SummaryADHD and reificationThis thesis starts with a quote from eleven-year-old Sylvia, who thinks ADHD “is like a cancer (...) but you’re not going to die from it”. ADHD is no disease like cancer, but a con- cept from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), currently in its fifth edition. The DSM-5 defines ADHD with -partly overlapping- behavioral criteria such as “often has trouble waiting his/her turn” and “often interrupts or intrudes on others”. Thinking that the definitions in the DSM are concrete illnesses, such as Sylvia does, is acknowledged as a problematic phenomenon called reification. The most well- known mechanism of reification is called the “nominal fallacy”: naming behaviors carries the risk of thinking we have thereby explained them. In fact, constructs like ADHD only name these behaviors. However, confusing naming and explaining is just one of the mechanisms of reification. This thesis aims to answer the questions: how is ADHD reified in written discourse, and how often do these identified mechanisms of reification occur?Generalization and other mechanisms of reificationBesides confusing naming and explaining, generalizations can also lead to reification; particularly group-to-individual generalization. For instance, the authors of a large meta-analysis of brain-anatomy compared groups classified with ADHD with groups of “normal” individuals. They stated in their paper in 2017: “We confirm, with high-pow- ered analysis, that patients with ADHD have altered brains; therefore ADHD is a disorder of the brain. This message is clear for clinicians to convey to parents and patients”. The find- ings were in fact mere averages, and the case and control groups largely overlap. The authors wrongly suggest that all those classified with ADHD have different (smaller) brain parts. In fact, many with an ADHD classification have larger than average brain parts while many without an ADHD classification have brain parts that are smaller than average.There are many other reifying mechanisms. For instance, when reporting about case-control studies of neurophysiology and neurochemistry, researchers often select brain-images of the extremes from both samples. These images are then often pre- sented as allegedly representative of the brain activity and neurochemistry of a whole population of those classified with ADHD. In reality, case and control groups again show much overlap. Furthermore, brain activity differs strongly across people, regardless of an ADHD classification. Also within persons neurochemistry and physiology are not consistent through time.Medical jargon, for instance words like “symptom”, can also reify ADHD as the term implies that behaviors like interrupting others are the result of a disease or disorder. Speaking of criteria for ADHD is a more appropriate term, as this word refers to a stand- ard on which a decision may be based, and the word does not suggest the behaviors are caused by an innate problem.Similarly, by using metaphors, such as comparing ADHD to a meat-cleaver that splits the brains of those with ADHD, agency is ascribed to the ADHD-concept as a real entity that does damage to the human brain. This reifies ADHD and such a metaphor may also create fear and stigma. Another reifying mechanism is the suggestion of causality when only correlation is empirically proven. It is often suggested that ADHD can cause academic failure and maladaptation to the point of delinquency. However, as for instance child maltreatment can cause problems of inattention and restless behaviors –for which the ADHD-con- cept merely provides a name- both ADHD and delinquency can be confounded by adverse circumstances.ADHD can also be reified by “textual silence”: omitting important information that shows the construct does not represent a steady and reliable disorder. For instance: birth-month studies reveal that normal, age-related behaviors tend to be “diagnosed” with ADHD and medically treated. Not mentioning this important information can leave the perception of ADHD as a concrete entity intact.How often do these reifying mechanisms occur?Using a sample of 43 academic textbooks used at universities in the Netherlands, this thesis aims to quantify the occurrence of reifying mechanisms such as textual silence in relation to genetics. For instance, roughly half of the textbooks mention 60-80% heritability estimates of twin/family and adoption studies that compare behaviors of relatives to estimate the influence of genetics. At the same time, these textbooks omit that the more precise molecular genetic studies reveal a low direct influence of genes of about 5%. Only a quarter of the textbooks mention the contrasting findings, which reveal that twin/family and adoption studies cannot separate genetic from environ- mental influences very well. A quarter of the textbooks do contrast the high outcome of twin/family/adoption studies and the limited effects according to molecular studies. This “missing heritability problem”, as it is known, is not mentioned explicitly as such.Generalizations are also a common mechanism of reification. Of 36 textbooks that discuss brain anatomy in relation to ADHD, 21 (58%) do not mention that empirical outcomes are mere average findings that have little bearing on individuals classified as having ADHD. Fifteen chapters on ADHD did place such findings in perspective, by referring, for instance, to the fact that such findings are mere group outcomes. Only 3 of those, however, clearly mentioned that those with ADHD do not necessarily have different brains, or that “normal” controls can also have different/smaller brains. Only one chapter on ADHD mentioned both: no single deficit is necessary or sufficient to explain all cases of ADHD. Additionally, none of the chapters mentioned sampling bias due to the use of “supernormal” controls on the one hand and “refined phenotypes”, rigorously screened ADHD cases, on the other.Background of reificationReification is a concept from scholars filed under the sociological school of “Conflict Theory” that sees the quest for power as a foundation of social relationships. Framing ADHD as a hardwired genetic and brain-based illness can privilege medical profes- sionals. When described by the catch-all concept that ADHD is at risk of becoming, everyday behaviors like interrupting others are framed as medical problems and not as a normal part of socialization. As a result, non-medical professionals, like teachers, may feel inept.Conflict Theory also addresses the monetary basis at the heart of the production of knowledge. Differences in the availability of monetary resources (e.g. from pharma- ceutical companies) might further tilt the power balance, such as by financing dedicated companies that help to prepare presentations, write scientific papers (ghost writing) and recruit opinion leaders. However, a conflict theoretical perspective seems limited to explain the passion of some of those who believe strongly in the biological approach. Financial incentives might not necessarily have preceded this enthusiasm, and many researchers do not receive industry funding.Philosophers such as Trudy Dehue and Charles Taylor bring an additional, more “functional” perspective to explain our contemporary eagerness to reify concepts such as ADHD. Dehue, for instance, states that as biological explanations of behavior, concepts like ADHD are functional by providing an excuse for the person one is, par- ticularly if one fails to meet the neo-liberal norm of being self-reliant and successful. Taylor traced one of the roots of this neo-liberal ideology, which he calls “disengaged reason” all the way back to the likes of Plato and Descartes. Disengaged reason means that humans can find true beliefs about the world when being disengaged from it and being disengaged from one’s emotions. This ideal is represented well by Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”.The success of science, partly founded on this notion of disengaged reason, eroded the influence of the church. The influence of the normative framework that the church provided eroded as well and created a void that, from a functional perspective, needed to be filled. Psychiatry rose to the occasion to help fill this void with its’ own psychiatric bible –as the DSM is often called. Perhaps unsurprisingly, psychiatry, as the new sci- ence-based norm-setting institution, is engrained with this ideal of disengaged reason.ADHD and the ideal of disengaged reasonI argue that the rationalistic norms strongly surface in the ADHD-concept. We expect children to control their impulses, be silent in their play and await their turn. Also in the way we study human behavior and “diagnose” children as having a neurodevelopmental disorder - based on splicing their behaviors and counting “symptoms”, we lean towards disengaged reason. A diagnosis does not require asking for a child’s motives for his/ her behavior. So, both the norms we bestow upon children via the ADHD-concept, and the norms we bestow upon ourselves by the way we try to classify them without the need to involve children themselves to give meaning to their behaviour, reflect the dominance of this disengaged reason in my view.ImplicationsSo, possibly we reify and fail to be objective to the disappointing outcomes of empirical studies with the ADHD construct due to our own narrow (institutional) interests. Or, possibly we have historically embedded high hopes for the success of psychiatry’s nor- mative framework. Either way, such interests or high hopes do not necessarily overlap with the interests of the child, which should be our primary concern. So finally, some political and practical implications are offered to safeguard the child’s best interest.Future studies based on this thesis could estimate the prevalence of reifying mech- anisms and could also include different domains of discourse besides textbooks. Ad- ditionally, institutional dependency on constructs from the DSM should be examined critically. For instance, scientific funding agencies should consider the pros and many limitations of the study into the highly reified classifications and consider alternative classifications, such as using Research Domain Criteria. Another possible approach to research and providing care is using a more tentative, back-and fourth, normalizing approach such as stepped diagnosis and stepped care. From a political point of view the high interdependence of science and commercially vested interest calls for reconsider- ation of how we can use financial resources. One longstanding idea is to concentrate these resources in a fund with representatives from different branches of industry, science and government.Finally, medically framing children’s restlessness that is associated with a plethora of problems -such as the contemporary schooling system, divorce, poverty, trauma and loss- makes it easy to forget such larger issues. To avoid this, we should seek refuge in the institute that aims to protect the child’s autonomy, agency and safety in the face of the many individual and collective challenges that our children are confronted with: The Convention on the Rights of the Child. This institution should also safeguard that our current healthcare system with its classifications is part of the solution and not part of the problem.
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ADHD is steeds meer een containerbegrip aan het worden. Aandachtsproblemen zeer erg a-specifiek; bij problemen zijn veel mensen nou eenmaal snel afgeleid en ongeconcentreerd. Het is dan ook niet zo gek dat mensen in de gevangenis, die zowel vroeger als nu te maken hebben (gehad) met verre van ideale omstandigheden een ADHD classificatie zouden kunnen krijgen. Dat betekent natuurlijk niet dat al hun vroegere problemen te wijten zijn aan hun aandachtsproblemen. Door zo simpel te denken gaan we hard richting bijgeloof.
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Lemma. This article argues that for Knowledge Management it is not important how knowledge is defined but how it is conceptualized.
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As I gaze out of my window, I am met with a totem. This totem is gray and windowless, nestled in between offices and academic buildings. Behind it is a park, and the longer I stare, the deeper it becomes embedded in the natural landscape, after a bit I forget it’s there. But in the corner of my eye I can see another one; another totem. This one intimidates me with its red glow. These buildings came to serve as mystical pillars of data flows to me, they became sites of reification, sites where the cloud finally condensed and data rained down. They assumed a posthuman status; high-tech facilities where humans are only needed to keep other humans out. I always imagined data as something abstract, as a floating entity, but as my encounters with these pillars started a process of materialization, it simultaneously sparked a desire to interrogate and to demystify.
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In media audience research we tend to assume that media are engaged with when they are used, however ‘light’ such engagement might be. Once ‘passive media use’ was banned as a reference to media use, being a media audience member became synonymous with being a meaning producer. In audience research however I find that media are not always the object of meaning making in daily life and that media texts can be hardly meaningful. Thinking about media and engagement, there is a threefold challenge in relation to audience research. The coming into being of platform media and hence of new forms of media production on a micro level that come out of and are woven into practices of media use, suggests that we need to redraft the repertoire of terms used in audience research (and maybe start calling it something else). Material and immaterial media production, the unpaid labour on the part of otherwise audience members should for instance be taken into account. Then, secondly, there is the continuing challenge to further develop heuristically strong ways of linking media use and meaning making, and most of all to do justice, thirdly, to those moments and ways in which audiences truly engage with media texts without identifying them with those texts.
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Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) as well as modern pedagogical perspectives have created new possibilities to facilitate and support learning in higher education (HE). Emerging technologies bring opportunities to reconsider teaching and learning. New ideas and concepts about the educational use of new technologies transform the roles of teachers. In this context the key question of this study is: whether learning as part of a (virtual) community of practice supports teachers' technology professional development. Different learning alternatives such as distance learning, workplace learning as well as blended forms of learning will enhance lifelong learning which forces a rethinking of traditional forms of education. However, most institutions for education foster just-in-case learning while new technologies foster just-in-time learning. As a result of new learning perspectives and the potential pedagogical benefits of ICTs in educational contexts, teachers have to learn how to integrate new technologies in teaching and learning. It is recommended that teacher professional development should be situated in multiple learning settings in which learning is teacher-centred. Next to classroom settings and cross-institutional learning communities, virtual learning communities (VCoPs) are a significant source for learning. There is an overlap between the educational values of interned-based learning and social theories of learning such as Lave & Wenger's situated learning theory and Wenger's theory of communities of practice. Drawing upon these theories, offers a perspective on social learning that emphasizes social processes within (V)CoPs where community participants engage in collective learning and knowledge creation. The data discussed in this paper have been drawn from a cross institutional setting at Fontys University of Applied Sciences, The Netherlands. The data were collected and analysed according to a qualitative approach. The paper concludes that VCoPs are learning environments since these network-based learning communities push learners to take more control of their learning and provide tasks which are more contextualised and meaningful.
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An agreed definition of metaphor does not appear to exist, with theorists and researchers agreeing only to a more general type of description of metaphor (Cameron, 1999). These general descriptions build on the derivation of the word metaphor from the Greek word meta, meaning above or over, and phorein, meaning to carry or bear from one place to another. Metaphor is, therefore, described as carrying meaning from one domain to another (Kopp, 1995)
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Metaphor is one of the important discursive themes in organizational literature (Grant et al.,2001). Metaphors play an important role in the discourse within organizations as well as in theorizing about organizations. This empirical paper focuses on the latter by analysing the role of metaphor in the development of theoretical concepts – in particular the concept of social capital – through the means of quantitative content analysis. Some authors argue that metaphors should be avoided in organizational theory (Bourgeois and Pinder, 1983; Tinker, 1986). Others see metaphors as valuable creative tools for developing new theories and insights (Weick, 1989). Morgan (1997) has shown that many theories about organizations can be ‘reordered’ (Keenoy et al., 2003) into a particular metaphorical view of organizations, showing the metaphorical bases of organizational theorizing. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) go even further, presenting compelling evidence from cognitive science indicating that metaphors are inescapable because they are the basis for our abstract reasoning. There is a debate about the way metaphor works (Black, 1993; Cornelissen, 2005; Heracleous, 2003; Keenoy et al., 2003; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003; Oswick et al. 2002, 2003; Tsoukas, 1991;) especially about whether metaphor is simply a matter of comparison highlighting the analogies in the source and target domain, or whether a metaphor does more then that. In the paper we take the latter position and adopt Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) model of cross-domain mapping. This model states that not only similarities and features are transferred from the source to the target domain but that the target domain often gets its structure from the source domain. The metaphorical mapping from the source to the target domain can be rich and complex because metaphors have many ‘entailments’. Entailments are the connotations of the metaphor that transport meaning from the source to the target domain. Furthermore, the application of conceptual metaphor often happens out-of-awareness (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003). It is part of the unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language. We can recognize the unconscious use of metaphor in organizational theorizing by looking at the literal meaning of organizational concepts and statements (Andriessen, 2006).
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This paper presents the results of an exercise to assess the effects of metaphors on knowledge management. Knowledge is an abstract phenomenon with no direct referent in the real world. To think and talk about knowledge we use conceptual metaphors. The exercise shows that these metaphors greatly influence the problems we identify related to knowledge in organizations and the type of knowledge management solutions we propose. The knowledge as water metaphor used in this exercise – which reflects the dominant way of thinking in Western knowledge management literature – leads to the thingification of knowledge, resulting in a discourse about ways to formalize, manage and control knowledge. This discourse primarily serves the interests of management. In contrast, the knowledge as love metaphor used in this exercise – which reflects more an Asian way of thinking about knowledge – shifts the discourse from the topic of knowledge as a thing to the underlying preconditions for good knowledge work. These conditions include the facilitation of knowledge professionals, the quality of the relationships in the organization, and the quality of the organizational culture. This discourse is aimed at humanizing the organization instead of formalizing it and is more in the interest of employees.
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To reach for abstraction is a major but challenging goal in mathematics education: teachers struggle with finding ways how to foster abstraction in their classes. To shed light on this issue for the case of geometry education, we align theoretical perspectives on embodied learning and abstraction with practical perspectives from in-service teachers. We focus on the teaching and learning of realistic geometry, not only because this domain is apt for sensori-motor action investigations, but also because abstraction in realistic geometry is under-researched in relation to other domains of mathematics, and teachers’ knowledge of geometry and confidence in teaching it lag behind. The following research question will be addressed: how can a theoretical embodied perspective on abstraction in geometry education in the higher grades of primary school inform current teacher practices? To answer this question, we carried out a literature study and an interview study with in-service teachers (n = 6). As a result of the literature study, we consider embodied abstraction in geometry as a process of reflecting on, describing, explaining, and structuring of sensory-motor actions in the experienced world through developing and using mathematical artifacts. The results from the interview study show that teachers are potentially prepared for using aspects of embodied learning (e.g., manipulatives), but are not aware of the different aspects of enactment that may invite students’ abstraction. We conclude that theories on embodiment and abstraction do not suffice to foster students’ abstraction process in geometry. Instead, teachers’ knowledge of embodied abstraction in geometry and how to foster this grows with experience in enactment, and with the discovery that cognition emerges to serve action.
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