We're coming to the end of a long academic year in New Zealand, so that means lots of examination and assessment of nervous students. This time last year I took over a postgraduate paper called Health Professional Practice with a view to 'reshaping' it. For years it had been delivered in a standard fashion: block study, lots of lectures and tutorials - mostly directed at students rather than engaging them, boring assessments. I decided to shake things up a bit. The paper needed to be much more about what made the students 'tick' as health professionals; their experiences, ideas and issues. But it also needed to get them to critically examine their professions in ways they hadn't … [Read more...] about Innovation
A critical thinking sandpit exercise
It's hard sometimes to 'see' your own profession critically. Where do you start? What do you look for? How do you know that you've 'found' it? But if you're going to critically analyse your practice, having the ability to see what's normally in plain sight is a good skill to learn. There's an activity I do with PG students that I use to help them identify some of the things that underpin physiotherapy practice, so I thought I'd share it with you here and see if it resonates with you. (If you click to open this blogpost and scroll to the bottom, there's a comments box you can use if you have any particular thoughts you'd like to share). Step 1 - go into an image search engine, … [Read more...] about A critical thinking sandpit exercise
Creativity in physiotherapy
Anyone who lives with, knows, or has trained as an artist will be painfully aware of how lacking in creativity a lot of physiotherapy education and practice is. My brother is a photographer and a teacher, and I am frequently reminded of how differently he responds to things. Where he often thinks like an artist, I often default to the kinds of design-thinking that Grace Jeffers talks about when she says that "Design thinking is about solving a problem, but art thinking is about feeling your way to a solution" (link). It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with the way physiotherapists are trained to think - there's certainly a lot to be said for the kinds of deductive … [Read more...] about Creativity in physiotherapy
Shitty robots
A few blogposts ago, I wrote asking why it was that things had to work (link)? Why is it physiotherapists are obsessed with things working. Well one of our Critical Physiotherapy comrades read the post and pointed me to the beautiful, poetic and entirely useless work of Simone Giertz and her Shitty Robots. And then would you believe it, but two days later Simone is being interviewed on our local radio station (listen here). Simone builds robots that don't work. Or rather they work, but don't do anything useful. They are the antithesis of all of the supposedly 'useful' (and frankly poe-faced and self-righteous) mechanical contraptions now making their way into physiotherapy … [Read more...] about Shitty robots
Why a grand vision might be bad for your practice (and your soul)
There has been a move in education for a number of years now that has focused on what Jan Meyer and Ray Land call Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge (Meyer and Land, 2006). These are ideas that students really struggle to grasp. We've all experienced it. For me it was mathematical formulae. I could never understand why it was that the maths teachers stepped through equations the way that they did. I didn't know the rules and they did an appalling job of explaining them to me. I fumbled around trying to make sense of my ignorance before giving up. But the fact that I've never forgotten this, and keep returning to it is a telling point. Meyer and Land argue that these … [Read more...] about Why a grand vision might be bad for your practice (and your soul)
Perception is everything
A recent article in the Boston Globe (Doctors debate safety of their white coats) talked about how doctors had realised that their traditional white coats were 'germ magnets,' and how they were now discarding them in favour of less formal attire. Setting aside the rather obvious question of why a dirty white lab coat would be any more rancid than a dirty shirt - a point also sidestepped in the article - the Globe went on to suggest that the good natured debate that had ensued 'touched on shifting perceptions of the physician’s role.' On the one hand, the white lab coat is a symbol of trust. There are studies that show powerful placebo effects of people wearing white lab coats (see … [Read more...] about Perception is everything