The Reflexive Training Setting (RTS):
working on the students’ view of their role.
A Case Study on a Group of Psychology
Students
SESSION D – RE-THINKING FORMATIVE PRACTICES IN HIGHER EDUCATION
M. Guidi – C. Venuleo
Università del Salento, Lecce (Italy)
20th March 2014, Naples
Overview
• Reflexive Training Setting (RTS): background
and goals
• Presentation of a case study based on RTS:
aim, model of analysis, results and discussions
• Implications for adopting RTS in higher
education
Three premises…
• Can learning be intended as a matter of getting
new forms of “content” (such as SKAs: Skills,
Knowledge, Abilities)?
• Is learning an incremental function of a
knowledge acquisition process?
• Has knowledge to be framed as an expert/nonexpert transmission practice?
What does it happen to a group of students sharing the
same training practices within an educational context?
A traditional perspective
Our point of view: scientific and technical
knowledge are not transmitted as such.
Any formative practice (especially in highereducation) is rather mediated by aims,
motivations, interests and meanings
concerning both the situation and the
position/role held by of the users of a given
training practice.
Yet… what does it happen in our view?
A contextual/dialogic standpoint
Synthetizing
Learning is (inter)subjectively construed
What learning will be, strictly depends on the
ways (what goals, interests, roles, visions of the
world) the actors involved in the training activity
(trainer, students, university…) use to interpret it:
e.g. its usefulness/uselessness for a future job
Learning is contextual
E.g. learning in Italy is not the same than in
another cultural context; as well as competitive
conditions do not allow the same kind of output
as cooperative ones…
The implementation of RTS:
its functions and goals
BASIC ISSUES:
1. IDENTIFY AND FOSTER THE (IMPLICIT)
MEANINGS USED BY THE STUDENTS
2. DEVELOP THE STUDENTS’ ROLE/AIMS
3. ENHANCE STUDENTS EFFECTIVENESS
The trainer’s role
• ENHANCE STUDENTS’ AWARENESS OF THE
IMPLICIT MEANINGS THEY USE AND SHARE
• HELP THE STUDENTS TO DECONSTRUCT AND
FOSTER THESE MEANINGS BY THE ENACTION
OF A REFLEXIVE PROCESS
Case-study
Aim
Studying the output of an RTS-based
Workshop aimed at working on the meanings
expressed by a group of psychology students
Methodology
Participants
A group of students enrolled in the 2nd year of the
Course in “Psychological Science and Techniques”
at the University of Salento
Model of Analysis
In accordance with a largely shared model of
analysis, adopted in various fields of psychological
research (e.g. Carli & Paniccia, 2002), we
considered text analysis as a very helpful research
tool for identifying the meanings produced,
emerging and shared within the training context.
The hypothesis grounding this model is that the
meanings shared by the participants of a given
activity are mainly conveyed by, hence are to be
recognized in, the on-going discursive practices.
Discourses let meanings to emerge.
It follows that, identifying the meaning
dynamics emerging and going through the RTS
workshop activities, helps identifying the
impact produced by the reflexive setting on the
students learning progresses…
…as, for instance, to let us know what set of
reflexive competencies the students have
acquired or what role has played the trainer
within these training practices.
Main Results
How was RTS experienced?
Power/affiliative relationship
or
Agentive intersubjective process
What kind of identity has RTS solicited?
Student identity
or
Professional identity
Time influence over the meanings
In session 1 the discourses focused on the
“power/affiliative meaning”. In session 3 were mainly
associated with the “agentive intersubjective process”. In
session 5 (the final one) they focused on the elements
needful for the psychological intervention, that is on the
students’ “professional identity”.
Two main transitions have occurred:
1. a transition from an idealizing/defensive position to a
more active and realistic one.
2. a transition from the focus on the student role to the
professional identity.
Participants’ perspectives
The students’ discourses strongly associated with the
power/affiliation, hence with an idealizing, meaning and
with the professional identity, while the trainer’s
discourses manly focused on the agentive intersubjective
process and on the student identity.
This means that:
1. the students’ discourses reflect their future-oriented
and intervention-centered focus (even if within a
supposed idealizing/defensive position);
2. The trainer showed to support the students to focus
on the on-going experience, and on its goals and
functions.
What these results inform us of…
A. Results provided some cues for showing how the
process of meaning-making took the students to
assimilate a new kind of training (reflexive training) to
the traditional one, hence to interpret it in terms of a
power/affiliative (idealizing/depending) scheme
B. Idealizing the (power of the) other (be it a trainer, a
student, a context…), and the corresponding affiliative
scheme, is a potential antagonist for:
(1) recognizing one’s own aims and interests,
(2) giving centrality to people subjectivity,
(3) hence, achieving effective learning outputs (and,
maybe, success in the professional activity)
C. In RTS, trainers assume a specific (apparently
paradoxical?) role: fostering the students to focus on
the on-going experience. There are cues for sustaining
that this focus helps the students to strengthen their
future professional identity.
D. Results show that the student role and the future
professional identity appear closely interwoven.
Working on the students identity means more or less
(in)directly to work on the professional culture and
professional identity.
Implications and future scenarios
• More theoretical and methodological effort in the field
of Reflexive Training Setting is due.
• A research development in this field is also needed:
analyzing the dynamics of different reflexive training
practices in higher education would take to get more
understanding of its effectiveness and efficacy either in
the mid-term (e.g. academic achievement) and in the
long-term (e.g. professional achievement).
• It could be useful to understand under which
conditions a RTS training model has shown to be useful
(e.g. as a factor of success) and when it has not (e.g. it
was a source for failure).
• More conditions of reflexive setting should be studied
(narrative methods, free-conduction methods…).
Thank you.
Corresponding author email:
[email protected]
Appendix
Data Analysis
A computer-driven text-analysis was applied
to the verbatim transcription of sessions 1, 3
and 5 (the final one) of the workshop in order
to map the discourses going on across the
training activities, hence to identify the main
meanings (even the implicit and latent ones)
being active in the discourses and to highlight
the markers of the students models of
thinking and the set of competencies
emerging in relation with the training.
Model of analysis
• The identification of the meanings emerging from
the discourses is based on a word co-occurrence
criterion which is directly connected to the lexical
variability of the text.
• Word co-occurrence is but the way the words
combine with each other within the same unit of
analysis in which the text is segmented (generally,
an utterance or a group of a few utterances).
• The co-occurrence of words is somewhat
isomorphic to the psychoanalytical freeassociation principle.
• This criterion relies on the identification of the
symbolic value of a discourse in the sequence
established among the different meanings |a|,
|b|, |c|… |n|, and not in their separate and
discrete sense (Salvatore, Tebaldi & Potì, 2009).
• The co-occurrence of a word is taken as a
criterion of similarity for running a
correspondence analysis on the units (words and
utterances) of a text. Units of text holding the
same co-occurring words are considered similar
and therefore grouped.
• The rationale is that a set of co-occurring words
marks a few general meanings, which display as
opposed the one to the others.
Data analysis
Text indexing
The text obtained from the verbatim transcription
of the workshop was first of all indexed in relation
to the moment/session of the discursive production
(1=first session, 2=third session, 3=fifth session) and
then by the role of the speaker (T=trainer or
S=student).
Data analysis
Lexical Correspondence Analysis
A Lexical Correspondence Analysis (LCA) – namely, a
modified procedure of the nominal data Multiple
Correspondence Analysis of Benzecri (1973) – was
applied to the corpus obtained from the verbatim
transcription.
LCA allows to break down the overall lexical
variability of a language corpus into synthetic and
discrete dimensions, called factors, each one
accounting for a part of the variability of the text.
Each factor identifies a structure of two opposing
sub-sets of co-occurring lemmas.
We conceptualize the factors in terms of meaning
dimensions active within the discourses in analysis.
Any factor is statistically independent from the
others. Factors can thus be geometrically
represented in terms of mutually orthogonal axes.
The combination of the n factors extracted by LCA
will produce a hyper-geometric space made up of
the n dimensions accounting, in good
approximation, for the entire variability of the text.
In order to evaluate the effects played by the
reflexive workshop in the course of time and by the
different perspectives of participants, the analysis
considered two variables:
• moment of production (session 1, 3 and 5), and
• role of speaker (Trainer and Students).
These variables were considered supplementary,
that is they did not contribute to identifying the
factors, but provided criteria at the moment of
examining the results obtained.
Specific goals of the analysis
• identifying the pattern of meaning mediating the
discursive exchange during the workshop
sessions, hence giving sense to the discourses;
• checking whether (and in what direction) a
change occurred in the participants’ discourses in
the course of the workshop;
• verifying whether and in what way the
conductor’s discourses differed from those of the
students… and, in case, why.
Time and Speaker positioning on the symbolic field
generated by the 2 main meaning dimensions
Legend:
- Time positioning: 1, 2, 3 respectively correspond to the 1st, the 3rd and the 5th session.
- Speaker positioning: S and T respectively relate to the roles of Student and Teacher.
- Transitions emerging in the course of time