Focused Discussions
University of Valencia
Featured Using Narratives for Teaching Qualitative Research: A Critical Autoethnography of Teaching Practice View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Julie Dell-Jones
When inviting graduate students in Education Studies to expand any preconceived boundaries of what counts as research, I turn to novels that share the research process, particularly qualitative research, either via fiction or autoethnographic narratives. As facilitator of a multi-session research methodology workshop in Morocco, I use The Ethnographic I (Ellis, 2004) as a pedagogical guide while sharing Spark (Leavy, 2019) as a novel entry into critical discussion. Student communications on the first day regarding prior research experience includes: “I learned what not to do!” I needed to change the negative (undergraduate) experiences from their first research forays. To see if and how this change may be encouraged with this new workshop, in a new cross-cultural context (American instructor in Morocco), I adopted a critical autoethnographic approach to examine my own teaching. I contextualize my narrative in hermeneutical ways, draw from multiple experiences over time, and make connections to theoretic and practice-based research. Similar to the student workshop using guided reflexivity via researcher reflective journals, I approach this reflective study through a systematic (and cyclical) meaning-making process. The critical autoethnographic practice has the potential to initiate conversations about care, collaboration, and community (academic community, classroom community, critical/social community). The agenda to encourage more accessible and more flexible views of qualitative research is an optimistic endeavor; however, as new(er) and emerging methodologies expand to more contexts, the next generation of researchers may be better able to enact change through research frameworks that hold reflexivity, empowerment, and self/Other complexities at its core.
Narrative Medicine in Medical Education: Making Sense of Illness Narratives in Intercultural and Plurilingual Contexts View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Sakinah A. Ismael
Around the globe, experiences of health and illness are at the forefront today more than ever. Medicine has exponentially evolved in terms of biomedicine and artificial intelligence; yet, the other vital component is the humane side of truly ‘seeing’ a patient needs to be further developed. Narrative medicine practices in a university context train medical students in how to understand patient narratives through close readings in the arts and humanities. An interpretive theoretical framework could be an essential tool in research and education to understand patient narratives more fully. The analysis of patient narratives as seen through the lens of the humanities and close reading allows interpretive methods to further parse narratives for a deeper understanding of culture, language, context, and a vast array of sociological perspectives. Illness narratives in today’s world of migrating populations give rise to contexts of intercultural exchanges within plurilingual environments. This focused discussion will revolve around medical education, narrative medicine, interpretivism, and Cope and Kalantzis’s (2020) texts, Making Sense, and Adding Sense as a grammar for multimodal meaning. These texts give a structure of how to think about the meaning of understanding in many fields, including understanding patient narratives from all aspects to develop a vertical and intense understanding of these narratives in context and in terms of the broader human experience. This creates a vertical and intense understanding of illness narratives and the human experience in any intercultural or plurilingual context. This is vital in educating future medical practitioners.
