Humanistic Ways Research Articles

Beautiful Mis/takes

In the following three fragments, I illustrate how I am learning to practice reflexivity through the arts—with a story, piano improvisation, and poem—to evoke possibilities for more empathetic and humanistic ways of teaching and learning that embody what truly matters at the heart of children’s lived and living experiences of exploring music and piano playing. I integrate text, digitally edited photographs, and music video as artistic expressions of my praxis toward more heartful, healing, and joyful ways of teaching and learning.

Improving Patients' Experiences Communicating With Nurses and Providers in the Emergency Department

IntroductionAs health care becomes increasingly patient centered, organizations strive to improve patients’ ratings of satisfaction with care. Communication with nurses and providers drives overall satisfaction, yet little evidence exists to guide them in ensuring effective communication in the emergency department. MethodsA semistructured interview guide based on the Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers survey was used to elicit qualitative data from 30 patients seen in the emergency department and fast track regarding communication with nurses and providers. Data were analyzed using content analysis methodology. ResultsTwo types of overarching themes emerged. Foundational themes include behaviors that convey courtesy and respect and are required for participants to view their interactions with nurses and providers as positive. Interactive themes describe humanistic ways in which nurses and providers conveyed courtesy and respect, reassurance through careful listening, attentiveness, and explaining things in an understandable way. DiscussionThe findings underscore existing evidence regarding patients’ perceptions of being treated with courtesy and respect via nurses’ and providers’ use of positive verbal phrasing and nonverbal body language. They reveal new insights into the importance of specific communication behaviors used by nurses and providers during interactions. Treating patients as individuals amidst a fast-paced care environment, proactively recognizing and responding to patients’ fears and concerns, and explaining information clearly to ensure understanding were critical.

The Unbounded Gatherer: Possibilities for posthuman writing-reading

This article develops a posthuman approach to authorship to challenge implied distinctions and superiorities between the social and material worlds, which can detach academics and their writing from societies and ecosystems. By reimagining academic texts that are open for richer interpretation and accessible to diverse audiences, this article offers two main contributions. Firstly, I develop a conceptualisation of the posthuman author as an 'unbounded gatherer', adding to others' attempts to destabilise predominant humanistic ways of writing about managing and organizing that view authors as autonomous agents. Secondly, by developing the idea of 'mediators' as a means to explore how the sociomaterial is implicated in writing, debates about materiality in writing are extended. Through an illustration of posthuman writing, five emergent categories of mediators are analysed, and three textual practices are performed and examined.

‘Imagineering’ mixed reality (MR) immersive experiences in the postdigital revolution: innovation, collectivity, participation and ethics in staging experiments as performances

ABSTRACT At the frontiers of our technoculture and experience economy, artist-researchers as catalytic agents become Imagineers and entrepreneurs of themselves. Arts are quantified in expectations of extending forms of communication with people and our environments, by creating humanistic ways of interfacing with machines. Within the experience economy the term ‘immersion’ is overused trending towards VR, which has troubled many researchers and practitioners across disciplines. Drawing on perspectives from performance studies, digital humanities, and human-computer interaction (HCI), this paper reviews the role of XR-enabling technologies, beyond VR, in designing immersive experiences, and their integration into performance practices. It discusses the shift of the artist’s role in imagineering new resources and new ways of working to immerse audiences, and it evaluates this in a postdigital context. It discusses how immersion operates, and critiques components necessary to create affective environments in terms of audience engagement, agency, participation, involvement, presence, embodiment and interaction. The article discusses how performance as a lab can act as a method of inquiry by bringing the anthropological, performative and theatrical perspectives; and the ethics of to testing immersive-enabling technologies and/or experiences within the context of live performances.

Homo Perfectus versus Educatio. Filozoficzne refleksje na temat transhumanizmu i edukacji

A new form of intervention into what it means to be human is currently emerging. It is an effort to purposely transform the very nature of man, which at once becomes some kind of a material to be worked on, the same as other components of nature are for man. This new emerging form of intervention into human existence extends beyond the humanistic ways and aims at the cultivation of man. Homo perfectus is a transhumanist perspective which calls for perfecting man, while stressing the enhancement of the human body and its performance, or his cognitive capacities. At the same time, the human characteristic of creative action is being marginalized. As a result, such a perspective neglects not only the dimensionality of man, but also his finality. The concept of the homo perfectus creates a pessimistic image of man and rejects man’s intrinsic, biologically limited humanness in expectation of gaining greater control over our lives. The image is not an image of the enhancement of human nature and his full realization, but it is rather an image of a battle against what was once given to man. In this paper, I will present the contradiction that arises in connection to the concept of homo perfectus and point out the significance of the concept of educatio in connection to human existence. Education becomes a prerequisite of human existence; without education, man would not be able to gain his freedom. Education is not only a preparation for certain life performances but it also guides us out of every partialness, every isolation in the sphere of personal limited interests into a space that can be open towards one and only human direction, that is a direction from the partial to the whole.

Interpret in context: Generalizing from the single case in evaluation

This article presents an argument for how to generalize from a single case study evaluation of a social programme or policy, focusing on two essential elements of case study – context and particularity. Taking an interpretivist perspective and drawing on artistic and humanistic ways of understanding, it examines both different ways of generalizing from the case that retain a connection with the context in which they first arose and how we generalize by direct encounter with the particular. This argument is not new. It has its origins in earlier centuries and, in contemporary evaluation, dating back to the 1970s. However, in a political climate that privileges evaluation approaches stemming from large sample studies and experimental designs, it seems timely to restate the value of generalizing from the single case. Grounded in the reality of programme experience and retaining that connection with context and particulars in the case facilitates the use of evaluation knowledge.

Valuing Human Significance: Connecting Leadership Development to Personal Competence, Social Competence, and Caring

This chapter examines humanistic ways of understanding learning; connects leadership learning to the concepts of personal competence, social competence, and caring; and introduces the model of emotionally intelligent leadership.

The implementation of Mask-Ed: Reflections of academic participants

This paper profiles the findings from a study that explored the perspectives and experiences of nurse educators who implemented a novel simulation approach termed Mask-Ed. The technique involves the educator wearing a silicone mask and or body parts and transforming into a character. The premise of this approach is that the masked educator has domain specific knowledge related to the simulation scenario and can transmit this to learners in a way that is engaging, realistic, spontaneous and humanistic.Nurse educators charged with the responsibility of implementing Mask-Ed in three universities were invited to participate in the study by attending an introductory workshop, implementing the technique and then journaling their experiences, insights and perspectives over a 12 month period. The journal entries were then thematically analysed. Key themes were categorised under the headings of Preparation, Implementation and Impact; Reflexivity and Responsiveness; Student Engagement and Ownership; and Teaching and Learning.Mask-Ed is a simulation approach which allows students to interact with the ‘characters’ in humanistic ways that promote person-centred care and therapeutic communication. This simulation approach holds previously untapped potential for a range of learning experiences, however, to be effective, adequate resourcing, training, preparation and practice is required.

Trying to Restore Justice

New Zealand is well known for its restorative justice conferences in the youth justice system. However, restorative justice has yet to overwhelm the adult criminal justice system. Based on interviews in New Zealand with correctional staff, restorative justice providers, and others, this article explores the reason for the modest inroads that restorative practice has made, and suggests that the general context may explain the limits of restorative justice in other places. The article argues that bureaucratic silos make it challenging to determine if restorative practice might fit within a rehabilitation or reintegration framework. In addition, because of the dominance of psychological modes for assessing and treating criminal behavior, an overarching preoccupation with risk management orients correctional practice toward treatment. Moreover, restorative justice's affiliation with victims' perspectives has made its placement within offender reintegration difficult to imagine. Finally, the penal populism that frames correctional practice in New Zealand, and other Anglophone countries, makes alternative to punishment harder to sell. However, the current liminal state of correctional practice creates an opportunity to conceive of more humanistic ways of repairing the harm caused by crime.

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five at Forty: Billy Pilgrim—Even More a Man of Our Times

Critical consensus agrees that Slaughterhouse-Five, forty-three years old this year, remains Vonnegut's canon masterpiece. In the 1960s and '70s, the novel was perceived as commenting on World War II, America's putative “good” war, through the lens of the controversial Vietnam War and proving that no war is ever fully righteous. Billy Pilgrim's story, an Everyman saga, condemns American apathy and the defeatist notion that the lone individual is the helpless plaything of juggernaut forces. Vonnegut vehemently argues that individual agency can still influence events in humanistic ways. Currently, in post-September 11, 2001, America, Billy's static meekness may be even more representative of the nation's mood than it was forty-one years ago. If America's current fascination with apocalyptic scenarios is any indication, the psychological exhaustion of the two-front War on Terror, the economic crisis, and disillusion with a new President's inability to reverse everything overnight has led to a near national death wish.

On Sociological Writing*

It is widely thought, both inside and outside our profession, that sociologists do not express themselves very well. The critic Malcolm Cowley complained years ago that the wisdoms of sociology, such as they are, tend to be conveyed "in a language that has to be learned almost like Esperanto." And Edmund Wilson, who once toyed with the idea that the writing of every specialist in the university should be reviewed by professors of English, doubted that sociologists would ever be able to survive such a test. Exposing the defects of sociological writing is a literary sport of long standing.

Bringing The Body Back: The (Mis)Languaging Of Bodies In Bio-Medical, Societal And Poststructuralist Discourses On Diabetes And Epilepsy

Recent scholarship on 'disabilities' and bodies has tended to be extreme in its orientation and has, on the whole, not been able to speak of chronic disabilities and bodily breakdown in humanistic ways. In its verve toward finding 'cures,' biomedical discourses, from which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning body parts and have made little room for bodily breakdown. Likewise, some strains of poststructuralist discourses on bodies in their tendency to emphasize the performative aspects of bodies and to see experience as constantly under erasure, make little room for bodily breakdowns. Based on an evolving exploration that includes various kinds of data, this paper focuses on how two men living with chronic ailments, namely "type-1" diabetes and epilepsy, respectively, language their bodies and 'disabilities.' The paper argues for the need for applied linguistics in general and aging-related work in particular to bring the body back to where we can speak of it humanistically, to language the body and its breakdowns in ways that eschew both the dehumanizing rhetoric of biomedical discourses and the erasure of experiences as per some poststructuralist thought. However, in keeping with other strains of poststructuralist thinking, we sought to un-fix some 'disability' interpretations by attempting to render them fluid. The paper also reflects on the extent to which we were successful, and the implications of such attempts on texting disability-related papers.

Progressive Psychotherapists and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement

This article argues for and focuses on the importance of humanistic,radical, and other progressive psychotherapists finding ways of relating to the psychiatric survivormovement. Progressive cliniciansand survivor groups, it is suggested, have overlaps in values, a sharedobjection to institutional psychiatry, complementary strengths, andto varying extents, common cause. So there are strong reasons forconnection. Drawing on the survivor movement as a resource andreference point for psychiatrized clients and helping them connectwith the movement are identified as particularly importantdirections for practitioners to take. Recommended examples of moredirect involvement with the movement are supporting andendorsing statements made by movement groups, cowritingarticles, making room for movement involvement in clinicians’initiatives, contributing to movement initiatives, and mounting jointeducational programs and joint campaigns. All such actions areconditional on practitioners respecting survivor groups,acknowledging their expertise, not violating their trust, and supportingtheir struggle for self-determination.

Multi-User Environment Studies: Defining a Field of Study and Four Approaches to the Design of Multi-User Environments

A fundamental shift has occurred in the development of software programs which must take into account the humanistic ways in which people connect via software and the Internet. Software design models need to incorporate the significant element of human interaction involved in a category of programs I call 'multi-user environments', the most 'people-intensive' or 'presence-intensive' of software programs. This article lays out Multi-User Environment Studies as a field of study and defines multi-user environments as software programs that allow a person to interact with other people, programmed entities, and/or a persistent environment in real-time or asynchronously. A spectrum of multi-user environments are identified, including Talk programs, MUDs, Web chat programs, people browsers, audio-video conferencing programs, computer games, and worlds. I offer four analytical frameworks from which to study multi-user environments, based on interface design, performance studies, literary studies, and cultural studies. The evolution of new terminology related to dynamic digital environments is discussed. Examples of curriculum are provided from a course on virtual environments that I taught at West Virginia University in 1998

Fukujoka Heuman Relations Community: a Network Approach to Developing Human Potential

At the time of the student riots in the 1960s, a small seminar on Carl Rogers's writings began at a college in the city of Fukuoka, Japan. It has spontaneously developed into a satellite network community called Fukuoka Human Relations Community (FHRC), and it is likely to evolve further into an unknown form of community. The FHRC is a large growth-oriented network of people who get to know each other through encounter groups, monthly open group sessions, and other humanistic activities. The purpose of this article is to describe FHRC and discuss how FHRC activates human potential for growth. This social experiment has important implications for the transition away from a hierarchical society in Japan and illustrates the benefits of new spontaneous, humanistic ways of being and relating.

医学教育における人間尊重のための体験学習の試み

The "humanization" of medical practice is regarded as one of the topics of present day medicine. A number of models and educational programs for teaching humanistically oriented medicine has appeared, but few studies have been done to illustrate the effects of such programs. In the present paper, the authors report a study that they conducted in which the effects of participating in a seminar on counseling skills were demonstrated. The subjects were 11 first and second year medical students who took part in an elective course in medical humanities, in which counseling skills, active listening and experimental focusing were taught. The class met for 10 sessions every other week, in which students were exposed to these techniques. On weeks when the class did not meet, students practiced these techniques in pairs among themselves. At each of these sessions, students filled out a relationship scale and recorded the session into a cassette tape. Furthermore, students filled out personality tests at the first and last class. A comparison of the results of the relationship scale between the first and last session showed a significant increase in the students' ability for empathy (P less than 0.02) and for unconditional positive regard (P less than 0.02). Not enough personality tests were handed in at the last class to provide a useful comparison. Tapes of the sessions are currently being investigated in another study using a different measurement. The authors discuss the need for such experimental courses for medical students to overcome the Cartesian view of seeing others as "objects" and for developing humanistic ways of relating to other persons.

Conference on Commonalities in Ways of Knowing: Science and the Humanities

Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will sponsor a Conference on the Epistomological Relationship Between Science and the Humanities, to be held at the university. The four‐day session is tentatively scheduled for March 1976.Some fifteen years ago, C.P. Snow defined the 'two cultures' of the sciences and the humanities in his Rede lectures and began a discussion of the relative importance of scientific and humanistic ways of knowing in which seemingly little headway has been made since. The sponsors of the conference wish to pursue an inquiry into the possibility that the sciences and the humanities, as ways of knowing that are fundamental to valid enterprises, have something in common even as they move in different (but mutually intelligible) directions.

Cultural Differences in the ESOL Classroom

For ESOL teachers, understanding cultural differences is just as important as knowing appropriate techniques or acquiring adequate teaching materials. Not only is understanding required, but a commitment to promote positive activities in and out of the classroom to ease cultural conflict is an absolute must. Teachers have many avenues open for studying about cultural differences. Some are simple, such as basic readings, asking information about specific cultures from informants, and checking preconceived ideas about given cultures with natives. Other techniques, such as, keen observation, require more profound and systematic study. In the actual ESOL classroom, situations may be created where both Anglo-American and the native cultural patterns may be practiced in open relaxed atmospheres. In these kinds of responsive environments, both sets of values are understood and accepted more readily than in the traditional rigid classroom of yesteryear. To be able to maintain this type of classroom, teachers must know cultural differences quite well. An ESOL teacher's main responsibility is making friends for this country by teaching English and the way of life the language represents in humanistic ways.