ABSTRACT
THIS CHAPTER ARGUES THAT SOMETIMES WHEN RESEARCHING INTO aspects of clinical education and the ‘nitty-gritty’ of nursing practice, no single methodological or theoretical stance will suffice. Perhaps ironically, if there were only one methodological stance, it would be easier to generate a single universal theory to explain the multifaceted nuances of professional education. The chapter will explore the dilemmas raised by investigating how registered nurses learn and develop in daily clinical practice, with specific reference to their use of intuition, thinking and reflection-in-action. These study concepts are slippery, contested and multifaceted, with their universality and existence questioned. To investigate them, I need to confront the legacy of dualism (which means, in this case, the separation of mind from body in both thought and language), venture into the murky world of tacit embodied practice, address the links among thinking, doing, seeing and speaking, and to analyse these concepts with respect to existing theories concerning learning in professional practice. Selecting a method of investigation is not without its challenges when deciding how to investigate phenomena related to intuition and reflection-in-action. Ironically, Plato (1966) outlined these paradoxes in what is known as Meno’s dilemma:
But how will you look for something when you don’t know what it is? How on earth are you going to set up something you don’t know as the object of your search? To put it another way, even if you come up right against it, how will 104you know that what you have found is the thing you didn’t know? (Meno to Socrates, p.128)
Later, in response, Socrates outlined Meno’s trick question:He would not seek what he knows, for since he knows it there is not need of the inquiry, nor what he does not know, for in that case he does not even know what he is to look for. (p.129)
To manage these paradoxes, the study presented in the second part of this chapter needed to be hermeneutical, exploratory and pragmatic without compromising rigour in order to address Meno’s questions, namely:How would I look for intuition, reflection and/or thinking-in-action if I don’t know what it is (they are)?
How will I set up something I don’t know as the object of my search?
How will I recognise intuition, reflection and/or thinking-in-action should I come right up against them (it)?
This chapter relates how conceptual and methodological questions and concerns led me to adopt the ‘bricoleur’ stance as researcher, while conducting fieldwork in an emergency department, a cardiothoracic unit, a hospice and the community. Denzin and Lincoln (1994, p.3) argued that the qualitative researcher’s role is like that of the bricoleur, namely someone who brings elements of texts, images, representations, interpretations and phenomena together to form a bricolage: this is akin to a collage. The bricoleur is someone who uses instruments and tools for purposes for which they may not have been designed, and ‘gets the job done’ according to the tools at hand and what is needed at the time (see Gobbi, 2005; Weinstein and Weinstein, 1991).