The use of imagination in professional education to enable learning about disadvantaged clients
Valerie Hall and Angie Hart
Professional education is delivered equally on campus and in practice placements but until lately, theories of learning and teaching in higher education have focused mainly on processing text-based forms of knowledge. Even more recently introduced learning methods such as reflection and problem or enquiry-based learning do not fully address the complex and often challenging learning needs of student health and social care professionals as they face the reality of everyday professional practice (Hall 2001). Working in a practice placement requires students to be able to make sense of the chaotic events going on around them that frequently evoke emotional responses, and challenge the individual’s value and belief systems, which can lead to a changed outlook on life (Howard 2002). This means that the type of learning, which occurs in practice settings, is often implicit in nature and the knowledge gained is likely to be tacit making it difficult to share with others. However, what is learnt implicitly both within the placement and campus will have a significant impact on later practice and therefore we need a mechanism to ‘unlock’ this tacit knowledge. In this paper we propose that creative methods of learning such as developing the use of imagination may have more direct application in bringing into the public domain previous implicit learning experiences. As a means of exploring this issue we present our recent research (Hart et al. 2001), which assessed how qualified and pre-qualified midwives are educationally prepared to work with disadvantaged women, an area of crucial importance, and one that is personally and professionally challenging. From the findings of this research, we created a learning model which can be used by lecturers or practice educators either in the campus or practice settings. We conclude the paper with a discussion evaluating its fitness for enabling students to learn about disadvantaged clients.
Watch our workshops: how to do community co-research on health equity
Created as part of the ongoing Community Solutions for Health Equity project that Boingboing Foundation are proudly part of, we are pleased to share recordings of a series of workshops held recently in Blackpool. These workshops are free resources to be taken advantage of by any community members or organisations looking for a beginner’s guide to developing the research skills and knowledge needed to explore health inequalities in coastal areas.
The Research Ready Communities pilot continued
For the past year and a half Boingboing has been working on a Research Ready Communities pilot project in Blackpool alongside the National Institute for Health Research as part of their Under-served Communities programme. Typically, much of the funding for health research in the UK goes to universities in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but health research is needed the most in places like Blackpool, where the harmful impacts of health inequalities are worst felt.
The Boingboing Resilience Framework
The Resilience Framework is a handy table that summarises ‘what works’ when supporting children and young people’s resilience according to the Resilience Research base. The Resilience Framework forms a cornerstone of our research and practice. On this page we have pulled together lots of useful links so you can find out all about the Resilience Framework.
An introduction to the Research Ready Communities pilot
For the past year and a half Boingboing has been working on a Research Ready Communities pilot project in Blackpool alongside the National Institute for Health Research as part of their Under-served Communities programme. Typically, much of the funding for health research in the UK goes to universities in London, Oxford and Cambridge, but health research is needed the most in places like Blackpool, where the harmful impacts of health inequalities are worst felt.
Community Report – Climate Change and Mental Health
A full summary of findings from the research project ‘Climate change and mental health; A co-produced study with young people in Blackpool’.
Communication between autistic and non-autistic speakers: Gemma Williams introduces her fellowship research
Gemma is an autistic Early Career Researcher based at the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice, University of Brighton and a Boingboing volunteer. In this blog Gemma talks about her PhD research, and what she plans to do over the coming year of her fellowship under Prof. Angie Hart’s mentorship.
Resilience Revolution – Blackpool HeadStart
The Resilience Revolution has delivered an extensive programme of lasting change with disadvantaged young people in the town of Blackpool, through a successful £10.4 million Big Lottery HeadStart funding bid. Their work is based on research into resilience by Boingboing and the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice.
Nothing about us without us: civic activism as a mental health intervention
Through this research a team of co-researchers from different generations, professions and backgrounds will co-create knowledge regarding the role of innovative ‘glocal’ civic activism as a mechanism to strengthen young people’s mental health.
How can patients, the public and health professionals work better together?
In this blog Debbie Hatfield, postdoctoral fellow with Boingboing and the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice, talks about her research and what she hopes it will achieve. Debbie’s work includes promoting and developing her PhD findings which looked at patient and public engagement and involvement for commissioning health services.
Our Academic Publications
This page presents an archive of selected published works from the Boingboing, Resilience Revolution and CRSJ community. This includes key academic papers, submissions of evidence and a few books relevant to the Boingboing approach to resilience.
United we stand Film: Youth perspectives on developing resilience to drought in South Africa
United we stand is a policy briefing paper produced by all the team members involved in the co-productive research project led by Professor Angie Hart on Youth perspectives on developing resilience to drought in South Africa.
Resilience among young people in a community affected by drought
The expertise of young South Africans in coping with drought is being harnessed for this co-productive research project. Our team is working with partners to understand what enables young people to withstand, adapt to, resist or challenge these impacts.
Cross-cultural investigation of resilience
This research project will investigate whether the Resilience Framework operates similarly or differently across diverse contexts in a cross-cultural study, and adapt the Resilience Framework for non-Western life orientations in multiple languages.
Co-production in promoting resilience – what does this mean for schools?
Co-production is a value-based approach that views people who use a service as assets with important knowledge and skills. It harnesses this experience, knowledge and skill to promote positive change, and design, produce and deliver better services.
The Imagine Programme
The Imagine Programme brings together different research projects working across universities and their local communities. Using the new knowledge we gather, we are imagining how communities might be different. We are researching, and experimenting with different forms of community-building that ignite imagination about the future and help to build resilience.
Our schools-based resilience projects
Our schools-based resilience research adapts the Resilience Framework for use in schools and helps schools make resilient moves across the whole school community. Many different types of school are working with us on this.
Resilience to re-offending: young men overcoming adversity
This practitioner research combines support work with young people who have experienced challenging times and the Resilience Framework. By examining the mechanisms that promoted resilience amongst young men who were offending, the study took the Resilience Framework and applied it to the data collected on the young men’s experiences.
Can kinship carers benefit from learning about resilience?
This is a Collaborative Action Research project using Photo-elicitation to represent kinship carers experiences of trying to use Resilient Therapy and individual interviews with children to find out what helps them through difficult times.
Can resilience be measured?
Can resilience be measured? Finding adequate and good ways of measuring is important because we would like to track the effectiveness of resilient building approaches in daily practice, to make sure that people benefit from our interventions, check the quality of our work and continue developing our interventions.
