Interprofessional Practice

Editor's Notes

• #9: Going through our own process of training was similarly an intense and emotional experience for all of the participants, leaving many feeling vulnerable and exposed. Team members came out of that workshop with very different feelings, varying between feeling traumatised, enlightened, frustrated and invigorated. Not all agreed about the workshop, or about its resolution, as one team member commented in an interview in the third year of the project:   You know there were different perceptions of how the training was seen … and I think it was important that we did speak face-to-face, and that we did write things about it, but I noticed that there is quite a silence about it, that we haven’t really gone back to any depth, and I’m wondering why and whether we will ….   This comment demonstrates that although the team have come a long way in learning to deal with uncertainty and discomfort, it has not reached a point of full resolution of dealing with the difficulties associated with talking about difference and diversity. One possibility for the difficulties associated with the training, is that the safe space that the team had created for its members did not “protect” them from interacting on matters of diversity, with individuals outside of that space.   Treacher (2001), a mixed race teacher who addresses issues of ethnicity in the classroom, writes that to be on ‘uncertain and shaky ground’ when talking about matters of race and ethnicity is ‘the only place to be’ (pg.325). These intensely and communal experiences assisted us to strengthen our sense of solidarity and to consolidate the team as a collaborative community of enquiry. It allowed us to focus our combined energies on making the final year of the course a more successful one. This was not unlike the experiences of many of the student groups, where despite finding the learning process challenging, they developed a sense of common purpose. Thus the team members were mirroring some of the processes that we were expecting the students to undergo, and were trying to “practice what we preached” to the students.   Team members expected to gain intellectually from planning the course collaboratively and across disciplines, but not to the extent that they did gain. In a series of interviews conducted with team members towards the end of the second year of the project, one team member reported, “I envisaged the thing as more teaching , I didn’t realise we would think so much”. Working together and across disciplines was also difficult, as another team member indicated that she experienced “stepping out of my comfort zone”. Another team member, who is a very experienced lecturer and researcher, and a head of department, said in an interview, “ I don’t feel quite so out of my depth so often … which is a good thing …it is nice because I’m learning”.   The beneficial impact of participating in the project was described by team members variously as: having our knowledge bases and sources of expertise broadened; having our understanding of theoretical as well as interpersonal issues deepened; and finally, team members experienced having their professional identities as teachers and researchers validated. It is fair to say that the team members, like the students, gained from learning through conditions of uncertainty. Team members had become aware that the experience of learning across boundaries was an intensely emotional one for students, but had not realised how emotional learning in an uncertain terrain would be for us too. Trowler (2008:110) refers to Dirkx on the emotional nature of learning: “ The process of meaning making ... is essentially imaginative and extrarational, rather than merely reflective and rational.”
• #11: For students to learn within a pedagogy of discomfort, it is also true that the lecturers themselves have to be prepared to learn. The ‘Community, Self and Identity’ project became a valuable personal and educational experience for the team involved in directing it, even more so than initially anticipated. The initial form of learning was amongst the team members, who each drew from varying disciplines and life and work experiences, which were shared with other members of the team. The research approach adopted was that of participatory action research, which emphasises research as a practical and collaborative social process, which is emancipatory, critical, reflexive, and which aims to transform both theory and practice . The project was set up as a response to the problem described by the team as that of isolated learning and each cycle of the action was documented for further reflection and improvement.
• #17: PLA techniques are group based, open ended, flexible visual methods which are used in the learning process Examples of such techniques are visioning, mapping, matrix ranking, problem and objective trees, etc