This article examines the effects of intergenerational diversity on pedagogical practice in nursing education. While generational cohorts are not entirely homogenous, certain generational features do ...emerge. These features may require alternative approaches in educational design in order to maximize learning for millennial students.
Action research is employed with undergraduate millennial nursing students (n=161) who are co-researchers in that they are asked for changes in current simulation environments which will improve their learning in the areas of knowledge acquisition, skill development, critical thinking, and communication. These changes are put into place and a re-evaluation of the effectiveness of simulation progresses through three action cycles.
Millennials, due to a tendency for risk aversion, may gravitate towards more supportive learning environments which allow for free access to educators. This tendency is mitigated by the educator modeling expected behaviors, followed by student opportunity to repeat the behavior. Millennials tend to prefer to work in teams, see tangible improvement, and employ strategies to improve inter-professional communication.
This research highlights the need for nurse educators working in simulation to engage in critical discourse regarding the adequacy and effectiveness of current pedagogy informing simulation design. Pedagogical approaches which maximize repetition, modeling, immersive feedback, and effective communication tend to be favored by millennial students.
•Action research is used to give voice to millennial students.•The process involves students in a manner which improves pedagogical underpinnings.•Millennials are the largest generation to enter the tertiary setting.•Millennials are the most ethnically diverse, technologically focused, entitled generation to appear in 100 years.•Simulation as a teaching/learning platform is well suited to millennial students.
Background.
Models provide a structure for organizing knowledge and facilitating learning and are upheld by occupational therapy as epitomizing the cornerstones of its practice.
Purpose.
This article ...briefly examines the scientific history of occupation-based model development in the 1950s before addressing the process of conceptual model making in occupational therapy. Using the theory of semiosis, it explains and takes a critical perspective on conceptual model building in occupational therapy.
Key Issues.
Since the surge of development in the mid-1970s, models have grown and undergone some revision. However, while the profession has often contested the definitions of its core terms, it has not challenged the accepted models and diagrams that present the constituents of practice.
Implications.
Examining the processes of conceptual model development from a critical, semiotic point of view foregrounds models in the historico-theoretical literature and brings into scrutiny a model’s relevancy in current practice.
Background: Occupation-based models are generic explanations of occupational engagement. Their associated diagrams are conceptual tools that represent the key concepts and their interrelationships, ...which have withstood substantial shifts in the profession's knowledge base and scope over the last 30-40 years.
Aims: We aim to bring into question the sustainability of the diagrams used to represent models.
Methods: Intellectual history and semiotic analysis are combined as tools for examining the history of selected occupation-based models and the convention of representing them diagrammatically. Our critique employs a hermeneutically inspired semiotic technique to scrutinise the diagrams as stand-alone symbolic objects.
Results: We argue that the rigid categorisation and oversimplified structure of diagrams keeps the profession pinned to dated perspectives based in positivism and dualism, bypassing the real, lived experiences of people. Our critique highlights the ontological absences from diagrammatic representations of occupation-based models.
Conclusions: The continued practice of depicting models with diagrams needs to change, to create space to integrate other theory and perspectives, such as a more fundamentally human, ontological perspective.
Significance: An ontological perspective is important for practice to advance past the dualistic or pluralistic stance the profession has held for decade, to understand how people experience their world rather than how the profession sees a person's world.
While a range of literature has explored the meaning of occupation, the lived experience of occupation has been relatively neglected. In this hermeneutic phenomenological study 12 New Zealand adults ...who had experienced a disruption to their occupations were interviewed, on the assumption that disruption reveals things that are usually overlooked. The data were analysed by identifying key themes and engaging in a hermeneutic process informed by the philosophies of Heidegger and Gadamer. The findings suggest that the meaning of occupation is complex and tends to remain hidden. Three facets of meaning that work in unison, each interconnected with the other, emerged from analysis; the Call, Being-with and Possibilities. The findings of this study are considered in relation to selected literature, to build on current understandings of the meaning of the occupation. While the study is acknowledged to have limitations in terms of sampling, the findings do have implications for occupational science which include building on knowledge of the meaning of occupation and considering occupation from a context wider than that of the individual.
The notion of choice, especially of informed choice, is a central tenet of maternity services in most western countries; it also underpins debate about rising rates of intervention that are now a ...feature of childbirth in many of these countries. Our study investigated the shaping of understanding and practice in relation to these rising rates of intervention in childbirth in the New Zealand context. Critical hermeneutics was used to analyse the data from interviews with nine midwives and obstetricians, and six focus groups with 33 women. This article reports on the notion of choice, which featured prominently in all the interviews. It became clear that women’s choices were strongly influenced and determined by social change, by the gendering of women, and by values such as control, predictability, convenience, the ‘quick fix’ and the normalization of surgery. We argue that the prevailing notion of ‘informed’ choice obscures the structural and social influences on ‘choice’.
Hermeneutic phenomenology is a little used approach in sport settings yet is widely advocated in other disciplines (e.g. health research). This article contributes to the theoretical understanding ...and practical application of hermeneutic phenomenology in sport research. It considers and explores the lived experience of skiing through a phenomenological approach and in so doing exposes a deeper understanding into the meaning skiing may hold in the lifeworlds of those who ski. Such research highlights the growing use of interpretive paradigms to elucidate lived experience in sport research, contrasting measurement of experience with seeking to understand the experiences themselves. We assert that hermeneutic phenomenology has much to offer sport research where an understanding of how one's subjective encounter can reveal much about the shared knowings, meanings and experiences of participation in sport in our society.
This article reports the findings of an analysis of historical and contemporary literature which explored how the meaning of occupation has changed over time. A hermeneutic approach, based on the ...work of Gadamer, focuses on changes of meaning. The core idea of reviewing literature published over a very wide and ancient span of time was to bring the notion of occupation to the fore and shed light on how meanings of occupation are culturally embedded. This article focuses on Western sociology, history, philosophy and leisure texts that ranged from Ancient Greek and Roman times to the Industrial Revolution. The exploration showed that while the word 'occupation' did not exist until the 12
th
century, there were rich descriptions of what occupational scientists now understand as occupation. While the meaning of occupation per se may have been hidden during these early times, there were many influences that contributed to both the understanding and experience of occupation. Highlighting how historical factors have contributed to culturally embedded meanings provides occupational scientists with insights into the way what is called 'occupation' is shaped, which in turn has the potential to influence current and future scholarship.
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