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Introduction

This chapter articulates a distinctive connection between practice, the body and pedagogy. Linking these is the idea of attuning, conceived as relational, corporeal and enacted. In this way, binaries between mind and body, knowing and doing, self and other, teacher and learner are disrupted. I discuss ‘pedagogies of the unknown’, referring to situations where it is not clear at the outset what is to be learned, and where knowledge informing what to do is unstable, incomplete and fragile. Pedagogy is seen here as emergent, consistent with practice theoretical and sociomaterial approaches (see Reich and Hager 2014; Hager 2011; Hopwood 2016b). My analysis draws on an ethnographic study of professional practices in a parent education service supporting families with young children deemed to be at risk (see Clerke and Hopwood 2014; Hopwood 2013, 2014a–e, 2015a–c, 2016a, b; Hopwood and Clerke 2012; Hopwood and Clerke 2016). The pedagogic role in these practices has been intensified through changing relations between professionals and clients, referred to here as partnership , but connecting with broader spread of coproduction as a focus in practice reform. This underpins the case for exploring growing demands on professionals to act pedagogically in work not traditionally conceived in this way.

I describe an approach to pedagogy that relies on professionals attuning to the bodies and objects around them. Two further steps of explaining to learners (clients) why what has been noticed is significant, and then attributing agency to them as the locus for change, complete a sequence that transforms mundane, often overlooked features into pedagogically valuable resources. This is a highly embodied and responsive pedagogy, much more than simply a ‘teachable moment’. I link practice theory with Vygotskian ideas, arguing that the second and third steps in the sequence bring learners into a ‘space of reasons’ (Derry 2008), making links between the concrete and conceptual that have inferential rather than just representational meaning.

The argument of the paper unfolds through a series of philosophical, conceptual, and empirical moves. The notion of attuning developed here is a strongly embodied one, so I begin by briefly setting this against historically problematic treatment of bodies in scholarship. Contemporary practice theory provides one way to attend to the body in more productive ways, and thus constitutes a broader philosophical and theoretical basis for the chapter. Specifically, this enables us to consider body and mind in more entangled and performative (or enacted) ways—a move that is crucial in unpicking attuning and its relation to pedagogies of the unknown. It is to the ‘unknown’ features that I then turn. I arrive again at the relevance of practice theory, but this time through consideration of changing relations between professions and clients. I argue that these place professionals in a somewhat ambiguous pedagogic role, where what the client is to learn cannot be specified in advance. This strike at the heart of contemporary theories framed around metaphors of emergence, and places a further conceptual foundation for the account of attuning that follows. I use the idea of ‘epistemic dilemmas’ to convey the knowledge challenges that professionals face in this kind of relational work, prefiguring a close grip on questions of knowledge as the body that is maintained throughout the chapter.

Before going further, I will rehearse the main advance of the chapter by outlining the distinctive notion of attuning that is developed and empirically illustrated below. My conceptualisation of ‘attuning’ is heavily infused by practice theory . It invokes the body, but not (just) as physical entity, rather as entangled with mind, knowing and other bodies. Cartesian dualism and clear-cut individual subjectivity are rejected. Attuning as discussed here points to bodily effort of professionals as they attune to their surrounds—noticing, attending to, interpreting, and making meaning. I make no clear distinction between perception and conception, but work instead with a Schatzkian notion of practical intelligibility in which meaning cannot be separated from unfolding practices. I suggest attuning is central to ways in which professionals resolve the epistemic dilemmas associated with pedagogies of the unknown. Thus, I bring questions of the body into direct dialogue with questions of knowledge , expertise and learning.

The Body, Mind and Practice

Jackson (1983) argued that the subjugation of the bodily to the mental or verbal is epistemologically fallacious and contradicts our experience of the body as a lived reality. However, the tendency to marginalise the body in accounts of educational practices has persisted. Cartesian metaphors continue to underpin separation of mind from body and the location of (rational) thought in the mind and (irrational) affect in the body (Barnacle 2009). ‘Scientific’ knowledge writes the body out, supposedly, to protect rationality and objectivity (Dale 2001, cited in Haynes 2008). Professionals appear as mindful and bodyless (Ellingson 2006, 2015) or ‘empty workers’ (Acker 1990). Much scholarship remains haunted by the idea of the body as biological, devoid of expertise (Boyer 2005).

Breaking away from Cartesianism is not easy (Hodkinson 2005). Fortunately, the resources for doing so are multiplying, and the reward of pursuing alternatives becoming increasingly apparent. Feminist approaches have unsettled mind/body separations (Butler 1993; Grosz 1994), questioning conventional ways of conceiving the boundaries of the body (Weiss 1999a, b). This disrupts conventional distinctions between bodies and things (Haraway 1991), the knower and known (Barad 2007, 2013). Contemporary practice theory offers novel tools for rethinking the body in pedagogy, drawing in valuable ideas from such work and social philosophy more broadly (see Green and Hopwood 2015b). I draw on a number of practice theoretical ideas in building distinctive, embodied concepts of attuning and pedagogy. These are performative notions of corporeality that help to foreground the ‘knowingness’ of the body in practice.Footnote 1

Epistemic Dilemmas and Pedagogies of the Unknown

Changes in the relational basis of professional services raise important questions about practice, expertise and the nature of learning and pedagogy. Shifting relationships between professionals and service users are variously referred to as coproduction (Boyle and Harris 2009; Fenwick 2012; Needham 2006), co-configuration (Edwards 2012; Engeström 2007), or partnership (Davis and Day 2010; Gallant et al. 2002; Hopwood 2014d). These move away from a notion of clients as passive consumers or recipients of services in which problems are solved on their behalf. The public have been imagined as ‘doers, not the done-for’ (Boyle and Harris 2009), associated with alluring notions of empowerment and equality. Seductive as these ideas are, they do not come without challenges. Professional practices reconstituted on new relational terms can give rise to epistemic dilemmas, in which the nature, status and content of knowledge are brought into question, and in which the professional has to act pedagogically amid uncertainty as to what should be learned (see Hopwood 2016a, b).

This can be linked to what Edwards (2010) describes as a ‘relational’ turn in expertise. Rather than seeing expertise in terms of knowledge held by individuals, expertise has come to be viewed as relational in its focus, constitution and accomplishment. Relating with others is seen as part of what professionals are expert at, what their expertise is focused on. This accompanies rather than replaces specialist expertise in particular professional domains. The relational constitution of expertise refers to the idea that expertise is not wholly contained within an individual mind/body, but is socially and materially distributed. The relational accomplishment of expertise means that expertise is not simply owned, a possession that, but is rather something that is done, emerging through relationships in practice (see Gherardi 2006; Hager 2011). The concept of attuning that I present in this chapter builds on these assumptions.

Practices are emergent (see Reich and Hager 2014; Schatzki 2010). This means that the knowledge required to perform as a professional cannot be fully specified in advance (see Hager 2011; Hopwood 2016b). Whether working with clients, patients, students or pupils, pedagogic practices cannot be reduced to routines repeated without difference, or with differences so minor that they present no knowledge challenge to professionals. There is always a degree of the unknown and unknowable in professional work. This can be considered as a gap between stable, shared bodies of specialist expertise and the knowledge required to go on successfully in particular moments. The quest for the knowledge needed to practice is never finished. There is a recurring imperative for the professional to learn in the course of work.

The need to learn as one goes about work is not a particularly novel idea, and may often be resolved unproblematically. However, the uncertainty described above presents particular difficulties when it converges with ‘what is to be learned’ in practices where professionals take on pedagogic responsibility. By this I mean situations, where there is a clear intention that one or more people should learn, and that the professional is expected to guide, facilitate and support that learning. School teaching, university lecturing, and workplace training are all familiar examples. Other professional practices are increasingly constituted around pedagogic responsibility, albeit perhaps less obviously. This includes the work of child and family health practitioners who build resilience in families with young children. Relationships based on partnership or coproduction involve different roles and responsibilities for the professional and client. One key focus of this difference concerns the pedagogic imperative—that the professional should help the service user(s) learn. This is not to say that the professionals do not learn from clients, patients, students. Indeed, the concept of attuning explicitly points to professionals learning from, about and with such others.

Many practices now involve pedagogic responsibilities. Why, then do emergence and associated properties of uncertainty and unknowability create a problem? If we are to help another person learn, it helpful to know what she should learn. In formal education a large degree of uncertainty (but by no means all of it) is removed by prior specification of content and learning outcomes. But what if there is no curriculum? What if we do not, and cannot, know what the person we are trying to help should learn? What if we do not, and cannot, know what aspects of our specialist knowledge will have a useful bearing on the work we are going to do together? What if large parts of what we do know about the people we are working with cannot be treated as stable, complete or robust? Then we must lead others down an unknown learning path where much of the knowledge informing this is changing, partial and fragile. This confronts professionals with what I term epistemic dilemmas. They are thrown into a position in which straightforward relationships between what they know and what they should do break down. Thus, they must enact pedagogies of the unknown. Footnote 2

I am not suggesting that everything is unknown. Wide bodies of specialist knowledge remain relevant and active. The client is also assumed to bring relevant knowledge to bear in discussing what direction joint work should take, and how to get there. Neither epistemic dilemmas nor pedagogies of the unknown implies a knowledge vacuum. Prior knowledge influences what happens and contributes to what is learned, but new knowledge also emerges, and the nature of such influence and contribution cannot be specified in advance. I would speculate that such dilemmas and unknown characteristics are not absent from pedagogic relations even where features such as a detailed curriculum might suggest otherwise.

Professional Setting: Supporting Parents in Families at Risk

Having outlined the skeleton of the key concepts and relevant aspects of their theoretical underpinnings, I will now introduce the professional practice setting that provides the empirical reference throughout the remainder of this chapter. Services for families with young children are often delivered by professionals from a range of fields including child and family health nursing, social work, speech and language pathology, psychology, psychiatry and paediatrics. The focus of such services may include providing assistance with issues relating to infant sleep and settling, breastfeeding, managing challenging toddler behaviour, coping with chronic conditions and mental health. Such challenges may pose threats to child and family wellbeing, with lasting consequences if left unaddressed. The philosophy of early intervention is supported by extremely strong evidence that suggests multiple benefits of providing professional support for parents (see Hopwood 2016b).

It clearly makes sense to support parents who experience challenges in giving their children the best possible start in life. However, doing so effectively requires sensitive approaches. Parents who are already vulnerable can feel judged and disempowered when confronted with a professional who knows the answers and points (implicitly or otherwise) to flaws in their practices. We know that parenting is one of the strongest influences on child development and well-being, yet there are no universal recipes for effective parenting that apply across family, community, historical and cultural contexts. Parents are less likely to follow through on advice from professionals if they do not feel listened to and actively involved in decision-making (Davis and Fallowfield 1991).

It is crucial to better understand the kind of practices and expertise that such approaches demand. With this in mind, a number of scholars have turned to concepts of learning and pedagogy. The role of the professional is not to solve problems for families, but to help them learn. To do so, the professional must learn about, from and with these families. Thus such work has been described as ‘reciprocal learning’ (Fowler et al. 2012). Fowler and Lee (2007) question the notion of knowledge transfer between professional and service users. They suggest learning and emergent forms of knowing are more helpful concepts. I have described this kind of work on Vygotskian terms (Hopwood 2015c), highlighting its pedagogic aspects (Hopwood 2014c, 2015c, 2016a, b). I will return to Vygotsky later in this chapter, in connection with the space of reasons.

While a nurse might be familiar with a wide range of approaches for settling young children, she cannot know which of these will be appropriate in terms of being acceptable to parents, matching their family practices, and producing desirable effects. Even though components of professional expertise provide a recurring basis for content to be learned (such as attaching meaning to children’s cries), they are always reshaped as they are brought to bear with particular parents. There are nearly always new knowledge issues at hand, too. For example, if a parent is encouraged to give her child practice falling asleep in a cot rather than in arms, then the pedagogy concerns how conditions favouring such practice can be put in place. This requires detailed knowledge of family life, domestic arrangements and so on, and is never merely a question of selecting from a range of pre-existing solutions.

Professionals’ generic specialist knowledge is relatively stable and robust. However, what they come to know about each family is unstable, incomplete and fragile. Even ‘facts’ like how many children a parent has might change (one mother gave different answers, depending on whether she included a child who had died). Elsewhere I have described how parents’ goals change from day to day, while new knowledge emerges, bearing on what and how parents might learn in order to meet those goals. For example, midway through one week, staff learned that a father could not read and write, and had difficulty controlling aggressive behaviour (see Hopwood 2016a). Such ambiguities around what is (not) known, and the status of knowledge contribute to the epistemic difficulties encountered in this kind of work. I theorise the response to this dilemma in practice theoretical terms as a process of attuning, through a knowing body and embodied knowledge. Before turning to theory in more detail, I will give brief details of the research underpinning this chapter.

Empirical Context

The study was based at the Residential Unit of Karitane in Carramar, Sydney. The Unit accepts around ten families each week for a five-day stay, and is staffed by a team representing many of the professions mentioned above (see Hopwood and Clerke 2012; Hopwood 2014a–d, 2015a–c, 2016a, b). Data were generated through asymmetrical team ethnographic methods, with Teena Clerke (see Clerke and Hopwood 2014; Hopwood 2013, 2014e, 2015b). Most observations involved shadowing members of staff, and were enriched through sketching, photography and document collection. Families are referred to the Unit for help with parenting children under the age of four, and the Unit specialises in taking on complex cases where multiple risk factors or forms of vulnerability may be present.

Karitane has adopted the Family Partnership Model (FPM; Davis and Day 2010; Day et al. 2015) as a particular approach to working with families. The FPM constitutes a specific articulation of coproduction . It frames the work of supporting families as a helping process, emphasising a negotiated, joint approach. In the FPM expertise of both professionals and parents comes together. A professional might challenge an unhelpful idea (especially by identifying strengths in parents when they may feel they are lacking) and suggest strategies to a parent, but the process of trying out particular ideas and assessing their worth and effectiveness is done jointly, and with constant reference to parents’ goals and values. Professionals on the Unit do not solve problems for families. Rather, they use their expertise to support parents’ learning . Attuning enables professionals to lead this pedagogy while coping with the uncertainties and ambiguities that characterise the knowledge involved. My analysis of these practices foregrounds the body in particular ways, and so it is worth pausing here to dwell further in how practice theory might enable a distinctive way of handling questions of the body in practice.

The Body in Practice Theory

A now oft-cited passage from Schatzki (2001) provides a useful starting point, establishes the centrality of the body in practice theory :

A central core, moreover, of practice theorists conceives of practices as embodied , materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understanding. (p. 2)

To take practices as a unit of analysis brings us immediately and inescapably to questions of the body. Importantly, this is a material body. The material and social bundle intimately because social practices are performed through bodily activities. These activities include not only doings and sayings , but ‘fine shades’ of behaviour, including the manner in which doings are carried out, and the tone of voice with which utterances are spoken (Schatzki 1996). What kind of body or corporeality is implied here? Schatzki (1996) writes:

To be a body… is to be able to both perform bodily doings and sayings and to experience bodily sensations and feelings…. Being a body is but one component of embodiment , one that emphasizes the lack of experiential and conceptual disunity a person has with her body in normal circumstances of acting and experiencing. (p. 43)

There are parallels here with Green and Hopwood’s (2015a) notion of the body as background.Footnote 3 This body is the one that does not require or engage our conscious attention as we perform particular activities. We do not try to hear, we simply hear. Barnacle (2009) argues that developing and sustaining a sense of self in relation to others is not merely or even primarily cerebral. Instead, she refers to a relational notion of self, an idea I take up through the notion of attuning. This body, the body we are, is entangled with mind, knowing and other bodies.

Schatzki (1996) refers also to ‘having a body’. That we have a body becomes evident in breakdown, malfunction, discomfort and incompetence—when our bodies manifest themselves explicitly and demand our attention. This might be when in moments of struggle , for example when trying to see in the dark. The unity of self and body is undermined. For the professional expending bodily effort in attuning to her surrounds, although the body is hers, she is not identical with it, she has it.

Finally, Schatzki (1996) writes of the instrumental body. Through the performance of bodily actions, other actions are effected. There are parallels here with the body as resource (Green and Hopwood 2015a). By raising her arm, cupping her hand, placing it on a mother’s shoulder, and speaking through a calm, quite voice, a nurse may reassure a parent that she is doing well in trying out a new settling technique. Schatzki (1996) is clear: “In saying this, I do not mean that the body is an instrument that some disembodied will or intelligibility takes hold of, as it were, and exploits to achieve its ends” (p. 45).

Here we confront what Green and Hopwood (2015a) refer to as the body as metaphor. This challenges mind/body dualism, and the relegation of action to performance at the will of the mind. Schatzki (1996) conceives people as in-the-world via behaving and feeling bodies. By way of the body, mind is present in experience . I take this to mean that a distinction between perception and conception falls down—a point that informs my theorisation of attuning.

Schatzki’s (2002) concepts of practical and general understanding are relevant. The former refers to know-how that enables people to carry out the actions it makes sense to perform. We understand with our bodies, and our performances are forms of understanding. The concept of general understandings points towards shared, relatively stable forms of expertise (at least in my appropriation of it, see Hopwood 2016b). These guide and are expressed in doings and sayings , but refer to concepts, norms, aesthetic judgements, expectations of conduct, and attributions of meaning that enable us to participate in practices. A practice theoretical approach displaces mind as the central phenomenon in human life (Schatzki 2001). It brings with it a transformed conception of knowledge, in which practices are the source and carrier of meaning and norms, and yet are where novelty and transformation take off and take hold.

A Practice Theoretical Concept of Attuning

Having established a particular set of assumptions about practice and the body, I can now locate the concept of attuning can be located at the interface between practice, body and pedagogy. Not only does this address the need for post-Cartesian accounts of pedagogy, but it can explain how professionals cope with epistemic dilemmas associated with leading learning down an unknown path, when much of what is known is unstable, incomplete and fragile. Attuning helps to explain pedagogy in situations where neither existing theories of formal education or workplace learning quite cover what is going on.

My work on attuning was prompted by analysis of ethnographic data showing how professionals paid careful attention to what was happening around them in order to inform judgements as to what to do next (Hopwood 2016b). Framing the idea within a practical theoretical tradition imbues attuning with conceptual power not otherwise present. It emphasises the body, while speaking directly to questions of knowledge , expertise, learning and pedagogy. Attuning is a relational, embodied , and knowing process of noticing, attending to, interpreting and meaning-making. It invokes a body that is in-the-world, but this body does not just receive the world or even occupy it. It also bodies forth, actively creating it. Patterns of our experience of the world become embodied in our emerging understandings and actions on that world.

This has important implications for how we think of professional expertise. My notion of attuning does not view expertise as located solely within the head or even body of the professional. Instead it views expertise as relational in the three ways described above: concerning relations between self and the world, distributed between self and world, and accomplished through inter-actions between self and world. This expertise cannot be taken out of an unfolding moment where the professional is entangled in changing, relationships with the world around her. Markauskaite and Goodyear (2014) write of professional expertise as dependent on conceptual perception and sensory intelligence—capturing important features of attuning. Distinctions between body and mind collapse, as ‘conceptual perception’ suggests the senses do not perform separately from how we interpret and make meaning, while ‘sensory intelligence’ suggests that meaning making resides in the senses as much as in any cognitive realm.

The conceptual specification of ‘attuning’ as I am presenting it here can be taken further by linking it to Schatzki’s (2002) concept of practical intelligibility . Practical intelligibility shapes which features of the material world (including other human bodies) are pertinent to practices, when and how (Schatzki 1996, 2002). Materiality exerts force in social affairs largely through ways it becomes intelligible in relation to particular practices. Objects, including bodies of parents and children, do not have or carry meaning outside of particular practices. On the Residential Unit professionals may place one or more chairs in the corridor during the night, in anticipation that settling may take a long time. The chair is intelligible as something to sit on, but also as something that normalises what parents feel is pathological, reassures and gives permission (see Hopwood 2016b).

Attuning relies on practical intelligibility . As the professional attunes to the bodies and objects around her, they become meaningful through the practices that are unfolding. The resources for such making sense do not come from inside the professional’s head, but from the social practices that constitute professional work. Attuning also shapes the unfolding activity, informing what happens next.

Linking attuning to practical intelligibility yields two important results. One is to imbue attuning with a sense of movement, entangling with human activity that is purposeful and oriented to particular ends. Attuning is teleological. The second is to reaffirm and extend the decentring of the individual. While attuning might rely on physical performances by particular human bodies in relation to other bodies and things, involves sense-making that is social in origin. Practical intelligibility frames this sociality in terms of the practices into which particular performances of attuning are folded.

Attuning in Practice

Having set out key aspects of the concept in abstract form, I will now show how the concept of attuning can be put to work, and the benefits of doing so for our understanding of pedagogy. I my approach physical environments and the bodies of others emerge as practically intelligible, informing what and how the professional learns and guides others’ learning.

When families arrive on the Residential Unit each Monday, the professionals working with them know relatively little about them. Notes from referral documentation are expanded through intake phone calls prior to arrival. Staff learn about, from and with these families over the course of the week. Edwards and Apostolov (2007) describe ‘relational forms of co-configuration with parents and carers’, in which ‘practitioners learnt from listening to and working with families’ (p. 81). As I have explained elsewhere (Hopwood 2016a) such professional learning can be considered in terms of three foci that mediate each other: learning about particular clients and what matters to them, learning about the changing relationship between professionals and clients, and learning about the practices that lead to lasting positive change. In the present chapter, I advance this argument, claiming that none of these can proceed in the absence of skilful performances of attuning on the part of the professional. To convey what is involved in performances of attuning, I disentangle particular senses and features. Such separations are analytical (i.e. devices that serve a conceptual purpose) rather than ontological (i.e. being performed separately in reality).

Dixon (2011) asks how we might know when someone is a good listener. In my analysis of performances of attuning, I focused on bodily performances, an approach that proved highly instructive. Below is an excerpt from my fieldnotesFootnote 4:

Wednesday, 2.05 pm. Nurses Jayne, Julia and Mary are sat at the nurses’ station, writing up progress notes. A cry is heard down one of the corridors. Jayne stands up and asks “Who is that?”. Julia replies “I think it’s Jayden from [room] 11”.

Here, we can see the body as background, the nurses as their bodies. They were writing without having to focus on how to move their fingers, while their bodies were listening for them, alert to the sounds that might come from the corridor. We can also see Jayne listening with her body. She stands up. At this point the instrumental body comes alive. The act of listening is folded into practices with other ends, associating sounds with a particular (child) body, to inform judgements about what to do next—where to go, who should go, when to go and so on.

These acts of listening are not mindless. They are instances of knowing, and through them, knowledge emerges. The constant alertness to children’s cries draws on shared forms of professional expertise (general understandings) about children’s sleep routines, the nature and meaning of cries. It is also connected to tentative ways of knowing particular children, what their cries sound like, and what their cries mean (emerging practical understandings). This is shaped by shared intentionality—supporting families with young children through partnership . The fact that Julia correctly identifies the source of the cry shows how the sounds are entangled with multiple forms of expertise—the habitually developed ability to locate sounds, and the recently developed association between specific sounds and Jayden.

The excerpt below and Fig. 5.1 convey how attuning through listening is a whole-of-body and mindful act.

Fig. 5.1
figure 1

Listening as a whole-of-body act of learning

Full size image

Thursday, 8.30 am. Nurse Bridget walks up to stand outside the nursery door for room 13. There are sounds of gentle cries and it is dark inside. She takes down the chart, which is hanging by the door, writes on it, and puts it back. She stands with her feet close together, hands clasped in front of her. She lifts the flap covering the small window in the door to peer in occasionally, using her left hand to shield her vision from the bright corridor lights outside. She either gazes at a gentle angle down towards the floor, or along the corridor into the distance, towards the nurses’ station. She is almost statuesque, moving only slightly and occasionally, shifting weight from one leg to another.

After pausing and listening by the nursery door, Bridget returned to the nurses’ station and called the child’s mother on the telephone. She explained that the child was ‘just talking, winding down a bit’. She cues the mother to listen out for cries like those from the night before, and to go in and comfort her daughter when she is ready. The quotation and the image convey the way in which listening is not performed just with the ears, but through posture, stillness, gaze. Where there is movement, it is gentle and synchronised with changes in sounds being listened to. Thus, the sense of listening as performed by the whole body.

Performances of listening are not separate from expertise in the form of practical and general understandings. Such knowledge resources listening, but it also emerges through it. I hold that this emergence of knowledge constitutes learning when it affects connectedness in action —what Gherardi (2006) calls texture—(see Hopwood 2016b for a more detailed explanation of this position). The meaning that Bridget constructed informed what she said to the mother. The act of attuning was born out of relationships between these three bodies (nurse, child, mother), not just in the moment, but stretching back at least as far as the night before. The act also reshaped those relationships, leading to intervention by Bridget in which she encouraged and invited the mother to continue listening, applying professional vocabulary and categories (chatting, winding down) to help the mother associate sounds of cries with meaning.

In this example, I have focused on listening, revealing it as a whole-of-body act that cannot be separated from mind. But attuning, of course, is rarely focused solely on the aural domain. Understanding children’s behaviour and communicative intent involves attuning to sounds, facial expression, postures, movements and touch. Much work on the Unit responds to children’s bodies, and imbuing them with meanings such as boredom, hunger, fatigue, frustration, attachment, separation anxiety, calmness, protest, distress and so on. This professional practice also relies on similar attuning to parents, including listening of the kind implied by Edwards and Apostolov (2007). Giving open-minded and non-judgemental attention to what parents have to say requires ‘fine shades’ (Schatzki 1996) of bodily performance including tone of voice, pauses, hesitations, silences, sighs. It also depends on attuning to bodily cues in parents, such as changes in posture, trembling lips, furrowed eyebrows, fidgeting.

Such attuning is accomplished through an entangled array of whole-of-body and mindful acts. Perceiving and conceiving happen together, shaping how sense is made of what is happening and what to do next. Several times, I observed professionals deviating from planned activity because of the ways parents’ bodies became practically intelligible. For example, some parents confirmed verbally that they wanted to pursue with an approach to settling their child in the cot. However, when the time came, nurses detected signs of anxiety, interpreted these through understandings of partnership , and so discussed whether or not to continue. Just as with the example of listening, such attuning constitutes professional learning when new ways of knowing emerge, and these have implications for relations between professionals and clients.

Attuning and Pedagogies of the Unknown

My task now is to close the loop, and connect attuning with the features of professional practices mentioned at the outset of the chapter. I thus now address the question of how attuning can enable professionals to go on amid epistemic uncertainty and fold this emerging knowledge into acts that facilitate families’ learning. Attuning underpins the first of three linked practices that together constitute a pedagogic approach that functions under conditions of uncertainty.Footnote 5 Through attuning, explaining significance and attributing agency to parents, professionals can support and guide parents’ learning in a responsive way. In such sequences, the epistemic dilemmas described above become less problematic, as the pedagogy is tolerant of tentative knowledge . More stable forms of knowledge are required, too, but the immediacy of these attuning-based practices means issues of durability and fragility are less pressing. Indeed, at their most powerful, these practices can help to stabilise knowledge, clarify its degree of completeness, fill out gaps and strengthen what was previously fragile.

The first step in the sequence involves the professional attuning to the bodies and objects around her. This implies all the bodily mindful characteristics discussed above—fine shades of bodily performance, and practical intelligibility . With attuning as the catalyst, these pedagogies arise out of what happens in practice. The pedagogy emerges and does not need to be planned or follow a curriculum, nor does it emerge from or into a vacuum. As explained previously, attuning links both to what unfolds in-the-moment, and to more stable, shared forms of expertise. The latter guide professionals’ attention, informing what they attune to, anticipate and deem important. Pedagogic responsibility is upheld because the purpose of attuning is to make explicit something that would otherwise have been overlooked (or perhaps considered irrelevant) by the client alone. And, the epistemic conditions are somewhat ameliorated as the new knowledge introduced comes from something that has just been witnessed. It cannot be undone, is robust, and endures for as long as is needed.

When the professional attunes to the parents and children she is supporting, the act is a relational one (linking her body with other bodies and objects). However, there the sense-making is, so far, private. The second step in the pedagogic sequence changes this in two important ways. Parents’ attention is drawn to what has been noticed, and then the professional explains why this is significant. Significance here is not a property of the action that was attuned to in the first place, but a form of practical intelligibility that links the action to the pedagogic purpose of supporting the client. A particular gesture or utterance from a child may be significant if the goal is to help the child fall asleep in a cot, but be less important if the focus is on other changes. Often in this step, the professional might apply labels to describe what has been noticed, using categories from their specialist expertise. Establishing significance involves bringing parents into what Derry (2008) calls a ‘space of reasons’. The space of reasons is linked to Vygotskian (1978, 1986) ideas of spontaneous and scientific concepts. Entry into the space of reasons moves away from the realm of the concrete (that particular cry, gesture etc.) and into a more abstract space where concepts form part of a system of relations. This pedagogy is based not only on establishing referential value between a professional way of understanding and what has just happened, but inferential value. The latter promotes much more powerful learning as it changes the forms of reasoning that parents can participate in, including conceptual work of classifying and considering causes (because of…) and consequences (if… then…). The move into this space of reasons follows a path from the concrete bodies and actions of a particular family to more abstract forms of understanding. Parents then return to the concrete, now through new forms of reasoning.

Important pedagogic work has already taken place, however, the Karitane study revealed a third step that extended and expanded the transformational impact of seemingly minor and mundane occurrences. The final step draws on the first two and attributes the locus of agency to the parent. This can include retrospective analysis, in which a positive, observed change is linked to actions that the parent has performed herself. It can also look forwards, suggesting that future changes can be promoted by the parent, challenging unhelpful notions that the situation is beyond the parent’s capacity to influence. This final step brings parents further into a space of reasons. Here, the reasoning expands from interpreting child behaviours to connections between this and parents as agents of change. It is through this final step that the aims of partnership —to build resilience rather than to problem-solve—are more fully realised. I will now illustrate the sequence with an example.

Kaveri has come to the Unit for help settling her son Usaf. She wants to be able to put him down to sleep in his cot, rather than having to breastfeed him to sleep, so that her husband could be more involved, and also so that he might be easier to resettle when he wakes during the night. On Tuesday evening, Cat works with Kaveri to settle Usaf in his cot. At this stage neither Cat nor her colleagues know what settling techniques Usaf will respond to. Based on experience from the day before and earlier that day, the nurse suggests an approach that involves going in and out of the nursery, giving Usaf chance to self settle, but going in when his cries indicate physical comforting is warranted. Previously, Kaveri had found it hard to distinguish between different cries and their meaning. On entering the nursery, Kaveri is encouraged to pat the mattress and offer strong shushes, and to avoid picking Usaf up or touching his body.

At one point, the two adults are stood in almost statuesque posture, outside the nursery, listening to the child. Cat’s attuning also encompasses the mother. Cat’s gaze switches between a soft focus (listening to Usaf) and occasional open glances to Kaveri. Cat’s changing gaze, synchronized with Usaf’s cries, helps guide Kaveri’s attuning. Kaveri takes eye contact from Cat as a cue to question what she is hearing for potentially different meaning.

After a while, Cat and Kaveri’s gazes meet, and through raised eyebrows and a gentle nod, Cat suggests they go into the nursery. Kaveri sushes and pats in the dark, and Usaf settles. They come back to the corridor. Cat says “I noticed he didn’t lift his arms up this time”. “Oh!”, responds Kaveri, expressing surprise. Cat continues, “That is showing us that he doesn’t want to be picked up any more. He lifts his hands when he wants and expects you to pick him up. He’s showing us he’s happy in his cot now”. Cat’s tone remains measured, firm and authoritative, maintaining the low volume required of conversations outside a nursery. “He’s happier staying in his cot because you’re going in as soon as he gets distressed. You’re telling him you’re not far away, that you’re there if he needs you. He needs that reassurance. By shushing and patting the mattress, you’re showing him you’re right there, and helping him go off to sleep. You’ve been consistent, doing the same thing each time, so he is learning that you’re not going to pick him up immediately, you’ll see if he settles with some patting and shushing first. He cries because he loves you, but he’s learning.”

Notice the attuning work going on outside the nursery. This is informed by and informs emerging knowledge about Kaveri and her family and is performed whole-of-body. Forms of professional expertise are made pedagogically available, by differentiating cries and associating meaning with them in order to inform what to do next: this is a protest cry, we can remain outside; this indicates more distress, we should go in. Both stable understandings of cries as communicative, and particular understandings of Usaf’s cries are active here.

When they go into the nursery, Cat notices Usaf’s arms remaining down. Her expertise tells her to look out for his, and she notices it as a change because of what she knows about Usaf’s recent behaviour. On returning to the corridor, Cat proceeds through the three steps outlined above. She draws Kaveri’s attention to what she noticed in the nursery, then she helps Kaveri understand why the lack of arm movement is significant, bringing her into a space of reasons. Finally, she makes links between this positive change and Kaveri’s own actions, locating the mother as the driving force for change. Through new modes of reasoning, Kaveri is learning about her agency as a mother, what to look for as signs of positive change, and about the potential efficacy of this particular settling approach. While such settling routines are familiar to nurses like Cat, the pedagogy is infused with particulars. Cat could not have known that this is where the settling episode would end up. Previously tentative knowledge of Kaveri’s tolerance of her child’s cries was, at the outset, provisional, became more robust and stable as they proceeded. The pedagogy emerged through relational, embodied and expert work, building on a foundation of attuning from which a path into the unknown became available.

Conclusions

I began this chapter by posing problems associated with the absented body in accounts of pedagogy, indeed of professional practices more broadly. I handled ideas of a knowing body, and embodied knowledge within a performative framework that imbues the concept of attuning with meaning and significance far beyond its everyday currency.

My distinctive concept of attuning involves more than noticing with one or more senses. Attuning, in this practice theoretical guise, is a mindful whole-of-body performance. Perception and conception, doing and knowing, are entangled. Attuning involves: (i) knowing how to listen, look, touch, sense; (ii) knowing what to listen and look for; and (iii) making meaning. These are separate only in analytical, not ontological terms, as performance, knowing and meaning occur together. Meaning and motive support each other. Meaning in the form of practical intelligibility arises through motive, as what is attuned to is significant only in the context of a particular practical ends. Meaning supports motive, as it is through the creation of new meaning, linking the particular and the abstract, and entry into a space of reasons, that powerful pedagogies take effect.

The shifting relational basis of professional practices can confront professionals with epistemic dilemmas. The pedagogic nature of professional work is intensified when professionals take up roles of helping others bring about change. Thus, professionals working in partnership or other relational modes have to both learn in practice from, about and with their clients. But they must also act as pedagogues, guiding, leading and facilitating others’ learning. Epistemic dilemmas arise when what is to be learned cannot be specified at the outset, and the knowledge at hand is unstable, partial and fragile.

I showed how attuning can enable professionals to go on amid precisely such difficulties. The pedagogies I described are based on attuning. When sense-making through attuning becomes shared, it can support changes in reasoning that in turn act as a driving force for change. I have developed these ideas through exploration of a context where unknown qualities and epistemic ambiguities are quite stark. It remains to explore whether my characterisation of the pedagogic imperative and challenges associated with it hold up in other forms of partnership -based and coproductive work.

Recalling my prior assertion that the unknown is not completely removed in formal education , the idea of ‘teachable moments’ (see, e.g., Hyun and Marshall 2003) seems potentially relevant to the attuning-based pedagogies I have discussed here. A long-standing notion, the teachable moment includes both a sense of learner-readiness (resonating with partnership) and responsiveness (resonating with the notion of emergence). My sense is that the theorisations in offered in the present chapter could be useful in enriching what teachable moments are, how they arise, and in specifying more fully how they can be exploited for greater pedagogic benefit. My framework would tear at some of the (perhaps implicit) assumptions regarding knowledge and the body that underpin existing ideas of the teachable moment. But in this tearing lies significant disruptive value.

It also remains to ascertain whether these ideas bear similar fruit in contexts where, on the surface, pedagogy appears to proceed amid more ‘known’ than ‘unknown’ conditions, as in formal education . Rather than assuming that the presence of a curriculum or pre-specified learning outcomes does away with the epistemic dilemmas, my inclination would be to entertain the possibility that such challenges are indeed present. To do so would potentially be revealing of features of pedagogic expertise that have previously been more shadowy presences in our accounts of teaching and learning, not least: the body.