Categorie archieven: Niet gecategoriseerd

Niet gecategoriseerd

Doing Dialogic Hermeneutical Knowledge Review

Een reactie plaatsen

About the development of meaning making

I started my PhD in the autumn of 2019 with expert interviews. These steps were contemporaneously my first steps back into science since I graduated as a social psychologist in 2000. I wanted to do expert interviews because I had a quite positivistic schooling within academia, and I felt I had no experience within my academic career so far where I could build upon. So I had to start this knowledge review from scratch. Starting with the question: how and where to search for? I had already experienced that conversations with experienced academics were very helpful, not only in gaining knowledge, but also in reflecting on my own convictions. My first interview based on my semi structured questionnaire did not bring the rich data that we were searching for.  We had to come up with a better idea. This is where the talking paper emerged. We wrote down our Ideas about existential questions on a flip chart and used that as a means to start a dialogue about the topic. That turned out to be a very good way for collecting rich data.

I conducted, in total, seventeen interviews, with experts who had all some relationship with the subjectification domain of education (Biesta, 2020).

All these interviews already affected my perspective and therefore influenced the way my research further developed and emerged. Like in reading Bortoft (see my August 2024 blog), I thought I had already made quite some changes in perceiving the world from a more existential and relational angel, but bottom line, I had not integrated that into my experience. Changing your world view in your thoughts seems easy, but changing your world view in the way you experience the world and in the way you act is rather difficult (by Mezirov (1997) expressed as “Habits of mind” (p5.)). The feedback on my first talking paper was: too much based on autonomy of the student, and the ideas of modernity (the still more instrumental worldview).

In living my questions as a heuristic inquiry, I immersed myself into the data of the conversations I had held until then (the first seven).  I processed all the conversations, and the talking papers, filled with sticky notes I put on the talking paper during the conversations. That led to a new picture, that came into my mind during the night. 

I drafted a second talking paper from this picture, and shared that with the rest of the experts I had conversations with. The feedback mostly confirmed the development of the talking paper, that formed the basis for my final heuristic model, as we call it in the book chapter.

Data collection, and in this case, also development was the first phase of coming to a paper. The second phase was writing it! I started with an outline and formulated the main tensions within the data, which I presented to a part of the experts, part close colleagues and some international experts I contacted, after reading their work. Based on the outcome of this meeting, I made a final outline. A few months later, In February 2022, I went to Sweden for a writing retreat at the university of Gävle, where Jari Ristriniemi worked. Jari wrote his thesis also about existential questions, and had worked on this theme throughout his career. During the week I could use his office or any other place at the university to write, and during the weekends, Jari showed me some beautiful spots of the country.

It was during this week, that I discovered that writing alone is, at least currently, not something I gain energy from. More the opposite, I ended up in a complete writing block. I decided, to change the plan, that was to make this my single author article, and asked Jari Ristiniemi and Scott Webster as co-authors. They did not need much time to think about my proposal, and immediately said yes! From that moment, my writing flow was back again!

Although I had a lot of support, for the article to come to the final version took still another year and a half. A period in which we learned a lot, probably I learned the most…

The article and the aim we had with it was quite complex. On the one hand, we wanted to show the methodology we used, and on the other hand, we wanted to show the development of the heuristic model (that started with the talking paper). In the end, these goals nicely merged in the paper.

Reference to the chapter:

Buijs, D. G. A., Ristiniemi, J., & Webster, R. S. (2025). Space for students’ existential questions in higher education. In M. A. Peters, B. Green, G. W. Misiaszek, & X. Zhu (Eds.), Handbook of Ecological Civilization. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-8101-0_74-1

critical autobiography, Niet gecategoriseerd, PhD project

Hearth ritual

1 reactie

In this blog, I want to share a more personal experience in living my questions.

In the autumn of 2021, I have done a  Heart ritual. Trigger for this ritual was my felt disconnection with some of the important people around me. I had the feeling that by doing this ritual, I could come to a deeper acceptance of some of my patterns that run within my family. Being related to others and using the natural connections in life has been a central theme and existential question for a long period in my life. In the first step of the heart ritual, I got a heart of baked stone. And in the first session I was asked to hold the heart, connect to it, and listen in my body for resonance. I got a picture of the house where my parent have been divorced. I felt that this was the place where the next activity of the heart ritual should take place. That was breaking the heart. But that took another two months before that happened. First, I spent more time in relating to my heart. I painted the heart with leaves and flowers that I took out of my garden. After that, I rubbed the heart with olive oil. And it became deep green with colours of brown and orange. It felt more and more difficult to break my heart, as it had become really part of me.

It also soon became clear how I wanted to break my heart. I still had a stone that I found as a child in the woods around Wageningen. I wrote “break” at one side of the stone and “open” on the other side. One word related to the pain and the sorrow in my life,  the other one more to the openness in live and joy. When connecting both together, I feel life becomes alive and thriving.

At the beginning of December I went with Katrien to Randwijk, where the house stood where my parents were divorced. It was amazing to discover that the people who bought the house from my parent still lived there. We where friendly welcomed and they could give me a picture of how they had experienced my parents during the divorce. That helped me to get a better understanding of the divorce and of my parents at that period of their lives. After talking and showing the bouse and sharing memories, the moment had come that I had to break my heart. I broke it at the gravel path besides the house. I felt the fear of having to break it, also the relief afterwards. I hit the heart quite hard and had many pieces.

This was the moment the next phase of the ritual started. The bonding of the pieces together with glue and I got gold powder to sprinkle over the glue. I felt an urge to start immediately. In half a day, te heart was whole again, but some pieces where pulverised and I could not restore them, so the heart remained open at two sides.

I was completely satisfied with the result. In the last session with the facilitator of the ritual, the question arose: How can I keep my heart open despite the pain? This question is still alive. During the past year it has become visible how entangled I am with this question. If feelings arise that are hard for me to let flow, I return to my question. Not always immediately of course. I also find myself eating too much in trying not to feel. At the same time, this question gives me a direction of development which goes on, consciously and unconsciously.