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Chapter Six – Part of a Session – Page 186
Keeping in mind the accumulating array of my impressions and thoughts, I then
considered the events of the whole session, and some of the issues and themes that stood
out for me from that consideration, in relation to the primary tasks of the semester and
of the research. With the themes and issues, I then link these to these primary tasks, in
the form of a considered interpretation of this material.
This chapter involves an iterative process, as in the previous Chapter, Five. A difference
between Chapters Five and Six is that whilst Five is a direct exploration of an episode or
sequence of interaction in the session, Six is an exploration of an episode from
consideration of aspects that the episode highlights, with aspects selected by the
researcher. This example of exploration is further from the surface of the events than
that in Chapter Five.
The aims of this chapter
predominant characteristic of the unconscious in this session can be seen as
Methodologically, the aim of this chapter is to show an exploration of a set of
phenomena, notably an eruption of emotional expression, extracting a set of themes by
an impressionistic process, and then examining and transforming the material that can
be generated from those themes.
Substantively, the aim is to show how the products of this process contribute to an
understanding of moments of difficulty in the process of teaching and learning. This
particular moment involves a sudden shift of mood, and I show how this approach to