the assignment

Reflecting on my assignment, or reflecting on what to put in my assignment, has been a confusing and illuminating process. It's not been clear cut, although starting out I kind of thought/hoped it would be. But clinical reasoning is not clear cut, so how can an assignment be clear cut? It's about reading and understanding, and re-reading when I realise I have not properly understood, and about breaking down and putting back together. Lots of people have said almost the same thing, but not entirely the same, which is why I find it tricky. Cos when you go to put it down on the paper I suddenly feel less confident about who said what and why that is different to the other.

So finding out 3 track mind isn't the be-all and end-all of clinical reasoning was quite a shock... They seem to be the gurus and their study was so earth shattering I guess I never thought to question it. We are still impressed by numbers I guess. A 2 year long ethnography is pretty impressive, although when I went back to look at the study, I found 1) yes there were mental health OTs 2) all hospital based 3) no men!

No men! I bet that skewed the results a lot. Wonder if anyone's thought of that.

Tacit knowledge, expertise and all that unfamiliar stuff...

I found it interesting that people on this course who are experienced practitioners all seemed to have really "hit a spot" when they read about tacit knowledge and expertise, "things we know but can't say" etc... I suppose it makes sense, because reading something that describes one's experience accurately which one never could quite put into words is very cathartic, and I have experienced that myself on other occasions. But not in this area, maybe because I lack that tacit knowledge, I don't have any knowledge that is "hidden" that I don't know of, maybe because I am a novice.

I feel a bit of a pang because I am clearly missing something, some eureka moment, but by the time I get to expert level (when is THAT going to be!) I would not experience the lightbulb going off because I am already armed with this knowledge, this theoretical knowledge so that when I gain that professional craft knowledge and tacit expert understanding, I can't quite be surprised by it. Unless I forget all that I have learned and read about in this course by the time I get there, which is a real possibility of course, seeing as it will be years away and I'm probably going to have other things forefront in my mind when I am in practice trying to "learn the craft" other than my tacit knowledge, or lack of. Hmm. One of those things we can only wait and see I guess. I wonder, like in those time travel stories, now that I know this, when I get there to the future, will this knowledge affect the way my tacit knowledge base is built over the next however many years?

Is any of this making sense? Is this rambling just a product of a sleepy afternoon? Am I having an existential moment or just caffeine/sleep deficiency??

Reflecting on work so far..

I'm glad we have to do this midway assignment because it's really making me think, go back to, re-digest, re-read and understand the material we've covered so far. I suppose that's the point of assignments. I thought I understood the readings and concepts we were going along week by week but it's only when I start to pull the ideas and concepts together for my assignment that I realise I need to dig deeper, and start to do so. I think it's coming together though. Well not quite yet, but I think it should do.

There are so many ideas out there, mostly not really competing with each other, but sort of similar-but-expressed-in-different ways. Almost like no one talked to each other before coming up with this stuff, or, everyone wants to be the one who came up with it! Or, we're all really similar and people are doomed to always repeat what others have said and few can be truly original or novel.

I don't mind. Sometimes reading about something written in slightly different ways helps to increase the depth of understanding and that surely is a good thing.