Tacit Expectations Research Articles

Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions: Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious

Defining the unconscious in a Husserlian manner as that which appears through reproductive acts of consciousness, this article attempts to investigate how Vladimir Nabokov tackles this theme in Pnin both as a stylist and as a storyteller. Nabokov understands literature as the art of language that imposes lived experiences on readers, and he achieves literary representations of the unconscious in Pnin by juxtaposing experiences containing tacit expectations that are incongruent with one another. Tracking the scenes where Pnin performs reproductive acts throughout the novel, it is found that the unconscious functions as a thematic pattern in Pnin and mirrors the protagonist’s progress in his quixotic war against cruelty and callousness in the world.

Planning for Difference: Preparing Students to Create Flexible and Elaborated Team Charters that Can Adapt to Support Diverse Teams

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> A robust body of research supports the use of team charters to purposefully create a team culture with shared norms and expectations. However, student teams often treat this requirement as busywork and fail to invest the effort needed to create team charters that prepare the team to adapt for obstacles that they may encounter. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> Teams that do not engage in effective planning for their collaborations are likely to encounter a range of problems including slackers, domineering teammates, curtailed learning opportunities, and general exclusion from the project work—problems that are often exacerbated on diverse teams and that disproportionately affect marginalized populations. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> We created three online modules that help students uncover their own tacit expectations for teamwork, share and merge these expectations, and then construct a team charter and task schedules with their teammates. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> We used a quasiexperimental design comparing team charters from control and experimental groups to understand how our modules affected students’ charters at a university with a highly international population. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Analyses revealed that control group charters tended to invoke universal team norms and assign punishments for failing to uphold those norms. By contrast, experimental group charters were more flexible, acknowledged competing priorities, evidenced greater planning, and articulated processes that could accommodate individual goals, values, and constraints. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Charters created after the modules showed more accommodation of difference; however, more research needs to be done to determine whether the more flexible and elaborated charters improve team behaviors.

Doctoral literacy practices as sites of connections, competition and discomfort

Due to a changing higher education sector, doctoral literacies are evolving. Students are increasingly expected to navigate a diverse range of literacy practices beyond the traditional monograph. Engaging ideas from the fields of Academic Literacies and New Literacy Studies, this study sought to explore what doctoral literacy practices students are engaged in and how these are acquired. Findings revealed that whilst some students maximised opportunities for making material and relational connections, others experienced unfamiliarity and discomfort due to the often tacit expectations of doctoral literacy practices. The contributions of this paper lie in the surfacing the range of doctoral literacy practices and highlighting the need for the doctoral community to make doctoral literacy practices visible and familiar.

Keeping Quiet in Tove Jansson's Fair Play

Abstract As a follow-up to the Common Knowledge symposium “Apology for Quietism” (15:1 to 16:3), this guest column asks what it means to say nothing. Strictly speaking, to “say nothing” is a contradiction in terms (unless, of course, one says “Nothing,” which is another thing entirely and generally not nothing). This essay explores what it means to say nothing in Tove Jansson's novella Fair Play (first published in Finland Swedish as Rent spel, 1989), an episodic account of the intertwined lives of two elderly artists. Through its careful staging of saying nothing, the text calls attention to the many vital functions that silence serves: exposing tacit expectations, opening up creative and psychological space, enabling otherwise impossible relations. Bringing forth the diversity, complexity, and mystery behind hesitation and reticence, Jansson's novella emerges here as a quiet celebration of conversational practices associated with weakness, redefining the genre of the “love story” along the way.

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

Amy Kaplan on Realism and the Imperatives of Empire

Multidisciplinary Staffing in a Graduate Writing Center: Making Writing Labor Visible, Valued, and Shared

Writing studies and writing center scholars have recently focused much-needed attention on how graduate student writers are taught, mentored, and supported. This scholarship also points to a persistent and stubborn conundrum: Graduate students must write their way into disciplinary belonging, yet most advisors lack a language for, or even awareness of, the specialized practices and tacit expectations shaping written discourse in their fields. While graduate student–serving writing centers help fill this writing-support gap, a reliance on English and humanities graduate students for staff reproduces a status quo in which the genre awareness and rhetorical vocabulary needed to mentor advanced academic writers are neither widely distributed nor recognized and valued. This essay offers the counterexample of a graduate writing center whose consultants hail primarily from master’s and doctoral programs in the sciences and social sciences. Using feminist social reproduction theory to examine this case study of one graduate writing center, the authors explore how multidisciplinary staffing resists the enclaving of writing process and rhetorical knowledge and points to a future in which the responsibility for mentoring graduate student writers is visible, valued, and shared.

Performance, pottery and pliers: rupturing play with bodies and things

PurposeThis paper aims to examine tensions around play, performance and artmaking as becoming in the mix of expected and taken-for-granted discourses implicit in an after-school ceramics makerspace (Perry and Medina, 2011). The authors look closely at one adolescent girl’s embodied performance to see how it ruptures the scripts for compliant bodies in the after-school program. While these performances take place out-of-school and in an arts studio, the tensions and explorations also resonate with broader issues around student embodied, performative and becomings that run counter to normalized school expectations.Design/methodology/approachA contemporary approach to nexus analysis (Medina and Wohlwend, 2014; Wohlwend, 2021) unpacked two critical performative encounters (Medina and Perry, 2011) using concepts of historical bodies (Scollon and Scollon, 2004) informed by sociomaterial thing-power (Bennett, 2010).FindingsPlaying while painting pottery collides and converges with the tacitly desired and expected ways of embodying student in this after-school artspace. Emily’s outer-space alien persona ruptured expected discourses when her historical body and embodied performances threatened other children. While her embodied performances facilitated her becoming a fully present participant in the studio, she fractured the line between play and reality in violent ways.Originality/valueAs literacy researchers, the authors are in a moment of reckoning where student embodied performances and historical bodies can collide with all-too-real violent threats in daily lives and community locations. Situating these performances in the nexus of embodied literacies, unsanctioned play and thing-power can help educators respond to these moments as ruptures of tacit expectations for girlhoods in school-like spaces.

‘It’s all about student accessibility. No one ever talks about teacher accessibility’: Examining ableist expectations in academia

ABSTRACT Drawing from perspectives in critical disability studies, this article examines the teaching experiences of 9 disabled graduate students in Canada and the United States. Participants took between 2 and 6 photographs that illustrated their experience teaching with a disability. Follow-up interviews were conducted to gather descriptive accounts of the meaning and significance of the photos. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data and uncover the core themes of mobility, disclosure and teaching performance, accommodation, and careers goals. The findings shed new light on the barriers that graduate students with disabilities face navigating the dual role of learners and teachers. Data reveal that there are overt and tacit ableist expectations in academia about how those in a teaching role perform and carry out their duties. Participants in this study internalised these ableist expectations and believed that an academic career was an unlikely career option.

Bravest Warriors Most Ethereal, Most Human

Often depicted as pitted in cosmic struggle against nobler multitudes of spiritual or heavenly warriors, when viewed from our modernist perspective, the ghostly or demon warriors of Chinese tradition are stigmatized as being, at best, ambiguous in status and, at worst, as perverse beings of consummately evil ill repute. However, discoveries from investigation into the historical origins of these demonic soldiers or troopers demand that we regard them as much more enigmatic in their roles and functions than is initially suggested. Documented earliest references indicate not only how the concept of demon warrior first arose for the purposes of furthering and facilitating the immortality ethos of religious Daoism. Also evident from these first written mentions is the clear and unassailable fact that the prototypes for these ghostly beings were unmistakably and very often unremarkably human. Subsequent literature, especially that surviving in the genre of early medieval tales of the strange, only reinforces the notion of these sometimes real and other times fantastical purveyors of violence as occupants of the permeable vortex thinly separating the human and the supernatural worlds, allowing them to manifest themselves at will and freely in either venue. Furthermore, we learn foremost how their primal function was not unlike that of Western guardian angels in being principally tutelary, with the tacit expectation that they should serve dutifully in defense of those who either cultivated or conjured them forth, ensuring the wellbeing of the living by acting as a kind of collective bulwark against the forces of death.

Embedding patient and public involvement: Managing tacit and explicit expectations

BackgroundEvidencing well‐planned and implemented patient and public involvement (PPI) in a research project is increasingly required in funding bids and dissemination activities. There is a tacit expectation that involving people with experience of the condition under study will improve the integrity and quality of the research. This expectation remains largely unproblematized and unchallenged.ObjectiveTo critically evaluate the implementation of PPI activity, including co‐research in a programme of research exploring ways to enhance the independence of people with dementia.DesignUsing critical cases, we make visible and explicate theoretical and moral challenges of PPI.ResultsCase 1 explores the challenges of undertaking multiple PPI roles in the same study making explicit different responsibilities of being a co‐applicant, PPI advisory member and a co‐researcher. Case 2 explores tensions which arose when working with carer co‐researchers during data collection; here the co‐researcher's wish to offer support and advice to research participants, a moral imperative, was in conflict with assumptions about the role of the objective interviewer. Case 3 defines and examines co‐research data coding and interpretation activities undertaken with people with dementia, reporting the theoretical outputs of the activity and questioning whether this was co‐researcher analysis or PPI validation.ConclusionPatient and public involvement activity can empower individual PPI volunteers and improve relevance and quality of research but it is a complex activity which is socially constructed in flexible ways with variable outcomes. It cannot be assumed to be simple or universal panacea for increasing the relevance and accessibility of research to the public.

The influence of the ’good’ patient ideal on engagement in HIV care

Research on patient engagement in health care shows that better health outcomes and lower healthcare costs are observed among highly engaged patients. Similar to other illnesses, high levels of patient engagement in HIV care are considered essential to maintaining optimal health, and patients who are on treatment and retained in HIV care are known to have better health outcomes. In this article, we draw on focus group discussion data with patients living with HIV in order to explain tacit expectations associated with engagement in care. The main objective of our research was to elicit an explanatory model of engagement in HIV care from the patients’ perspective. We conducted focus group discussions with a sample of two distinct types of patients: those who regularly attended medical appointments and those who did not. In total, we conducted six focus group discussions (n = 43) across in three cities in the US; these included two focus group discussions with a well-engaged and less-well-engaged group in each location. Both types of patients assigned a moral dimension to engagement in care, in that well-engaged patients were considered to be ‘good’ patients. Aspiring to become a ‘good’ patient provided a meaningful goal for some and deepened vulnerabilities among patients that struggled to achieve this status. More vulnerable patients may feel less secure in health care interactions and these feelings may be amplified if patients have an unreasonable impression of what constitutes a ‘good’ patient; thereby leading to disengagement in care. Our findings can inform the development of patient-centered, tailored messages to better serve patients struggling to stay engaged in HIV care.

Love, labour, loss: women, refugees and the servant crisis in Britain, 1933–1939

ABSTRACTBetween 1933 and 1939, around 20,000 Jewish, ‘non-Aryan’ or politically active refugee women from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia entered Britain on domestic service permits. Their immigration, mostly organised by women in the British voluntary sector, served as a moral response to the humanitarian crisis caused by Fascism in Europe, and a practical response to the ‘servant crisis’ in Britain as working-class women increasingly rejected domestic labour. This paper considers the practical and emotional relationships around domestic service and argues that the acceptance of refugee women into the metropolitan British home was conditional on the tacit expectation they could fill the vacancy left by the working classes, becoming British through their labour.

Temperature and pressure dependence of the interfacial free energy against a hard surface in contact with water and decane.

Theoretical descriptions of molecular-scale solvation frequently invoke contributions proportional to the solvent exposed area, under the tacit expectation that those contributions are tied to a surface tension for macroscopic surfaces. Here we examine the application of revised scaled-particle theory (RSPT) to extrapolate molecular simulation results for the wetting of molecular-to-meso-scale repulsive solutes in liquid water and decane to determine the interfacial free energies of hard, flat surfaces. We show that the RSPT yields interfacial free energies at ambient pressures that are consistently greater than that obtained from the liquid-vapor surface tensions of water and decane by ∼4%. Nevertheless, the hard surface and liquid-vapor interfacial free energies are parallel over a broad temperature range at 1 bar indicating similar entropic contributions. With increasing pressure, the hard, flat interfacial free energies exhibit a maximum in the vicinity of ∼1000 bars. This non-monotonic behavior in both water and decane reflects solvent dewetting at low pressures, followed by wetting at higher pressures as the solvents are pushed onto the solute. By comparing the results of RSPT against classic scaled-particle theory (CSPT), we show that CSPT systematically predicts greater entropic penalties for interface formation and makes inconsistent predictions between the pressure dependence of the interfacial free energy and solvent contact density with the solute surface.

Darwin's "Mr. Arthrobalanus": Sexual Differentiation, Evolutionary Destiny and the Expert Eye of the Beholder.

Darwin's Cirripedia project was an exacting exercise in systematics, as well as an encrypted study of evolution in action. Darwin had a long-standing interest and expertise in marine invertebrates and their sexual arrangements. The surprising and revealing sexual differentiation he would uncover amongst barnacles represented an important step in his understanding of the origins of sexual reproduction. But it would prove difficult to reconcile these findings with his later theorizing. Moreover, the road to discovery was hardly straightforward. Darwin was both helped and hindered by the tacit expectations generated by his transformist theorizing, and had to overcome culturally-embedded assumptions about gender and reproductive roles. Significant observational backtracking was required to correct several oversights and misapprehensions, none more so than those relating to the chronically misunderstood "Mr. Arthrobalanus." With careful attention to chronology, this paper highlights some curious and overlooked aspects of Darwin's epic project.

"You Can Turn off the Light If You'd Like": Pediatric Health Care Visits for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder as an Interactional Achievement.

Substantial scholarship has been generated in medical anthropology and other social science fields on typically developing child-parent-doctor interactions during health care visits. This article contributes an ethnographic, longitudinal, discourse analytic account of a child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-parent-doctor interactions that occur during pediatric and neurology visits. The analysis shows that when a child with ASD walks into the doctor's office, the tacit expectations about the visit may have to be renegotiated to facilitate the child's, the parent's, and the doctor's participation in the interaction. A successful visit then becomes a hard-won achievement that requires the interactional and relational work of all three participants. We demonstrate that communicative and sensory limitations imposed by ASD present unique challenges to all the participants and consider how health care disparities may invade the pediatric encounter, making visible the structural and interactional processes that engender them.

Done that: short-term repetition related modulations of motor cortex activity as a stable signature for overnight motor memory consolidation.

An almost universally accepted tacit expectation is that learning and memory consolidation processes must be reflected in the average brain activity in brain areas relevant to task performance. Motor cortex (M1) plasticity has been implicated in motor skill acquisition and its consolidation. Nevertheless, no consistent pattern of changes in the average signal, related to motor learning or motor memory consolidation following a single session of training, has emerged from imaging studies. Here we show that the pattern and magnitude of short-term brain activity modulations in response to task repetition, in M1, may provide a robust signature for effective motor memory consolidation processes. We studied participants during the paced performance of a finger-to-thumb opposition sequence (FOS), intensively trained a day earlier, and a similarly constructed untrained FOS. In addition to within-session "on-line" gains, most participants expressed delayed, consolidation-phase gains in the performance of the trained FOS. The execution of the trained FOS induced repetition enhancements in the contralateral M1 and bilaterally in the medial-temporal lobes, offsetting novelty-related repetition suppression effects. Moreover, the M1 modulations were positively correlated with the magnitude of each participant's overnight delayed gains but not with absolute performance levels. Our results suggest that short-term enhancements of brain signals upon task repetition reflect the effectiveness of overnight motor memory consolidation. We propose that procedural memory consolidation processes may affect the excitation-inhibition balance within cortical representations of the trained movements; this new balance is better reflected in repetition effects than in the average level of evoked neural activity.

Trust in health care encounters and systems: a case study of British pensioners living in Spain.

Research on trust in health care faces two enduring challenges. Firstly, there are conceptual ambiguities in distinguishing trust from related concepts, such as confidence or dependence. Second, the tacit understandings which underpin the ‘faith’ element of trust are difficult to explicate. A case study of British pensioners who have moved to Spain provides an opportunity to explore trust in a setting where they often have a choice of where to access health care (UK or Spain), and are therefore not in a state of dependence, and in which the ‘differences’ of a new field generates reflection on their tacit expectations of providers and systems. In accounting for decisions to use (or not to use) Spanish health care, British pensioners cited experiential knowledge of symbolic indicators of trustworthy institutions (they were hygienic, modern, efficient), which contributed to background confidence in the system, and interpersonal qualities of practitioners (respect for older people, embodied empathy and reciprocity) which evoked familiar relations, within which faith is implicit. In contrast, with limited recent access to the British system, their background confidence had been compromised by reports of poor performance, with few opportunities to rebuild the interrelational bases of trust.

Identity expectations in early childhood teacher education: Pre-service teachers' memories of prior experiences and reasons for entry into the profession

In the context of preparing early childhood teachers for a field with high attrition rates, this Canadian study examines pre-service teachers' identity expectations. Pre-service teachers wrote biographical narratives describing memories that influenced their reasons for choosing the teaching profession. Fifty-three narratives were analyzed. Implications from the study's findings suggest that teacher educators: 1) attend to the emotional dimensions of pre-service teachers' memories and identities; 2) help pre-service teachers access and articulate their tacit expectations about teaching; 3) address the image of the teacher as role model; and 4) attend to the political aspects of a prospective teacher's convictions.

10.5937/sjm9-6258 = Positions of young entrants

There are explicit, as well as tacit expectations among skills and competencies that are demanded from those newly graduated. My main question of interest is the following: Where do young people learn these skills, knowledge and experience? Present paper is based on literature review and a quantitative research which was conducted among university students aged 18-33, in autumn 2013. The findings prove that a significant part of tacit knowledge is gained through family socialisation, during the process of informal learning rather than via formal education. Hence, family socialisation affects the competence portfolio of young graduates immensely. Present paper endeavours to investigate this influence.

Toward an explanatory framework for mental ownership

Philosophical and scientific investigations of the proprietary aspects of self—mineness or mental ownership—often presuppose that searching for unique constituents is a productive strategy. But there seem not to be any unique constituents. Here, it is argued that the “self-specificity” paradigm, which emphasizes subjective perspective, fails. Previously, it was argued that mode of access also fails to explain mineness. Fortunately, these failures, when leavened by other findings (those that exhibit varieties and vagaries of mineness), intimate an approach better suited to searching for an explanation. Having an alternative in hand, one that shows promise of achieving explanatory adequacy, provides an additional reason to suspend the search for unique constituents. In short, a negative and a positive thesis are developed: we should cease looking for unique constituents and should seek to explain mineness in accord with the model developed here. This model rejects attempts to explain the phenomenon in terms of either a narrative or a minimal sense of self; it seeks to explain at a “molecular” level, one that appeals to multiple, interacting dimensions. The molecular-level model allows for the possibility that subjective perspective is distinct from a stark perspective (one that does not imply mineness). It proposes that the confounding of tacit expectations plays an important role in explaining mental ownership and its complement, disownership. But the confounding of tacit expectations is not sufficient. Because we are able to be aware of the existence of mental states that do not belong to self, we require a mechanism for determining degree of self-relatedness. One such mechanism is proposed here, and it is shown how this mechanism can be integrated into a general model of mental ownership. In the spirit of suggesting how this model might be able to help resolve outstanding problems, the question as to whether inserted thoughts belong to the patient who reports them is also considered.