Donna Frost

Philosophical foundations and methodological principles 63 3 “The anticipation of meaning in which the whole is envisaged becomes actual understanding when the parts that are determined by the whole themselves also determine this whole. We know this from learning ancient languages. We learn that we must “construe” a sentence before we attempt to understand the linguistic meaning of the individual parts of the sentence. But the process of construal is itself already governed by an expectation of meaning that follows from the context of what has gone before. It is of course necessary for this expectation to be adjusted if the text calls for it. This means, then, that the expectation changes and that the text unifies its meaning around another expectation. Thus the movement of understanding is constantly from the whole to the part and back to the whole. Our task is to expand the unity of the understood meaning centrifugally. The harmony of all the details with the whole is the criterion of correct understanding. The failure to achieve this harmony means that understanding has failed.” (p. 291 , my emphasis) Gadamer ( 1975 / 1989 ) goes on to say that this process involves a continual testing of our prejudices (p. 305 ) and is certainly not without tension. Part of the hermeneutic task is remaining open, throughout, to a shifting of meaning, and making explicit the tensions that are part of this process. Coming to know, or developing understanding, is only partly about following a particular method and just as importantly involves ‘dialogical, practical and situated activity’ (Malpas, 2016 , § 2 . 2 , ¶ 3 ). As Vagle ( 2014 ) emphasizes, knowledge is neither complete nor context free, it is always “ partial, situated, endlessly deferred, and circulating through relations ” (p. 111 - 112 ). To understand the worlds of practitioners within this research I needed to enter those worlds and provoke and support experience within them and dialogue about them. I wanted to create circumstances within my research in which practitioners could be involved in researching their practice from the inside out and wherein I could legitimately investigate my own understandings as researcher. In order to use our prejudices and pre-understandings to investigate practice we needed to find ways of uncovering and explicating them, and questioning them in turn. Heidegger ( 1953 / 1962 , 2002 , 2005 ) and Gadamer’s ( 1975 / 1989 ) ideas suggested to me that it was worthwhile, as researcher, to pay attention to ordinary, everyday practices in the world, and particularly to the practical wisdom employed in coping