Sensuous Learning for Practical Judgment in Professional Practice

This chapter extends the theoretical framing of Sensuous Learning presented in Chapter 2 of Volume 1 to elaborate how such learning can be operationalised to support not only professionals as individuals, but also in the communities and in the organisations where professional work is conducted. The focus here is to present a marked contribution of Sensuous Learning not only in addressing professional ineptitude, but in advancing also the quality, substance and impact of learning more broadly. The overall challenge is to expand the place that learning occupies in everyday life as part of living and working so as to better organise where, when and how learning is happening. This is so that the focus goes beyond designing reasonably well-functioning learning experiences and instead, appreciating the experience of learning itself embedded in the richness of the unpredictable, complex and ambiguous human nature.

In this chapter, we introduce the background of theatrical improvisation and a model in which it is applied outside the theatre. We illustrate the sensuous quality of Applied Improvisation by a case study of a developmental aid organization, employing the mind- and skill set to adapt the organization to the volatile and uncertain conditions it is operating in.

This chapter describes a comprehensive aesthetic intervention called Sisters Academy. The manifestation involves immersion in a transformed, sensuous universe (the school), created through light-, sound- and set-design. The performance group, Sisters Hope, take over upper secondary schools in order for teachers and students to explore sensuous learning and unfold their inherent poetic potential, give it an image, externalize it, create an interactivity design, and thereby discover new ways of navigating in the world. Sensuous learning can expand the space of maneuverability for professional practitioners and inspire them to embrace new sensuous approaches to learning. The data suggest that the impact is transformational for most teachers and students.

This chapter argues for and illustrates the value of parody in deliberate and planned organisational change. It documents the use of parody in an organisational theatre event designed to support the senior leadership team in establishing a not-for-profit cancer care facility in Australia. The chapter shows how parody can be used by professionals as an embodied form of learning to support the cognitive and emotional shifts required from diverse leaders in complex organisations undergoing organisational transformation.

This chapter positions the narrative approach as consolidated practice in the field of organizational studies, and explores and expands its potential to detect the interpretations that practitioners make of the realities in which they live, thus to grasp their cultural, social, personal, practical features. The use of ad hoc narratives as an art-based method is discussed as a way to foster reflexivity and learning from experience. Narratives are presented with illustrative examples from two different healthcare fields as a means for detecting material and symbolic dimensions, the weaving of roles, objects, critical incidents, shifting points, routine in use, which can be elaborated on, developing negotiation and relational processes. The distinctive feature of this approach is the relational texture that develops around a narrative and reflexive space, which is a basic condition in our proposal of art-based intervention.

This chapter explores dancing with balloons as an art-based process for intervening in the production of welfare in the Danish health care sector. Informed by nonrepresentational studies, the chapter considers how we can cultivate surplus value by shifting our thinking about welfare as a predefined service to experience welfare as felt but not yet articulated movements in-between us. The chapter shows how a cross-professional group in the Danish health care sector used balloons and their gentle, loose, vague, rhythmically intense, floating and more or less unpredictable movements to grasp welfare as felt thoughts-in-movement (Massumi 2002). This kind of ‘loose’ knowledge (McCormack 2012) involves reflecting on welfare from within the presence of the moment and all its changing worlds of real, felt movement. The chapter illustrates how the research process by intensifying welfare as felt (surplus value) can generate a passage to an ecology of ongoing form-shifting and felt experiences of welfare.

Helth has developed an art-based method (ABM) aimed professionalisation of leadership in organisational contexts. The method draws on the notion of aesthetic drama as a place for leaders’ creative experiments in ‘playing with’ their everyday problems. The purpose is to develop leaders’ art-based competences through practising leadership in practice. The chapter unfolds how practising aesthetic drama requires training sessions, as for example leaders’ common drawings of the sensed condition of their leadership and the vision of their future leadership. The best impact of using aesthetic drama is collective sessions based on a learning design with planning, preparation, presentation and processes of learning.

Lehtimäki and Silvast offer an encouraging account on using arts-based-intervention (ABI) with multiple arts-based-methods (ABM) as part of mainstream curriculum in higher education. The detailed case study from a university course on innovation management in Finland elaborates how ABI can be used to foster experiential student-centred learning and create conditions for reflexivity among students. With excerpts from written and videotaped learning diaries, Lehtimäki and Silvast provide an in-depth discussion on how students engage in deep learning about leadership, gain courage to be creative and learn to be reflective and empathetic leaders. The discussion on the use of ABI is inspirational on how cultivating leadership for change predisposes students as future professionals to not only appreciate innovation management but to actively innovate themselves.

This chapter focuses on an Arts-Based Intervention (ABI) into an Introductory course of Management and Leadership offered to students considering key concepts and frames of thinking in the field for the first time. First, we introduce Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy and conceptually frame our ABI in relation to the mode of learning that it allows for together with the drive for equality that it is concerned with. We then introduce the context of the ABI, describe the course and its background and the course facilitators together with information about the participants. Emphasis is placed on the way the course was framed to bring a sense of present-day management reality through our use of art-based methods including an ongoing collaboration with an experienced R&D manager who is part of the course team. Next an explanation of the content of three of the Art-based Methods used in the course as part of the whole ABI. This is followed by a description of the process of learning providing a sense of what the experience of learning would be like for a participant. The impact and experiences of learning during the intervention are then discussed from the students’ and the tutors’ perspectives. The final two sections focus on impact and lessons learned.

This chapter is based on educating UK Undergraduate Business School students with the opportunities afforded by an Open Space Learning (OSL) environment. Our use of the Arts-based Intervention (ABI) of physical performance challenges normative Business School pedagogy that has been claimed to reduce students to becoming “voracious copy machines” (Beghetto and Kauffman 2009, p. 300).

This Volume has extended the idea of using Sensuous Learning to foster better practical judgement in professional practice across levels from the individual, to communities and the organisations where professional work is conducted. More specifically, it has offered examples of how Arts-Based Interventions have been used in advancing new modes of learning individually and collectively in nurturing what has been described as Sensuous Organisational Learning.