe how qualitative and quantitative methods can be merged, and then apply this approach to the phenomena of pain, placebo responses, and background states of consciousness. In the course of their argument, they draw on empirical results that include qualitative studies, quantitative studies, and neuroimaging studies. Finally, they propose that the integration of experiential and natural science can extend efforts to understand such difficult issues as free will and complex negative emotions including jealousy and greed.

Educating avatars: on virtual worlds and pedagogical intent

Virtual world technology is now being incorporated into various higher education programs, often with enthusiastic claims about the improvement of students’ abilities to experience learning problems and tasks in computer-mediated virtual reality through the use of computer-generated personal agents or avatars. The interactivity of the avatars with each other is the central learning experience, but serious questions arise about the possible instability of the identity of the avatars and their dubious relations to the learners controlling them. Another problem is the questionable transference of experiential learning from the virtual world to the actual world. A final problem is the meaning of the possibility of avatars engaging in immoral activities. This paper reflects on these matters and attempts to relate the use of avatars to the five principal experiential learning paradigms: constructivism, psychoanalytic intervention, situative learning, critical emancipation, and complex co-emergence.

Pedagogia Imaginal e Processos Formativos: Arte, Narrativas e Mitos

O presente estudo focaliza os processos (auto) formativos dos Educadores da Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo e elege, como problema a ser investigado, o sentido da narrativa autobiográfica, na visão destes educadores. Neste trabalho, adota-se a abordagem (auto) biográfica, na perspectiva do paradigma experiencial de Josso (2004).

Intimate Geography: The Body, Race, and Space in Larsen's <i>Quicksand</i>

Intimate Geography:The Body, Race, and Space in Larsen's Quicksand Laura E. Tanner The field of cultural geography offers one critical lens for considering the interplay of race and space in representational as well as historical terms. Contemporary cultural geography's expanded focus on the way the body is constructed by and in space has allowed cultural geographers to consider identity in the context of race, gender, and disability as well as location. In recent years, however, some cultural geographers, echoing the critiques of scholars in literary critical, philosophical, and cultural studies disciplines, have noted that the field's emphasis on locating the body as a discursive construct—even as it serves the important function of denaturalizing racial and gender hierarchies—marginalizes the body's status as a material, sensory, and emotional entity. In response, cultural geographers have begun to call for analysis not only of the body's function as a discursive site but of the way in which, in David Theo Goldberg's terms, "Race is embodied, is sourced and sensed through the interactive play and performance of space(s) and bodies" (220). Bringing the insights of cultural geography to bear on the case of Nella Larsen's life and art, however, highlights the difficulty of any attempt to supplement theoretical analysis of the constructedness of racialized subjectivity with attention to what Claire Alexander and Caroline Knowles describe in Making Race Matter as "the complex and often contradictory ways in which identities are actually lived out at the level of embodied experience" (10). In Larsen's case, the glaring absence of firsthand accounts of the author's life exaggerates the universal representational challenge of rendering the textured immediacy of lived experience through language. The title of George Hutchinson's recent biography, In Search of Nella Larsen, emphasizes the difficulty of accessing and recreating the experiences of an "invisible" (1) and "mysterious" (11) biographical subject, a woman whom Hutchinson defines early in his study in terms of both corporeal and spatial lack. "Larsen herself," Hutchinson observes, "felt like a shadow through much of her life. She did not long inhabit the sort of place in which she could [End Page 179] feel at home" (1). Born in one of Chicago's worst neighborhoods, the child of a white Danish immigrant mother and a black Danish West Indian father who quickly disappeared from her life, Larsen spent most of her childhood as a black girl in an otherwise white family. Her presence in that family was marked both in corporeal terms—Nella's dark skin clearly announced her racial difference from her white mother, stepfather, and half sister—and in concrete spatial terms, as Nella's blackness dictated not only her "place" in the urban geography of turn-of-the-century Chicago but her family's place of residence as well. Tensions of space and embodiment not only shaped Larsen's most intimate experiences of subjectivity, family, and home, but emerge in her fictional texts as urgent representational concerns. By approaching Larsen's first novel, Quicksand, through an experiential paradigm which locates questions of space and race in the framework of the lived body, I will trace the way that the novel explores the human consequences of its protagonist's "theoretical" approach to her own racialized subjectivity. Insofar as existing criticism of Quicksand situates Helga's body primarily in the realm of cultural constructedness, I will argue, critics of the novel often fail to acknowledge the text's exposure of tensions between the textualized body and its experiential counterpart. Readers of Quicksand have thus puzzled over an apparently inexplicable conclusion in which Helga, its beautiful and sophisticated protagonist, marries a preacher, moves to the deep South, and collapses into an apparently endless cycle of difficult pregnancies and exhausting, even life-threatening childbirths. Why, they have asked, does a cosmopolitan novel that seems to emphasize the constructedness of race, gender, and identity end by retreating to the rural South and eschewing performativity to situate its protagonist in what Jeffrey Gray describes as "the trap of the body" (266)? Introducing experiential as well as biological and constructivist definitions of the body to criticism of the novel suggests that Helga is locked...

‘Step back in time and live the legend’: experiential marketing and the heritage sector

Abstract This paper investigates experiential marketing as a potential survival strategy for cultural heritage attractions competing in the leisure and tourism marketplace. The paper explores the nature and scope of the heritage industry, heritage as a consumption‐based experience and the evidence of adoption of the experiential paradigm by a number of sites and attractions. A content analysis (Krippendorf, 1980 cited in Easterby‐Smith et al., 2002) of promotional leaflets and websites and a case study provide the analytical basis for this evaluation and the paper concludes by proposing an indicative framework for experiential marketing in this sector. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The psychological significance and extensions of autogenic training

The paper first discusses the changes in paradigms involved in the development of self-regulation method (SRM) from autogenic training (AT). Further, an experiential paradigm for SRM and AT is presented. In this paradigm, SRM and AT are seen as ‘modes of relating’ within the patient and modes of relating within the doctor–patient relationship. This paradigm enables SRM and AT to be used in conjunction with other psychotherapies, particularly focusing-oriented therapy (FOT). The procedure for SRM/AT used in combination with FOT is shown and two case examples are presented. Discussions of these cases show that patients regard the nature of the relationship as therapeutic more than the technique of SRM. This view supports the experiential paradigm where AT and SRM are seen as modes of relationships.

The Characteristics of a Person-Centered Approach to Therapy and Counseling: Criteria for identity and coherence / Die charakteristischen Merkmale eines Personzentrierten Ansatzes in Therapie und Beratung: Identitäts- und Kohärenzkriterien / Las características de un enfoque centrado en la persona en la terapia y el counseling: criterios para identidad y coherencia

This article looks in two directions in order to contribute to the search for the identity and future of the person-centered and experiential paradigms: into the interior of the person-centered and experiential ‘family’ (where are we and what are our relationships?); and to the outside (where are the other orientations and what could be our contribution to the realm of psychotherapy as a whole?). It examines criteria for a coherent and distinguishing person-centered conception after the paradigm shift we owe to Rogers, gives reasons for the necessity for ongoing dialogue and mutual challenge among the branches of person-centered and experiential therapies, and discusses some of the consequences for psychotherapy in general.

Integrating experiential–phenomenological methods and neuroscience to study neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness

Understanding the nature of pain at least partly depends on recognizing its inherent first person epistemology and on using a first person experiential and third person experimental approach to study it. This approach may help to understand some of the neural mechanisms of pain and consciousness by integrating experiential–phenomenological methods with those of neuroscience. Examples that approximate this strategy include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities and brain imaging-psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. The experiential paradigm of Price and Barrell (1980) offers the possibility of improved designs and methods for investigating neural mechanisms underlying pain and consciousness.

Interlevel dynamics in clinical inquiry

Within experiential paradigms of action research, clinical inquiry has hitherto received little attention. Clinical inquiry is the observation, eliciting and reporting of data which are available when the researcher is engaged in a helping relationship in the management of change. Its core elements are: the client wanting help and, therefore, being more likely to reveal important data; the clinical researcher being expected to intervene, allowing new data about the client system to surface; and the richness of the data allowing the clinical researcher to develop deep insights into the client system. Interlevel dynamics, as an extension of levels of analysis, are useful diagnostic and intervention constructs for the clinical researcher who is helping an organisation manage change. They can be used to point out areas of systemic dysfunction and intervention. A case example of clinical inquiry in an IT‐organisational change context illustrates the systemic nature of clinical inquiry in dealing with human, organisational and technological issues at, and between, the individual, team, interdepartmental group and organisational levels.

Review of Handbook of experiential psychotherapy.

Part I: History and Theory. Watson, Greenberg, Lietaer, The Experiential Paradigm Unfolding: Relationship and Experiencing. Greenberg, Van Balen, The Theory of Experience-Centered Therapies. Part II: Foundational Processes Watson, Goldman, Vanaerschot, Empathy: A Postmodern Way of Being? Yontef, Dialogic Gestalt Therapy. Schneider, Existential Processes. Leijssen, Focusing Microprocesses. van Kessel, Lietaer, Interpersonal Processes. Bohart, Tallman, The Person as Active Agent in Experiential Therapy. Mahrer, How Can Impressive In-Session Changes Become Impressive Postsession Changes? Part III: Differential Treatment Applications. Greenberg, Watson, Goldman, Process-Experiential Therapy of Depression. Elliott, Davis, Slatik, Process-Experiential Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Difficulties. Wolfe, Sigl, Experiential Psychotherapy of the Anxiety Disorders. Sachse, Goal-Oriented Client-Centered Psychotherapy of Psychosomatic Disorders. Hudgins, Experiential Psychodrama with Sexual Trauma. Eckert, Biermann-Ratjen, The Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder. Warner, A Client-Centered Approach to Therapeutic Work with Dissociated and Fragile Process. Prouty, Pretherapy and Presymbolic Experiencing. Speirer, Psychopathology According to the Differential Incongruence Model. Melnick, Nevis, Diagnosing in the Here and Now: A Gestalt Therapy Approach. Part IV: Conclusion. Greenberg, Lietaer, Watson, Experiential Therapy: Identity and Challenges.

A Typology of Interpersonal Stalking

This article offers a structure for trying to distinguish between different types of stalking and for assessing the outcome of these different types of incidents. Using a law enforcement experiential paradigm, 10 stalking victims pilot-tested a questionnaire of 148 items. Revisions provided a 46-item checklist. In addition, 30 cases were used to pilot-test a typology of stalking based on the nature of the relationship—nondomestic or domestic; the content of communication—nondelusional or delusional; level of aggression—low, medium, or high; level of victim risk; motive of stalker; and outcome of case. Clinicians, investigators, judicial, and policy staff can utilize data from the Stalking Incident Checklist in their respective roles to provide for safety and protection of the victim and treatment and containment of the stalker.