Donna Lee Brien

Creative Practice as Research: A Creative Writing Case Study

This paper utilises a case study approach to examine practice-led research in a specific discipline of the creative arts by examining the range of research strategies utilised during the authors doctoral studies in creative writing. This personal example is then situated within a broader context through suggestions about the contribution such creative arts-based research practice can make to the development and enhancement of creativity more generally, and an exploration of why this is important.

Things you can learn from books: Exploring the therapeutic potential of eating disorder memoirs

This paper explores the potential benefits that books, and specifically memoirs, might offer mental health students, positing that first-person testimonials might make the complex experiences of a mental health challenge, in this case, eating disorders, accessible to learners. The paper presents a pedagogical approach, based on transformative learning, to assist in encouraging the development of a recovery approach in students. Transformative learning is a pedagogy that is interested in problematic practices that keep afflicting an area, such as the imbalanced focus on learning illness, rather than well-being, and in pondering and revising the educational solutions. The paper proposes that forward movement in this area will be based on considering and developing such innovative curricula, and researching its impact. By virtue of their accessibility, memoirs could offer to a large audience the benefits of universality, empathy, hope, and guidance. Teachers and learners could be making use of these books in face-to-face or online activities. This paper explores the groundwork that is needed before eating disorder memoirs can be confidently recommended as a therapeutic tool.

Exploring the educative potential of eating disorder memoirs

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential benefits that books, and specifically memoirs, may offer mental health students, positing that first person testimonials may make the complex experiences of a mental health challenge, in this case eating disorders (ED), accessible to learners. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a pedagogical approach, based on transformative learning (TL), to assist in encouraging the development of a Recovery Approach in students. TL is a pedagogy that is interested in problematic practices that keep afflicting an area such as mental health, such as the imbalanced focus on learning illness rather than wellbeing, and in pondering and revising the educational solutions. Findings – The paper proposes that forward movement in this area will be based on considering and developing such innovative curricula, and researching its impact. Originality/value – By virtue of their accessibility, memoirs could offer to a large audience the benefits of univers...

Exploring the diary as a recovery-oriented therapeutic tool

Diary writing is a centuries-old method of recording events, experiences, thoughts, and feelings that might offer potential as a tool that consumers and nurses could utilize in recovery-oriented practice. While the diary has been used within health disciplines to detail and communicate personal experiences to enable collaborative examination of progress, a diary can also provide a more complete picture of what life is like; not only within the confines of a health service environment, but also outside. In recent times, the diary appears to be experiencing a renewed interest in terms of health care. People experiencing a mental health challenge might use diary-based forms of communication to promote understanding between themselves and mental health workers, and ultimately the use of this form of narrative therapy might facilitate person-centred, recovery-based actions. The present study paper, therefore, explores multiple perspectives on the use of diaries in the therapeutic context. Suggesting that diaries have not yet been utilized to their fullest potential by and with consumers and clinicians, this discussion raises issues and offers clarity about diary forms and their uses in the health context. It also discusses the barriers to their use and how to engage consumers and clinicians in recovery-oriented work.

Higher Education in the Corporate Century: Choosing Collaborative Rather than Entrepreneurial and/or Competitive Models

At a time when many in the higher education sector are being directed to imitate corporate models of behaviour, this paper suggests that instead of responding to such dictates with aggressive resistance or passive helplessness, such directives can be reinterpreted and utilised to the advantage of all those in the higher education system. The adoption of selected modes of corporate behaviour can, moreover, not only benefit teaching and learning practices and outcomes, but can also increase the satisfaction of both students and their teachers. Importantly, the empowering strategy necessary to employ is not one that is forced, combative or underhand but is, rather, a process that utilises the kinds of strategic creative and lateral thinking that writing programmes promote.

Heroism and nursing: A thematic review of the literature

OBJECTIVES Nursing history is replete with examples of heroic individuals acting courageously to meet the needs of vulnerable patients and communities. Heroism exemplifies the pinnacle of self-actualised behaviour. It fuels the plots of countless human stories, and enthrals and inspires people. Yet, heroism may be seen as an extreme behaviour that only exceptional individuals are capable of enacting, and may thus be seen as out of reach for ordinary nurses, and something that could be risky to teach and disseminate. An alternative view is that altruistic professions such as nursing are often regarded as being heroic by nature, and that nurses therefore need to be encouraged to understand, deepen and exercise their potential through a recognition of acts of heroism in nursing - whether these can be classed as exceptional or everyday acts of nursing heroism. The purpose of this article is to provide a thematic review of the literature on heroism in nursing, in order to understand how recent research in heroism science is being, or could be, applied to the nursing discipline. Heroism science is an emerging research area that is of interest to nursing leaders, educators and all those seeking to advance the social change agenda in healthcare. REVIEW METHODS A literature review was undertaken in 2017 using CINAHL, PUBMED, Cochrane, Medline, and Google Scholar. The search was limited to papers that were peer reviewed, in English, and published in the last ten years. RESULTS Four books and 33 papers were identified. CONCLUSION Gaining a clear understanding of what constitutes a hero and heroism is essential to applying heroism to nursing and to education of students so they are inspired to act courageously.

Tainted love: Gothic imaging of nurses in popular culture

AIMS To discuss representations of nursing in popular culture using the Contemporary Gothic theory. BACKGROUND Nursing is stereotypically known as a caring profession. Caring in both the natural and professional perspectives is inextricably attached to love and love, we are told, is universal. In popular culture, however, there are numerous examples of nurses being portrayed in ways where love-its expression and its practice-has been transgressed or tainted. Exploring this dark side of nursing, even if fictitious, is significant because it illuminates social and cultural tensions. DESIGN Discussion paper. DATA SOURCES CINAHL, Scopus and Humanities International Databases were searched for terms related to nursing, love, abject and the gothic, published between 1990-2016. Four popular culture texts which ranged in genre and gothic elements were selected for analysis. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING The types of transgressive love these nurses express to patients ranges from the obsessive and the pornographic, to the monstrous. We suggest this positioning illuminates a hidden reality that nursing work is at once intimate and personal but also hidden, profane, repellent, horrifying and feared. Nursings allure for storytellers may rest in its association with the abject. How nurses find redemption, satisfaction and meaning in these locations is relevant for how we can imbue our lives and work with greater humanity. CONCLUSION The Contemporary Gothic is a useful tool in exposing and exploring ambiguous, challenging and taboo aspects of nursing in society. Such and analysis helps to explain phenomena-including nursing itself-which exists in the shadow of dominant and often stereotyped discourses.

Moving Beyond Routines in Teaching and Learning: Releasing the Educative Potential of Published Eating Disorder Memoirs

ABSTRACT Learning from the lived experience of disordered eating is vital for contemporary mental health practitioners. While mental health practitioners need to understand the psycho-biological issues that impact the person and family with an eating disorder, there is much about this complex condition that eludes and escapes a bio-medical perspective. Use of an aesthetic lens on the issue can illuminate various challenges, tensions and insights that people with disordered eating experience along the journey of their ill-health and on to their recovery, but which often remain unstated in the clinical context. Scholars within the creative arts discipline are experts in making judgements about the quality of artworks they encounter and have highly developed aesthetic knowing. Yet, the central skills and knowledges embodied in creative arts activity are not widely utilized outside that sphere. This article reports on how aesthetics can be applied to sensitize mental health practitioners to appreciate the lived experience of a mental health challenge such as an eating disorder. Such mental health practitioners play an important role in the health service, yet the widespread diffusion of the bio-medical model into mental health, once characterized for its equal emphasis on the psycho-social-cultural, has led to criticisms of an over-focus on illness identification, at the expense of accommodating the meanings of subjective and unique experiences of mental health, struggle and recovery. Using Kate Grenvilles typology of the elements of effective creative writing, we show how these elements contribute to the aesthetic power and impact of particular eating disorder memoirs.

Methodological and Other Research Strategies to Manoeuvre from Single to Multi- and Interdisciplinary Project Partnerships

This chapter explores what happens when researchers from distinctly different knowledge fields with diverse research methodologies and approaches (in this case, creative arts and nursing) work on multi- and interdisciplinary projects. Definitions of single discipline, and multi- and interdisciplinary research are provided, and exemplified by drawing upon the authors’ own recent research experiences. Working together opened up a maze of methodological choices and decisions in the research process, including approaches to data collection, interpretation, and dissemination. Two joint projects are described in order to explore the challenges, and opportunities, in working in, and manoeuvring through, this challenging but rewarding terrain.

Can diary writing facilitate recovery: an auto-ethnography analysis

Diary writing may seem a simple self-help tool, requiring only pen, paper and time. However, the unwary diarist may become entrapped in self-defeating thoughts and anxieties, and be swept out in a rip-tide of self-sabotage and self-doubt. Regimented lists of rules that focus on calories, exercise and weight may ease anxiety momentarily, but also disconnect body from self. The distancing effect that writing may have for a person who is struggling with inner anxieties is also double edged – it can exacerbate dissociation from ones own body and personal control, or it can illuminate new understandings. This presentation will draw upon an auto-ethnographic analysis to reveal that diary writing is a complex art. For the first author, the diary was both a constructive and destructive tool in the early years of a 40-year struggle with Anorexia Nervosa. Insights on this, and how diary-writing techniques assisted in reconnection with an authentic self, are discussed, showing that the diary offers an opportunity to be both life participant and observer. Findings indicate that, despite its dangers, guided diary writing can act as a lifebuoy between person and therapist.