In June and July, I presented at the Academy for Expanded Perspectives on Learning national conference in Estes Park CO.
https://www.sworps.tennessee.edu/aepl/index.html
I am including this website and encourage those of you who are educators, nurses, managers and just plain interested in the leading edges in education to go to this site. Certainly, we are pushing the limits of traditional education to transform what we do in the classroom and the clinical setting as well.
This is the body of the presentation using qigong, mindfulness and mandala drawing for teachers and clinicians. I will be producing an article for their journal in the next month and I will place links in this blog. This work is designed to support the newest in pedagogy and is intended to impact abusive behavior both by faculty, staff and students. The knowledge is critical because it is based on the research and practice we have developed over the last 20 plus years and it actually works to diminish the incidence of abuse and to provide administrations with the needed support to intervene and remove abusers within their individual settings.
If you are interested in bringing this workshop to your School of Nursing, academic program or clinical setting just contact me through this center blog and I will respond as soon as I am able.
Title: Inter-professional Mindfulness Education Techniques Utilized in A Nursing Education Program for Self-awareness and Transformation.
Forty two years ago there was a film produced by Franciscan Media called “Awareness.” This film presented a view of the origins of Buddhism, the life of Shakyamuni Buddha and the purpose of awareness as an integral approach to development of the spiritual experience and life. At that time I was 23 years old, watching that film, a doorway opened changing my life. Eventually, I became Buddhist in my personal quest, became a psychotherapist treating depression and abuse in patients, retreat director and educator. In this evolutionary process, developing skills for awareness and meditation predated the movement for mindfulness in education and healthcare we have experienced in the 90’s onward.
About twelve years ago I became a nurse practitioner and experienced first hand what is an oft quoted statement about nurses: “Nurses eat their young.” This assessment has been so documented in the education and practice of nurses that it has become the measure which must be changed if nursing as a profession is to transform itself, retain nurses who continue to practice (one third of all nurses leave the profession within three years) and create an atmosphere and pedagogy which creates a new, more viable identity for the nursing profession. Much of the education of nurses parallels the education of teachers; one of identity formation and transformation from novice into proficient professional. In identity formation the negative becomes as much a part of the process as the positive. Changing the culture of nursing from self-devouring into mutually supportive and collaborative requires self-examination and growth based on this self-consideration.
The purpose of this discovery presentation/ workshop was to share ideas and provide an experiential opportunity for developing mindfulness in the classroom utilizing, qigong, breathing exercises, meditation, journaling , art therapy techniques and critical thinking techniques and dialogic interactions. These methods have been utilized in psychotherapy and translations of them into the classroom to train therapists have been utilized. The effort to bring self-awareness to the student nurse through these same mechanisms is novel, just beginning to find a foothold in some nursing programs largely through journaling exercises but there are an array of techniques for classroom and patient use.
Participants had the opportunity to experience the discovery process utilizing some of these techniques and discuss their usefulness in the learning environment.
