How do I evolve, maintain and communicate a receptive responsive practice as an inclusional educator in an international context?

Je Kan Adler-Collins, Fukuoka University, Japan.

This thesis is a story focused on my emerging forms of knowing and knowledge-creation as a practitioner-researcher in nurse education. It seeks to contribute to the development of a new epistemology for a new scholarship of educational enquiry for healing and enquiring nurses. Central to this thesis is the emerging understanding of my Eurocentric self, its inappropriate applications and values in an eastern academy, itself colonised by differing and often conflicting western paradigms.

This thesis is grounded in the workplace context of seeking to transform the curriculum, pedagogy and assessment of nurse education in a new Faculty of Nursing at Fukuoka University in Japan.

In the telling of my story three distinct educative processes are at work;

The first being the educative process which focuses on implementing an officially approved foreign body of knowledge with its applied Eurocentric educative theories. These methodological elements consisted of living action research, heuristic enquiry, content based learning objectives, and testable learning outcomes. Included in the above is the development of an educational management audit trail for evaluation and assessment of curriculum design, learning and teaching strategies.

The second is the educative process of critical self enquiry into my own life long learning as I identify what it means to become critical in an inclusional sense of being. It includes how my Eurocentric thinking and teaching needed to modify itself to move from a position of being grounded in the rightness of my whiteness to that of a inclusive humanistic educator. This process raised in me ethical questions which were the cause of deep anxiety in me as my Buddhist belief of the intellect of the heart, with its values of compassion, rested uneasily with the dominant cultural context of "banking education". I explore the process I passed through, as I transform my epistemological position by being receptive and responsive to the ideas that emerged from the values base of my social context. This included the evidence and voices of my students' engagement with my curriculum and the learning and knowledge generation that emerged from the process of critically reflecting on and analysing my own writings.

The third examines the values and knowledge of healing, enquiring nurses in the process of their emergence and clarification in nursing practice. In the process of this clarification, the embodied values and knowledge will be transformed into living educational standards of judgment and practice that can be used to evaluate the validity of my knowledge claims. The methodological implications of this process of transformation will be explored in relation to the enquiry:

"How do I evolve maintain and communicate a receptive responsive practice as an inclusion educator in an international context?"