Using Arts-Based Participatory Methods to Teach Cultural Safety

Abstract

Cultural Safety as a mode of institutional interruption and accountability seeking has gained momentum in Australia. Developed by Maori nurses as a way of transforming the health impacts of unjust settler colonial systems and practices, it has become institutionalised in health education and practice with a particular emphasis on First Nations people. Despite nursing literature having a rich record in using critical and anticolonial pedagogies there are still barriers to teaching Cultural Safety. In this book chapter, I share my reflections on using arts-based participatory methods to facilitate the teaching of Cultural Safety in an undergraduate nursing program. I begin by setting the scene in settler colonial Australia and talking about how Cultural Safety became incorporated. I consider the barriers to teaching for anti-racism and social justice in the context of utilitarianism, conservatism, and instrumentalism in the neoliberal university. I problematise my own location as a person both outside whiteness and the settler-Indigenous binary but complicit in the colonial project through migration. I reflect on being a minoritised scholar, outside of whiteness attempting to transform whiteness in nursing, in a settler colonial society built on Aboriginal dispossession and carceral logics. I then discuss two case studies where I partnered with First Nations and racialised artists to introduce artistic methods into nursing pedagogy in Victoria, Australia. Where the aim was to assist nurses to integrate a praxis of critical reflexivity. I conclude with my learning from these pedagogical interventions in spaces of white supremacy by questioning the cost for activist scholars of trying to create pockets of healing or reparation. That is undertaking transformative rather than reproductive work in the nursing academy and suggest more collective strategies are needed to create just nursing communities in settler-colonial institutional spaces. My aim in sharing the lessons learned from collaboration with First Nations and Refugee and migrant background artists to implement innovative teaching methods is to amplify these experiences which can assist to activate the transformative potential of nursing education and prepare nursing students for social justice.