Overview

Description

COURSE DETAILS:

This course is restricted to students in the Health Education and Active Living (HEAL) Community M.Ed. cohort program.

Meeting Dates:

May 11,12	Personal and Professional Agency in Health Practice: Notions of Pedagogical Relationality
June 15, 16	Motions of Attunement: Postures, Positions, Gestures, Expressions and Complexions
June 29, 30	Mimicry, Synchrony, Rhythmicity, and Social Tuning
July 6, 7	Praxis: Responsiveness in Health Education, Health Promotion and Health Care
July 20, 21	Comprehensive Examination: Individual and Group presentations

Times:
Location:
Course Overview:
The focus of this course will be on theoretical and practical matters of pedagogical relationality in health education, health promotion and health care. This focus on pedagogical relationality is not so much a new focus as it is a further exploration of a theme we established in the first course and one that has unfolded in subsequent courses in paying attention to particular program developments, instructional interests, identity explorations, cultural sensitivities, and throughout your continuing personal and professional health commitments. It is about positioning your work, first of all, in relation to the agency-structure dialectic that has figured in the theoretical and practical ideas developed throughout the sequence of HEAL courses and, subsequently, through in-depth consideration of communicational competencies, interpersonal behavioral dynamics, interactive practices, and the contextual conditions supportive of population health and social and cultural wellness.

In our first course in the Fall of 2016 we considered the “social determinants of health” and found ourselves somewhat overwhelmed by the enormity of the health education, health care and health promotion challenges facing us. At the same time, we also considered what is possible for one person to do that can make a positive difference in the lives of others. Thinking locally and starting with one’s own sense of ‘agency’ seems a positively constructive approach. This approach was elaborated in subsequent courses with Robin Brayne, Kathryn Alexander, Celeste Snowber and Vicki Kelly where you considered curriculum possibilities, instructional frameworks, narrative, poetic and arts-based inquiry methods, and indigenous ways of knowing that can serve to link a personal sense of agency with a more public address of social and institutional structures that both determine as well as afford health and wellness for all. Our course this summer will drill down into this agency-structure dialectic, especially on the agency side, so that we can better see the possibilities for ourselves of making a difference that matters in the lives of those with whom we live, whom we teach, coach, care for, and for who we are otherwise responsible.

A specific intent of the summer course is to address the qualities of attunement that figure in, and configure, notions of trust, care, empathy, sympathy, and compassion for others. We shall explore through our readings, as well as in active and interactive ways of engaging with one another, the postural, positional, gestural and expressive means of creating these affectively-charged, pedagogical relations. It will be up to you to apply, as you see fit, insights you gain from our course explorations to your own, contextually-focused health education, health promotion and health care inquiries. You will also be encouraged to look back on the insights gained in previous courses, especially via the various writings and assignments undertaken in each of the courses, to address the axiomatic question we continue to circle directly or indirectly throughout this entire HEAL MEd: "What can I do as a health carer, health educator and health promoter that will make a difference in the lives of others?" This question now has some pedagogical urgency to it as we approach the conclusion of this “community-based” masters degree and come to appreciate that “community” consciousness has to be more than just the stuff of catchy institutional slogans.

Our over-arching course focus on pedagogical relationality also serves as a common place for understanding one another amidst the somewhat disparate realms of health education, health promotion and health care that are represented in our cohort membership. Beyond the different clienteles we serve (patients, personal clients, children and youth, university students), our different levels of professional engagement with others (from individual and one-on-one health education and health care to leadership and administration within institutionally-defined health care, health promotion and policy-making settings), our different modes and manners of interacting with others (whether teaching in schools, instructing tertiary students, coaching individuals and teams, to administering to, and caring for, the physical, cognitive and emotional needs of others), and differences in our institutional work settings (whether working in hospitals, community care settings, homes, recreation centers, schools, universities, and so on), we come together in our common interest in health as the key indicator of positive self management and self-awareness and of the quality of our relations with others.

We will continue to draw upon allied notions of Well-Being, Vitality, and Fitness. We will keep in mind the distinctions between Pathogenic and Allopathic notions of health, on the one hand, and Salutogenic and Holistic notions of health, on the other hand. We will be reminded, in this way, to renew our individual commitments to active and healthy living while continuing to discover, within our otherwise separate personal and professional realms of health-oriented practice, our commonly-held senses of what it means to educate, promote and care for our own health and for the health of others. Our focus on pedagogical relationality will thus be, not simply a conceptual and theoretical one, but also be a challenge for us to explore further the experiential dynamics of health-promoting interactions with one another that shed light on the varied practices of health education, promotion and care that collectively we represent.

Course Concepts
Let us begin with a common, practical understanding of what we mean by the term pedagogical relationality. We can get at the meaning of this term through a shorter word – Flow – that a number of you have picked up on in your inquiries.

Flow is variously a psychological state and an energy-related word that suggests some special experiential quality of the practices, activities and interactions we pursue. Unfortunately, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose work we have discussed, psychologized flow far too much and struggled with his own interpretation of flow as an experience which he did not acknowledge as, first and foremost, being intersubjectively and intercorporeally relational. Simply put, he failed to acknowledge that flow is shorthand for “relational flow,” and that such “relational flow” is not so much a psychological state as it is an experience we can feel deeply in a very embodied way. Relational flow expresses vital affiliations and felt affinities of interacting with others, whether those others are like ourselves, of quite a different kind, or even of an environmentally elemental and nature-based kind. In other words, we can experience flow with other people, pets and various critters, and with the elements of nature. Our interactions with one another ring true by the very admission of their ebbs and flows, and even by their breaks and stagnations, and by the obstacles to flow, and by awareness of the surfaces of fixity and resistance without which any possibility of relational flow could not be discerned.

Interactivity is another useful word for getting at the lived meaning of pedagogical relationality. Let’s hyphenate the word as “inter-activity” and thereby understand it as referring to the movement in-between the assumed identities of self and other, between our presumably separate positions and stances, between here-and-now and there-and-then events, between actor and audience, subject and world, teacher and student, parent and child, therapist and client, coach and athlete, and even between the seemingly inevitable “us and them.” Focusing on the very motions of “inter-activity” enables us to begin to appreciate that we are not separate entities after all and that we co-constitute one another, cooperatively and often competitively, through our communicative capacities, coexisting capabilities, and contributory competencies. We come to a realization that, inter-actively speaking (or “intra-actively” as Karen Barad called it, to indicate the always intertwined nature of engaging with one another) that “relations spawn objects, beings and acts, not vice versa” (as the philosopher Michel Serres put it). We can come to see pedagogy as being about the “agogic” part (as in holding onto the moment of meaningful engagement) rather than the “paideia” part (which assumes it is all about leading kids, or adults, or other critters for that matter, by the hand). Pedagogical relationality is about the meaningful moments of connection with one another where our interactions result in something larger than we could realize just by ourselves and if left to our own devices.

Another very useful word that is gaining traction in health care circles, in different branches of psychology, and to a limited extent in the educational literature, is that of Attunement. This word refers to the bodily, energetic, resonant connections we have with others. It contains an auditory, musical connotation that links to a sense of harmony and concordance with the interests and needs of others (as in being “in tune” with others, which is much like being “in sync.”) We will refer initially to the work of Daniel Stern, a child psychologist and psychoanalyst, who has done much to describe the kinetic, kinaesthetic, affective and energetic features of “attunement” between mothers and infants and, by implication, the attunement that can be established more generally with others. Our attention to these dynamics of attunement will prompt us to consider the broader pedagogical relations that comprise the diversity of HEAL inquiries.

The study of attunement has quite a celebrated pedigree. The phenomenological philosopher, Martin Heidegger, wrote of moods that express fundamental ways of being-in-the-world with others (for which he coined the German noun “befindlichkeit”). Heidegger referred to particular mooded relations of boredom, anxiety and joy that color our actions in the world and hence our interactions with others, even to the extent of framing what we think and say about them. These distinguishable moods (in German, “stimmung”) affect us to the core and infuse the situations in which we find ourselves. They are so pervasive that we can enter a particular place in which we immediately pick up a certain emotionally-laden “vibe.” Attunement is thus, on this Heideggerian account, primarily about dispositions, affectivities, and situated understandings, and only secondarily about personal feelings and individual emotions. Such an account follows critically upon Edmund Husserl’s studies of the intentionalities of consciousness (including the work of Husserl’s student, Edith Stein, on empathy). It has also heavily influenced subsequent phenomenological scholarship on a vast array of moods, modes and manners of being with other human and non-human animals. We will not delve too deeply into these literatures, except where they may inform certain of our own pedagogically-relational practices of attunement.

Our practices of pedagogical relationality, whatever our respective workplaces, educational sites or practical settings, carry an ethical responsiveness that can be felt, sensed and intuited in the daily events of living and working with others. We can broach this ethical responsiveness, not necessarily through recourse to professional codes of ethics, hippocratic oaths, policy statements or legal agreements (although none of this should be discounted) but through the bodily-felt basis of moral reasoning. Essentially we understand ethical relations with one another as those that are trusting, caring, empathic, sympathetic, and compassionate. Treatment of such relational qualities is increasingly evident in the literature on health care where we can find relevant and exemplary analyses of relations to others that serve as practical guidelines for the pedagogical relationalities of health education, health promotion and health care.

The course concepts I have indicated above are intended to help you develop further your HEAL inquiries by providing you with signposts toward personally, professionally and scholarly meaningful work. We are, in fact, aiming at sustained and sustaining praxes of health education, health promotion and health care that are theoretically justified, that are practically speaking about very demonstrable ways of interacting with others, and that are ultimately aligned with lived and felt ethical imperatives. The questions with which you started the HEAL MEd can thus be deepened, strengthened and connected even more substantially in our last course together to your ongoing practices of health education and active living.

Course Conduct
The best conduct of a course, particularly in terms of the time spent together in class, is where (borrowing Marshall McLuhan’s phrase) “the medium is the message.” The nature of our engagement with the course readings, and with one another, needs to be consistent with the flowing, interactive, attuned and ethical potentials we are addressing under this umbrella term of pedagogical relationality. Certainly, in an MEd program in “Health Education AND Active Living,” we need to keep in mind AND body the kind of learning that is fully consistent with active living and with the healthy interactivity which we espouse. The very motions of “active living” create a shift from heady knowledge transmission and apprehension (which a classroom essentially affords) to hands-on knowledge formation and comprehension. Class “inter-activities” are not so much ‘breaks’ in thinking as they are occasions to be reminded of what it means to think corporeally, with the senses, and in such a way that sensitivity, sensibility and sense-making are founded on the interactions of actual bodies of health knowledge. The medium is not only the message, but the medium can also be, literally and somatically, the “massage’” (although I might have stretched McLuhan’s message a little farther than he intended, but not so far as we can now appreciate after previous very hands-on, experiential HEAL courses).

My intention for the summer fieldwork course is not to overburden you with too many new concepts, but to provide theoretical and especially practical ways of remembering what has been covered so that we can continue to project our practices forward. To be sure, there will be challenging readings and class discussions, but they are for the purposes of discerning more fully the very nature of pedagogical relationality with which we are left when we uncover all the personal, professional and scholarly ways we talk about responsivity to, and responsibility for, others. This “flesh” of pedagogical relationality (with a nod to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s last writings on “the flesh of the world” and to the work of Michel Henry on the “flesh” of life revelation) can quite simply yet profoundly be intuited, sensed, experienced in our interactions with others, oftentimes when we are not even engaged in our professional practices, but when we are interactively immersed, feeling flow, and attuning to others, in our own self-sustaining life practices that can ultimately inform what we do daily for a living.

Our readings will be, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold points out, the means of drawing insights, “aha moments” if you will, that graph our various ways of being in the world. Much more than a representation of the world, or even an interpretation of actions in the world, our readings become a means of “wayfaring.” We can use them to follow the “lines of flow,” the traces of becoming knowledgeable and other-wise, that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have theorized as the very necessity of living in a world in flux where it is difficult to say anything with any ultimate certainty. The designation of our summer course as “Fieldwork” is thus an apt one since it recognizes the importance of drawing upon your experiences “from the field,” which is to say, from your work, your daily lives, and from the myriad interactions you have with others. Such a course designation also means that “wayfaring” need not be confined to the classroom, but that it actually occur “in the field” or, rather, within the fields of your respective professional and personal HEAL practices.

Practically speaking, some of our class time will be spent in “fieldwork exercises.” Be prepared for a possible field trip for one of the Saturday sessions, as well as a visit to a local facility, that will serve as points of reference for considering the kinetic, kinesthetic, affective dynamics of attunement with others and as a prompt for considering the pedagogical relationalities of our own professional practices.

Our fieldwork course of the summer will lead into the “comprehensive examination” comprised of the two pieces of learning evidence, namely, the written inquiry piece and the oral presentational component.

Comprehensive Examination  
It will be comprised of:  

1. an inquiry piece that draws from the work done throughout the program and that is further informed by the work we do in the summer;  
2. a supplementary piece that will constitute a presentation to the group (singly or in association with others) and that will use a medium appropriate to the inquiry topic.  

The written inquiry piece will have as the academic standard that of a publishable piece.  We will exercise some discretion in terms of length, format, media, etc. in keeping with your individual academic aspirations and the professional audiences you hope to address.  

The supplementary piece will have as its over-riding measure, the conjunction of "Heath Education AND Active Living," which is to say, this presentation should have its message at least partly in its medium. By now you will be familiar with traditional academic writing, along with arts-based and humanities-based methodologies, and multi-modal research should not cause any great consternation. If we are to conclude our studies in health education AND active living, then we can surely present something of those conclusions in active, enactive, expressive registers of health consciousness.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Our educational goals for this course are to:

1. Develop individually relevant, professional applications of research findings drawn from literatures on relational flow, attunement, synchrony, rhythmicity, and felt ethical responsiveness in relation to heath education, health care and health promotion.
2. Articulate a relational pedagogy of health education, health promotion or health care in terms appropriate to your workplace.
3. Specify the practical and practiced features of relational pedagogy in reference to your health education and active living (HEAL) topic of in-depth inquiry.

Grading

Materials

RECOMMENDED READING: