ABSTRACT
In this final chapter, I conclude with a brief discussion on how clinical training and medical education can be made more sensitive to the learner experience so that the multiple realities to emerge from any event of practice are accommodated, unpacked and supported. Individual learners and practitioners can and do experience and learn differently within the same learning encounter. The experiences of living through encounters with practice, which are powerful because of the affective rush they elicit and the states of rupture they create can occur in any training environment. The affective force of such events of practice can emerge in surprising ways and fracture for the learner/practitioner all that is familiar, known and understood. These are the moments of realisation where real learning occurs (Atkinson 2011) – ‘what learning can be beyond the parameters of reproduction, packaged knowledge, traditional skills and the pragmatic and predictable application of knowledge,’ (pp. 5–6). The analyses of real encounters with the thisness of actual practice (informed principally by the writings of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert Simondon) raises the following question: what modes of thinking and being are important in cultivating an ability to cope with the immanence of surgical/medical practice? This chapter advocates an approach to clinical practice that is first concerned with recognizing and understanding the various modes of mattering that develop and form within an event of practice.
