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

Reverend Je Kan Adler-Collins, Bath University, Bath, United Kingdom

Draft 26 October 2006

Abstract

This thesis is a story focused on emerging forms of knowing and knowledge-creation of a practitioner-researcher in nurse education in Japan, and his students. It contributes to the development of a new epistemology for scholarship in educational enquiry that transcends cultural boundaries, and is designed for critically thinking nurses who use healing as a primary health care tool in daily practice. Healing in this thesis is taken to mean methods of maintaining better health by consideration of spiritual, mental, emotional, physical and cultural needs of the individual and his or her group. Education through enquiry informs practice, and critical reflection of practice creates knowledge generation and new ways of maintaining health.

Central to this thesis is the examination of emerging understandings, which include analysis of my Eurocentric self, my appropriate and inappropriate applications and values in an eastern academy, itself colonised by differing and often conflicting western paradigms. This thesis is grounded in a workplace context where I introduced a new healing curriculum that is transforming the pedagogy and assessment of nurse education in a new faculty of nursing in Japan.

In the telling of my story three distinct educative processes are at work, the first being the process that focuses on implementing in Japan an officially approved foreign body of knowledge embedded with Eurocentric educational theories. These consisted of living action research, heuristic enquiry, content based learning objectives, and testable learning outcomes. Included in the latter is the development of an educational management audit trail for evaluation and assessment of design, learning and teaching strategies in a healing curriculum.

The second educative process is one of critical self enquiry into my lifelong learning as I identify what it means to become critical in an inclusional sense of being. This includes how my Eurocentric thinking and teaching needed to be modified to move from a position of being grounded in the rightness of my whiteness to that of being an inclusive humanistic educator. This process raised in me ethical questions that caused me deep anxiety and conflict since my Buddhist belief in the intellect of the heart, with its value of compassion, rested uneasily with dominant cultural context of Japanese “banking education” (or students being seen as vessels to be filled with knowledge). I explore the development I passed through as I transformed my epistemological position from an exclusional educator to an inclusional one who was more receptive and responsive to the ideas that emerged from the values of others in my social context.

The third process explained in this thesis is how I as a researcher used action research and heuristic enquiry to collect and analyse data in my classroom where students were introduced to the healing curriculum with its new educational methodologies. Three data collection tools were utilized: student portfolios, reflective journals and internet based tests that examined student classroom learning and comprehension. Major findings were that: Japanese students, who had been grounded in a banking educational paradigm, when given space, time and opportunity, could respond creatively and critically to new teaching methodologies; student reflective journals showed high levels of thoughtful and insightful analysis of curriculum; and my realization that the underpinning philosophical values of the healing curriculum were transferable to actual practice.

This thesis concludes with recommendations that are two-fold in nature: the first is the ways in which I as a nursing educator can use the knowledge gained from my research for future teaching practice; and secondly, ways in which nursing education in Japan can improve the preparation of nurse teachers as professional educators and therefore assist students of nursing to be more critical and more empowered consumers of education.