Tacit Theories Research Articles

Brat camp, boot camp, or ……..? Exploring wilderness therapy program theory

Wilderness therapy program theory is reasoned to be, as Weiss (1997) describes, a tacit theory, or one which is implied and not clearly articulated. This is evidenced by several meta-analyses which have consistently found either very limited or no detailed descriptions of the wilderness therapy programs under investigation. The purpose of this paper is to address this lack of articulated and empirically grounded theory by empirically examining the practice of four established wilderness therapy programs, all licensed by their respective state agencies and accredited by national accreditation organizations. A multi-site case study approach was used to elicit program theory that included interviews and focus groups with key staff at each program, participant observation of the process in the field, and interviews and observation of client case studies. An emergent theory is presented that consists of elements of program impact theory (who the programs serve and anticipated outcomes) as well as program process theory (how the programs are organized and how they deliver services). Implications and potential uses of the emergent theoretical framework are discussed.

Ethnography of mediation in an educational ICT course

This article comprises a discussion in which a theory of culture as a system of is used as an interpretativeion frame for the inquiry into the culture of a university course. The argument is that the theory of learning that is applied in the same study, namely sociocultural and related theories, coheres with the methodological lens of what I have termed ethnography of mediation as mode of inquiry. In the ethnographic images of electronic tool-making, the ethnographic text included in the article, the core of the culture of the M.Ed coursework is portrayed is the focus on electronic, interactive tools. There is less fertile ground in which to cultivate theoretical richness in the course, despite the motivation of the lecturer and the strong theoretical course content. The students' tacit theories of learning and of knowledge are regarded as a possible obstacle in their appropriation of the literature on learning and teaching. The successful engagement with electronic tool-making seems to come...

Freeing the chi of change: the Higher Education Academy and enhancing teaching and learning in higher education

This article examines recent UK policy initiatives to enhance teaching and learning in higher education in the UK, and the quality of the student experience there. The Higher Education Academy has recently begun to work in this area and the Higher Education Bill (2004) has passed into law. A reflective review of previous initiatives is therefore very timely. The article shows that, while these different initiatives have been explicitly addressed at different levels of analysis, the meso level—a particularly significant one—has been largely forgotten. Meanwhile these interventions have been based on contrasting underlying theories of change and development. One hegemonic theory relates to the notion of the reflective practitioner, which addresses itself to the micro (individual) level of analysis. It sees reflective practitioners as potential change agents. Another relates to the theory of the learning organization, which addresses the macro level of analysis and sees change as stemming from alterations in organizational routines, values and practices. A third is based on a theory of epistemological determinism and sees the discipline as the salient level of analysis for change. Meanwhile, other higher education policies exist alongside those mentioned above, not overtly connected to the enhancement of teaching and learning but impinging upon it in very significant ways in a bundle of disjointed strategies and tacit theories. Of particular relevance here are policies on funding, on research and on widening participation, all implemented in an increasingly managerialist environment in which work intensification and degradation of resources are occurring. Missing in all this is coherence across the policies, and their underlying theories, at the different analytical levels. Because there is disjointedness in various government and other agencies, higher education policies they have tended to obstruct rather than complement each other. Hence our use of a metaphor from Eastern philosophy—the notion of blocked chi. Also missing is a robust theory of change and associated set of policies at the meso level of analysis—the departmental level. We suggest ways in which the latter omission might be rectified, thus freeing the ‘chi of change’.

Problems and prospects for primary school teacher-professionalism

Groups of academics, school practitioners, L.E.A. advisers and consultants — members of the Association for the Study of Primary Education — were interviewed about how legislated change is affecting teacher (primary-school) professionalism. A range of views was expressed, though three tacit theories of teacher professionalism were found to dictate many opinions. Most people believe that professional associations and other interested bodies need to work jointly to remedy public misperceptions of teaching generally and primary school teaching especially.

Making the tacit explicit: A teaching intervention programme for early career academics

This paper1 describes the results from a research project designed to enhance the practice of novice science lecturers by making use of expertise already present in the University of Otago. The first phase involved the identification and study of excellent teachers from Division of Science departments. The second phase consisted of a teaching intervention program (TIP) utilizing videotapes of the excellent lecturers teaching and discussing their teaching. Participants in the TIP undertook a number of activities designed to assist them in investigating themselves as teachers (the personal); articulating their aims and intentions in the classroom; making their tacit theories about teaching and learning explicit; and, developing habits of reflective practice. Evidence from the TIP session transcripts, TIP evaluation, initial interviews, and stimulated recall interviews demonstrates that the programme assisted the novice lecturers to articulate their aims, intentions and beliefs, to interrogate their teaching practice and to formalize a plan for the future.

Metaphors as blueprints of thinking about teaching and learning

This study analyses the metaphorical conceptions of learning based on the reflections of 50 experienced teachers in an evening course on instructional psychology. The metaphors were achieved by collaboration in small groups. “Co-reflection” of group members was well suited to promote metaphorical reconstructions of teachers’ tacit theories about learning. The results show that the majority of these teachers shares traditional metaphors depicting teaching and learning as transmission of knowledge, followed by a smaller group of teachers expressing constructivist metaphors. Only a minority seems to conceive of teaching and learning as a social process. These results are compared with metaphors formulated by 38 prospective teachers without classroom experience participating in a course on curriculum design. In further collaborations these metaphors should serve as stepping stones to broader and more profound conceptions of the nature of teaching and learning.

Mental Simulation, Tacit Theory, and the Threat of Collapse

According to the theory theory of folk psychology, our engagement in the folk psychological practices of prediction, interpretation and explanation draws on a rich body of knowledge about psychological matters. According to the simulation theory, in contrast, a fundamental role is played by our ability to identify with another person in imagination and to replicate or re-enact aspects of the other person’s mental life. But on each side of the theory versus simulation debate there are significant differences of approach. On the theory-theory side, some use the term ‘theory’ in a narrow sense to require that the body of knowledge about psychological matters should be organised around generalisations that have the status of psychological laws. Others use the term in a more inclusive sense to encompass any body of information or misinformatio n about psychology. Some theory theorists say that the theory is learned, either by processes analogous to scientific investigation or else by cultural transmission. Others say that the theory is, to a considerable extent, innate. On the simulation-theory side, some think of mental simulation as restricted to the re-enactment of rational transitions in thought. Others contrast the simulation approach with accounts of mental-state attribution that make use of an assumption of rationality. Some abstract away from questions about cognitive machinery and describe simulation in personal-leve l folk psychological terms. Others regard the simulation theory as a contribution to cognitive science. 1

Can We Turn a Blind Eye to Eliminativism?

In this paper I shall reply to two arguments that Stephen Stich (1990; 1991; 1996) has recently put forward against the thesis of eliminative materialism. In a nutshell, Stich argues that (i) the thesis of eliminative materialism, according to which propositional attitudes don't exist, is neither true nor false, and that (ii) even if it were true, that would be philosophically uninteresting. To support (i) and (ii) Stich relies on two premises: (a) that the job of a theory of reference is to make explicit the tacit theory of reference which underlies our intuitions about the notion of reference itself; and (b) that our intuitive notion of reference is a highly idiosyncratic one. In this paper I shall address Stich's anti-eliminativist claims (i) and (ii). I shall argue that even if we agreed with premises (a) and (b), that would lend no support whatsoever to (i) and (ii).

Textual Indigence in the Archive

Textual Indigence in the Archive Jed Rasula The adjective “encyclopedic” is equivocal: as an enticement to comprehensiveness and mastery, it is awkwardly shadowed by its Enlightenment provenance and tainted by its association with master narratives. Yet the sort of narratives associated with encyclopedism are the very ones most insistently cited for their burlesque heterogeneity; and, inclining to pastiche, this has made Gravity’s Rainbow seem paradigmatically postmodern. Our distance and our proximity to the thought of encyclopedic narrative is patently linked to the publication date of Pynchon’s novel. In 1976 Edward Mendelson published “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (in the Pynchon festshcrift Mindful Pleasures) and “Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon” (in MLN), establishing a cogent vocabulary and a rationale for viewing Gravity’s Rainbow as the latest in a line of singular narratives exceeding the bounds of the novel. Ronald Swigger had previously written “Fictional Encyclopedism and the Cognitive Value of Literature” (Comparative Literature Studies, 1975), citing Pynchon as example but concentrating on Flaubert, Broch, Borges, and Queneau. Hilary Clark’s doctoral study, published in 1990 as The Fictional Encyclopedia: Joyce, Pound, Sollers, was given concise theoretical recapitulation in “Encyclopedic Discourse” (SubStance, 1992). Despite its relevance to the prodigious debate occasioned by Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives, “encyclopedic narrative” (or “discourse”) has not been assimilated to studies in postmodernism. But the appearance of Underworld by Don DeLillo raises the spectre once again—if only by virtue of its thematic scope and sheer length—imposing itself on the postmodern because DeLillo’s work has been instrumental in weaning the novel away from the gambit of metafiction and, by doing so, staking a claim for a more patently contemporary postmodern fictional practice—one attuned to “waning of affect” (Jameson) and epistemological ungrounding, yet oddly sensitized to glimpses of the sublime.1 Insofar as the sublime is an anti-representational concept, it appears antithetical to the encyclopedic impulse. But as I will elaborate here, encyclopedism is a more complex legacy than its proximity to the household Encyclopedia suggests; its archival propensity is subject to a paradoxically restorative disabling which I will call “indigence.” Mendelson’s portrait of encyclopedic narrative is descriptive rather than prescriptive, drawn from a select core of authors (Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Goethe, Melville, Joyce, Pynchon). Indexing features common to these writers, Mendelson contends that the encyclopedic narrative offers a robust depiction of the knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while at the same time exposing its underlying ideological orientation, thereby providing a tacit theory of social organization. In this endeavor such narratives assume a polyglot dimension, since their ideological analysis is contingent on a broad understanding of linguistic variety (being polyphonic, as Bakhtin would say), and they assimilate various generic protocols as a way of integrating linguistic perspectivism into their structures. Encyclopedic narrative is therefore formally indeterminate, exemplifying the double function of prophecy and narrative and thereby tending towards an epic dimension—a dimension marked by gigantism. Its prophetic and satirical enterprise is at once intrinsic and extrinsic to the society depicted, so Mendelson indicates that encyclopedic narrative is set near the immediate present but not in it (Pynchon’s 1973 novel takes place during World War Two, Underworld traverses the 1950s and early ‘60s, with stroboscopic bursts of the ‘90s); but such works display a temporal elasticity commensurate with their formal indeterminacy. Finally, in what might seem the most specific and thus most exclusive feature of the encyclopedic narrative, Mendelson claims that it offers a full account of at least one technology or science.2 Where Mendelson’s approach is content-oriented, Hilary Clark’s anatomy of “encyclopedic discourse” is formalist and cognitive. With “unreadability” as its signature trait, such discourse is made evident in its compulsiveness, its impetuous desire, and its adoption of encyclopedic material as a pretext for philosophical speculation. Encyclopedic discourse is self-defeating, in Clark’s view, because its investigative energy is finally directed at its own premises and its own performance, and these are necessarily found wanting: “any text (fictional or not) that we would call encyclopedic must speculate on its own discursive processes of discovery and arrangement and on the limitations of these processes” (Clark 105).3 Ronald Swigger characterizes the resulting...

Tacit models of disability underlying health status instruments

In recent years much attention has been paid to the development of measures of subjective health status yet, although statistical criteria of reliability and validity have been quite rigourously tested, there has been little consideration of the different theories of disability which underlie the design. The sociology of disability may illuminate such tacit theories. It is suggested that the development of health status questionnaires has not been one of simple rational accumulation in response to methodological advances. Through an examination of the content of health assessment questionnaires, four distinct models of disability are indentified. These are shown to influence not only the focus of the content and phrasing of the questions but also, crucially, the way that they perform and how responsive they are to change. The models (the functional, subjective distress, comparative and dependence) are illustrated and discussed in terms related to research design.

The Development of Human Change

The Development of Human Change Human Change Processes: The Scientific Foundations of Psychotherapy Michael J. Mahoney. New York: Basic Books, 1991. (590 pp.) $45. In the Preface, Michael Mahoney notes that this volume is the result of ten years of research and writing on human psychological change. He has drawn broadly and extensively from the literatures of the social, biological and physical sciences, as well as philosophy, in providing an integrated view of how humans' understanding of ourselves and our world has developed throughout history. The depth with which Mahoney immersed himself in varied literatures in order to present a conceptualization of human change and knowing processes is evident in his detailed citations of works in each field, the frequent use of footnotes to elaborate points and provide additional sources that the interested reader may consult, the set of technical appendices (covering topics such as attention and perception, psychobiology, and human evolution), and the 120 pages of references. The result of this massive scholarly effort is a dense and often technical text that might put off some readers but contains a wealth of stimulating ideas highly relevant for practitioners and researchers interested in the complex processes involved in human change. This is a challenging book, in terms of both the complexity of the material presented and Mahoney's questioning of some basic assumptions underlying major models of psychotherapy, including the cognitive psychotherapies. The book is divided into three sections. Section I, "Conceptual Introduction and Historical Contexts," begins with a chapter emphasizing how the principles of psychological change in psychotherapy are essentially the same as those involved in human change in the world at large; that issues of individual suffering and security are intimately tied to parallel issues in the survival and development of societies. Throughout the book, Mahoney illustrates the powerful forces providing continuity and stability in both individual lives and broader cultures, but he also stresses the capacity for change at both the personal and societal level. He emphasizes that recent trends toward a focus on change at the individual intrapsychic level of "self need not be incompatible with a sense of social responsibility. Chapter 1 concludes with a brief consideration of three basic questions about human change, each of which the author initially answers in the affirmative and then addresses in depth in subsequent chapters: "Can humans change? Can humans help humans change? Are some forms of help better than others?" Chapter 2, "A Brief History of Ideas," is an overview of human conceptualizations about the world and how people know themselves and the world around them. A basic premise of this book is that an individual's personal life experiences are the result of a synergistic relationship between events and the active processes through which the person comes to know about those events. In this view, what and how one notices aspects of the world depends to a great extent on one's tacit personal assumptions and theories about the natures of the self and world. Consistent with the concept of personal realities, Mahoney traces the roots of modern sciences in philosophy, presenting a brief history of Western philosophy, including major theories and debates about reality, truth and epistemology (e.g., the problem of mind-body dualism). He notes three axial periods in which fundamental shifts occurred in the ways that humans conceptualized their worlds. The first axial period (sixth century B.C.) involved a transformation of earlier mystical and supernatural concepts used to explain the nature of the world into organized religions and rational philosophy (a turning inward). The second axial period, during the Renaissance, was characterized by a turning outward toward naturalistic observation, including the development of astronomy and studies of the human body. …

User-centeredness, situatedness, and designing the media of computer documentation

User-centeredness has become a concept of much interest in a number of fields. Systems engineering, architecture, usability research and computer documentation, to name a few, are all areas of study which have, to one degree or another, adopted the terminology of user-centered philosophy in order to come to grips with the problem of how to design for users' needs. While there is much positive to be said about applying user-centered concepts to any discipline that wishes to pursue it, there is also a danger that the concept and philosophy of user-centered design could become, at best, empty rhetoric, and, at worst, fuel for lip service that could serve to undermine the humanitarian goals of a user-centered ethic. One concept which has already suffered a similar fate is that of “problem-solving.” Problem-solving has become, essentially, a hollow term when used by certain disciplines or institutions. For example, it is commonplace to hear representatives of business and industry refer to the need for 'good problem-solvers' in the world of business. One answer to this call has been the adoption of the terminology of problem-solving by the business curricula of many college and university business schools. At least one critic of current business school curricula has mentioned that theories of problem-solving have been diluted by the time they reach students (1). My own experience in teaching business writing at two universities has shown similar characteristics. Many of the business majors want to refer to themselves as “good problem-solvers” in their job application letters, but when asked to elaborate on or give an example of this, they often have simplified or inaccurate ideas of what should constitute an understanding of rich and powerful strategies. Certainly, the research and theory-building of Simon and Newell (2), or G. Polya (3) is applicable to the academic and workplace settings of business, but somehow the terminology of the theory lost its relevance during the translation. My purpose in this article is to discuss how user-centered computer documentation can avoid a similar fate. At present I fear our direction is veering in the direction of such a fate, and that one step toward correcting our course is to develop a clear theoretical understanding of what user-centeredness means to documentation. This means that although there may be a tacit theory which underlies current applications, it is important to make the theory visible, and thereby illuminate the gaps that may exist. In addition, my focus will also be upon the contribution that user-centered theory can bring to our understanding of how to design for the different media of computer documentation. As we all know, online and hypermedia documentation is becoming a central charge of our profession, and user-centered theory can go a long way in helping us understand the similarities and differences among the different media.

When Covariation Is Not Enough: The Role of Causal Mechanism, Sampling Method, and Sample Size in Causal Reasoning

College students and college-bound ninth and sixth graders read several story problems in which a problem solver tried to find out whether a target factor was causally related to an effect. Each story problem included information about possible mechanisms that could have mediated between factor and effect (mechanisms present vs. absent), sample size (large vs. small), sample method (direct intervention vs. natural occurrence), and results (target factor did vs. did not covary with the effect). The results suggest that adolescents hold a tacit theory of evidence in which the presence of covariation is accorded a kind of primacy so that the presence of covariation overrides other evidence that calls causation into question

Ideology and Freshman Textbook Production: The Place of Theory in Writing Pedagogy

Of hundreds of pounds of freshman writing books produced each year, few are constructed with any overt indication that composition theory has ever existed. This essay argues that material presented in these numerous textbooks bears little relation to large work on composition theory that is widely available. The textbooks, with some important and hopeful exceptions, engage in a presentation of written language that appears to deny composition theory. Behind this appearance, however, are books which actually present unconscious theory. Two primary and mostly unacknowledged theories dominate writing textbooks: 1) a truncated version of five classical canons, and 2) modes of discoursebasically, exposition, description, narration, and argument along with various attachments. Both these tacit theories are illustrated by excerpts of various kinds of writing. These excerpts derive from a wide range of writing that has usually been published before and function as illuminating examples. The origin of modes in work of Alexander Bain has received extensive and excellent treatment.' Robert Connors writes that modes have been the most influential classification scheme of last hundred years (444). This system of categorizing writing exerted wide influence because of its presentation in Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric. Unlike modes, however, unconscious use of classical canons has received scant attention in discussions of writing textbooks, even though this structure forms many composition books. The five canons, widely used since Aristotle's time, had become a fixture in classical rhetoric by time of Hermagoras (Kennedy, Art 304). Cicero discusses five canons, or parts, of rhetoric in Book I of On Character of Orator (62). Here, Cicero, through his literary spokesman Crassus, lists

Laman's Kongo Ethnography: Observations on Sources, Methodology, and Theory

Opening ParagraphValuable African archival materials are known to have been ‘rediscovered’ accidentally after having been ‘lost’ to scholarship for a time. Perhaps the foremost example of this in Lower Congo research is the eighteenth-century bibliography located by Jadin in the Vatican Library some time ago. A similar case which I shall discuss here is that of the KiKongo sources of Karl Laman's four volume ethnography The Kongo, a 775-page work detailing traditions, customs, lore, and legend from the BaKongo north of the Congo River at the turn of the century. These sources were ‘lost’ too, but in a different way. Through an obfuscating editorial policy and several translations from KiKongo to Swedish, and again from Swedish to English, their central role in the final work became completely obscured. A reconstruction of how Laman's posthumous ethnography in fact reached the stage of publication should be of help to those who find it difficult to work with as it is—although I must make clear that the work is, as it stands, already of outstanding value. An explanation of the editorial policy in terms of its premises should reveal the impact of tacit ethnological theory upon something as seemingly cut-and-dried as the posthumous works of an established scholar, already well known in his field.