Each day over the next week I'll post up an abstract for a paper being presented by a member of the Critical Physiotherapy Network at the In Sickness and In Health conference in Mallorca in June 2015. (You can find more information on the conference here.) Suffrage suspended? Counter-narratives of womens’ quest for professional legitimacy David Nicholls A great deal has been written about the role the suffrage movement played in the development of nursing and midwifery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of this research points to roles played by middle- and upper-class women in professionalizing socially validated notions of caring, and the importance of this … [Read more...] about Suffrage suspended? Counter-narratives of womens’ quest for professional legitimacy
Critical perspective on client-centred practice
A few weeks ago, I posted up a blog from Hybrid Pedagogy that shed some light on what it means to be critical. With perfect timing, Karen Whalley Hammell (author of Perspectives on Disability and Rehabilitation and honorary under cover member of the Critical Physiotherapy Network), has published a new paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy (access the abstract here) Although the paper is directed at an occupational therapy readership, there's a lot in the paper for physiotherapists to reflect on. Karen is very keen to share thoughts and ideas about the paper (you can find her contact details in the list of CPN members). … [Read more...] about Critical perspective on client-centred practice
Uncertainty, luxury and creativity – a brief compendium
Last week I posted a compendium of some of the things I had found over the Christmas holiday that I thought might be interesting to people interested in all things critical. Here is another post pulling together some interesting loose strings and ephemera from the last 3 or 4 weeks. Uncertainty is a major theme for me in the pursuit of a more critically-informed physiotherapy. It seems to me that the ability to embrace uncertainty will be a vitally important capability for future practice - a point made in this post from the ever reliable and interesting Steve Wheeler. David Warlick once said 'for the first time we are preparing young people for a future we cannot clearly describe.' … [Read more...] about Uncertainty, luxury and creativity – a brief compendium
Being critical
In yesterday's post I mentioned the Hybrid Pedagogy site and the work they had done to define what it means to be critical in education. As a critical physiotherapy network, it's probably important that we do the same thing and articulate how we think we are critical, because there are so many different meanings for the word, it could easily be misleading. Critical can mean: Intensive care and the physiotherapy that is given to people in life-threatening situations Critically and systematically analysing the quality and content of research articles These are almost certainly the approaches to criticality most familiar to physiotherapists today. The first is a very specialised field of … [Read more...] about Being critical
Artisan practitioners
It's been a very busy few weeks. AUT students have finished all their exams and we're nearly done with all the marking and exam board reporting. I step down from my role as Head of Department at the end of the year, so there is a lot of tidying up to do. I've also just put the finishing touches on a book chapter that I've written for Franziska Trede and Celina McEwan's upcoming book Educating the deliberate professional: Preparing practitioners for emerging futures, which will be published by Springer and will hopefully go to print early next year. The book is going to ask some important questions about the past, present and future of professional practice, particularly about the need … [Read more...] about Artisan practitioners