Phenomenological Pedagogy in Higher Education of Mental Health Workers

This article describes the use of phenomenological pedagogy in thehigher education of mental health workers. The mental health field is an immenselycomplex professional field. To create access, the conventional education of mentalhealth professionals compartmentalizes the field according to traditional professionalboundaries. Personal–professional expertise and user preference are thereby lost. Suchpersonal experience is privileged in a pedagogy based on Giorgi’s descriptivephenomenological method. Students learn systematically to describe a mental healthphenomenon of their interest and reflect on this using each other’s professionalinsights as well as relevant research literature. Phenomenological description andreflection are repeated several times in the curriculum. Kegan’s subject–object theoryof adult development explains how this repetition may support transformation of insightin rather than an accumulation of information about mental health work. The complexityof the mental health field thus emerges as a source of knowledge to exploit rather thanmerely a rugged landscape to navigate