ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with promoting and cultivating interconnections between theory and actual practice. In it a conceptual framework is developed to explore and contrast the knowledge that practitioners must acquire to practice with the kind of knowing that arises unpredictably through an engagement with actual events of complex medical practice. Whilst established clinical knowledge is abstracted from actual occasions of practice, knowing that emerges through the uncertainties of medical practice that is grounded in the thisness or haecceties of practice – a kind of knowing on the inside. That is a pedagogic approach that prioritises the immanence (Deleuze 1994) of practice, attempting to capture the affective flows and intensity (Massumi 2002) of the learner experience, as it emerges from within events of practice. These concepts inform the practice-theory paradigm set out in this chapter – pedagogies of encounter. Currently, the immanence of clinical learning is not appropriately addressed by traditional assessment schemes or curricular discourses – the hylomorphic frameworks of education and training. Such places emphasis on the affective character of experience and feeling (Whitehead 1992) which relate to how an event is initially sensed or prehended. It also prioritises processes of becoming or what Gilbert Simondon terms individuation (Mills 2016), which constitute a learner’s passage through medical/surgical training schemes.
