Communication focus

Yesterday my research path led me to facilitating a focus group with seven amazing final year students. It felt like we were together-apart, creating a transformative space for the sharing of human dis/connectiveness (Barad 2007). It was an emotional meeting place for a conversation sparked by individual drawings. The images that each student created with pastels illustrated some of the dark moments that they recall from their fourth year learning in Obstetrics, as well as memories from remarkable role models who displayed admirable characteristics during difficult times.

As ideas and experiences became entangled in our conversations, it became evident that relationships matter a great deal in student learning, yet often neglected. The drawings and the discussions demonstrated some of the invisible tensions emerging through students’ learning, such as the hierarchical relations in the medical system, facility rules that undermine care, the closing down of communication following death and the associations with personal positions. Sometimes the best learning was grasped when a student observed the action from a distance.

The focus group was an example of material-discursive intra-activity (Barad 2007). The objects represented on the papers gave force and intensity to our discussions highlighting the entanglements of discourse and matter. For instance curtains drawn boldly across the page showed how a student was excluded from a bereavement experience. She observed the signs without any explanations. Wheels of movable equipment were visible rather than human suffering.

Looking at drawings that reflect the medical curriculum from a student’s perspective offers key insights into their being and becoming doctors. Their individual and collective learning experiences open up issues of social justice related to the curriculum. Furthermore, the critical gazes that students develop in their educational journey can contribute to meaningful changes particularly in terms of the integration of epistemological and ontological elements.  Drawing on hook’s Pedagogy of Hope, Carolisson et al (2011:158) assert that a crucial element for building critical citizens who can promote change in communities is to promote interpersonal relationships through “conversations that facilitate reflexivity, dialogue and criticality”.

The image above was drawn using the Penultimate app on my iPad.

Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Carolisson, R., Bozalek, V., Nicholls, L., Liebowitz, B., Rohlender, P. & Swartz, L. 2011. bell hooks and the enactment of emotion in teaching and learning across boundaries: A pedagogy of hope? SAJHE 25:1:157–167.