The stick

The in-between space in this doctoral research project seems to feel like a wandering in the forest with different paths to follow amidst the beauty of the vegetation. I stop, look, feel, smell, then move on with a varying pace. The route is uncertain and untracked. There is no well-trodden path to follow nor a Google map or GPS to guide me to a specific place.

Sitting down gives me a chance to reflect and digest the beauty and the movements around me but it does not lead me to my destination. Climbing a tree can offer an overview, a panoramic perspective of where I ought to be going or give clarity to potential possibilities. I need to move with intention yet I stumble as I question which way to go. Which desires do I follow? The maze of paths that connect in different ways can be compared to Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. The growth and life around me inhabiting the forest offer encounters that I am experiencing as I read the transcripts and listen to the audio-recordings of my interviews and focus groups.

As the light illuminates different parts of the forest, new insights become visible in differing ways. Through my being and becoming aware of the relevant patterns and interferences I am engaged in a diffractive approach to my research analysis. Various forces and intensities open up channels of evidence that can lead me to reach my destination, my research objectives.

As I sit in the midst of my research data, I feel a sense of entanglement, caught in the branches and the foliage that seem to be holding me back, yet affecting me in a manner that is pushing and pulling me to experiment, to find something new. McClure recommends that in post-qualitative research we need to be sensitive to the glow of the data, what “arrests our gaze and makes us pause” (2013:662). Davies suggests that in data analysis we engage with the “entanglement of intra-active encounters” (2014:2). I feel reassured as she contends that it is “ hard epistemological, ontological, and ethical work to enable the not-yet known to emerge in the spaces of the research encounter”.

What struck me this week was the significance of a stick. In an interview with a student he explained how difficult relationships play out in the medical hierarchy between midwives and medical students, where midwives appear to give preference to nursing students. This was also a strong theme in a recent student focus group. The student reflecting on his obstetrics experience said “you feel like there’s a certain judgment that comes with being a medical student that you must be a medical student so you must be like every other medical students or every other doctor I've met in my life. So we just carry the stick with us …  so everywhere we go we represent a bigger group of people”. The stick represents punishment that he relates to possible past experiences of relationship issues between nurses and doctors. The image above was drawn using Sketchbook Pro on my iPad.

Punishment seems prevalent in the maternity facilities. Kruger and Schoombee (2010) write about the various forms of punishment. There is neglect and abandonment, as well as physical and verbal abuse of women in labour. Kim and Motsei (2002) report that nurses themselves are victims of abuse/punishment by partners who feel threatened by the nurse’s professionalism and independent income generation. Beating is sometimes viewed as an acceptable form of discipline and punishment both in the home and in the workplace.

Earlier educational settings also carry “the stick” as a symbol of control and regulatory practices. Despite the South African Schools Act 84 in 1996 that bans corporal punishment and the protection offered by other legal frameworks such as our South African Constitution, it is still prevalent. Veriava’s (2014) report indicates that 15,8% of all learners experienced corporal punishment in schools in 2012. This sadly reflects societal “norms”.

In terms of obstetrics Kim and Motsei claim that “any educational intervention must move beyond the intellectual or technical level to address the deeper and more personal context of the nurses’ own experiences” (2002:1252). They assert that the starting point is to find a way for “acknowledging and exploring the nurses’ own experiences of abuse” (ibid), They recognized that a guiding principle to changing behaviours is to ‘‘first do no harm’’ and that both the medical and nursing curricula ought to be raising awareness and sensitivity to these matters in the early years of training.

Perhaps a creative approach to these problems may inform principles for changing attitudes and practices. As I seek to develop a socially just pedagogy in Obstetrics I recognize the value of drawing on the philosophy of children, an emerging academic field. Lenz Taguchi (2010) describes how stick-play amongst small boys was transformed by offering a different symbolic meaning of the stick. By giving sticks names and recognizing the sticks as part of a tree, rather than sticks as guns and weapons, new and positive relationships developed which materialized into changed attitudes and behaviours. The sticks became agents transforming shooting and shouting to curiosity and care that promoted inclusivity.

Lenz Taguchi recommends that “we want to be in a listening dialogue, where we negotiate our different understandings, and learn about the diversities and differences in meaning-making and strategies of doing things” (2010:34). Drawing on my own background in Physiotherapy, a stick can become a supporting mechanism to assist us to be respectful, caring and compassionate. By moving from a top-down approach where a person holding the stick signifies superiority, objects such as sticks can become collaborative tools when considered as intra-active resources for learning and practice.

Davies, B. 2014. Reading Anger in Early Childhood Intra-Actions: A Diffractive Analysis. Qualitative Inquiry.

Lenz Taguchi, H. 2010. Introducing an intra-active pedagogy in early childhood education: introducing an intra-active pedagogy . Routledge.

Kim, J. & Motsei, M  2002. Women enjoy punishment’’: attitudes and experiences of gender-based violence among PHC nurses in rural South Africa. Social Science and Medicine 54:1243–1254.

Kruger, L & Schoombee, C. 2010. The other side of caring: abuse in a South African maternity ward, Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology, 28:1:84-101.

McClure, M. 2013. Researching without representation? Language and materiality in post-qualitative methodology, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 26:6, 658-667.

Veriava, F. 2014. Promoting effective enforcement of the prohibition against corporal punishment in South African schools. Pretoria University Law Press.