Centring Human Connections in the Education of Health Professionals

Sherri Melrose, Caroline Park, Beth Perry

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771992879
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Méthodes pédagogiques

Many of today's learning environments are dominated by technology or procedure-driven approaches that leave learners feeling alone and disconnected. The authors of Centring Human Connections in the Education of Health Professionals argue that educational processes in the health disciplines should model, integrate, and celebrate human connections because it is these connections that will foster the development of competent and caring health professionals.

Centring Human Connections in the Education of Health Professionals equips educators working in clinical, classroom, and online settings with a variety of teaching strategies that facilitate essential human connections. Included is an overview of the educational theory that grounds the authors' thinking, enabling the educators who employ the strategies included in the book to assess their fit within curriculum requirements and personal teaching philosophies and understand how and why they work.

1


Celebrating Human Connections in Teaching

A human connection is the energy that exists between people when they feel seen, heard, and valued; when they can give and receive without judgment; and when they derive sustenance and strength from the relationship.

—Brené Brown (2010, p. 5)

The environments in which health professionals gain knowledge, skills, and attitudes that they need in their practice can be dominated by technology and mechanized procedure-oriented approaches. Health professionals achieve the competencies required by their discipline in clinical, classroom, and online settings. Health professional learners include pre-service students enrolled in higher education programs and in-service practitioners participating in graduate studies or continuing education activities. Students and practitioners in all health disciplines are expected to become, and remain, self-directed lifelong learners. Whether learners are registered in formal health profession programs or simply seek information on current best practices, they must reach out and engage with informed others and relevant resources as part of their learning.

Human connections can support learners in achieving success in all learning environments. Yet, in many instances, learners remark that they feel alone, disconnected from other students and the teacher, and bereft of human contact. Learning in isolation can negatively influence the educational experience. Learning outcomes that focus on higher-order affective domain competencies such as responding to phenomena and internalizing values are often best facilitated through human interaction and interpersonal communication.

For learners in the health professions in particular, learning in a community is essential. Health professionals provide care, kindness, and compassion to people when they are at their most vulnerable. Processes that students experience in their pre- and in-service education should model, integrate, and celebrate these human connections. Educators need to actively pursue ways to humanize the curriculum for health-care providers. In an early explanation of how educators can humanize education, Dutton (1976, p. 79) offered this simple explanation: “Make students feel ten feet tall.”

In this chapter, we begin with a glimpse of what the concept of human connection means. Next, we provide a brief introduction to humanizing pedagogy with a discussion of how educational environments that embrace immediacy, praxis, and affective learning can help educators and learners to establish successful human connections. We emphasize how personalizing learning, by inviting learners to set individual goals and by offering opportunities for “voice and choice,” can play a critical role in the education of health professionals. In each section, we include practical (and proven) strategies that serve one of two purposes. Some boxed strategies are designed for educators to assist them in reflecting on whether they approach learners in humanizing ways. Other boxed strategies are approaches that educators can use to help learners (in a variety of educational settings) “feel ten feet tall.”

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN CONNECTION

People engage and connect with one another in different ways and for different reasons throughout their lives. Psychologist Mathew Lieberman (2014) suggested that the human brain is wired to connect with others and that this need to connect with others is even greater than the need for food or shelter. In some instances, when connections with others extend beyond superficial conversations or interactions to include profound and meaningful communications, those involved can feel a deep sense of shared humanity.

Understanding the concept of human connection is not straightforward. The role that humanity can play in interactions is not easy to define. Most of us would associate the meaning of the word humanity with the simple definition of “a quality or state of being human” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). But the definition of humanity also explains that the concept includes “compassionate, sympathetic or generous behaviour or disposition: the quality or state of being humane” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). This definition is particularly important for educators who teach learners in the health professions. The definition suggests that people’s behaviour toward others (e.g., educators’ behaviour toward learners) is what makes them human or at least humane humans.

Deconstructing the definition further leads to a cursory examination of the requisite humanizing behaviour of compassion. Compassion means a “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). It is beyond the scope of this book to fully explain behaviours that demonstrate compassion. However, it is important to emphasize the vital role that compassionate behaviour can play in cultivating relationships rich in humanity. Fostering human connections in health professionals’ education begins when educators strive to act with compassion, to recognize distress in their students, and perhaps most notably to alleviate or reduce that distress.

In contrast, behaviours that are inhumane and lacking in compassion are not difficult to identify. Behaviours that could be described as callous, insensitive, and unfeeling are clearly inhumane. In their literature review of humane interpersonal relationships among Russian educators, Kleptsova and Balabanov (2016) noted that educators considered inhumane are likely to be more oriented to themselves, to identify others with their own ideas of good and bad, and to behave immaturely. As well, inhumane educators were described as demonstrating egoism, anger, envy, fear, cynicism, apathy, aggression, indifference, detachment, and idleness. Although educators might not intentionally act in inhumane ways, it is important to recognize that inhumane behaviours can be present and that they do not support positive, compassionate, and humane connections among educators and learners. The following strategy can initiate individual reflection and awareness building related to the importance of human connection in teaching.

A STRATEGY TO TRY

What Does “Human Connection” Mean to You?

What stands out for you when you think about the concept of human connection? In your experience as a learner, can you remember a time when you felt a special connection with an educator? What role did compassion play in establishing that connection? How did this educator demonstrate humanity? Were there times when you felt stressed and overwhelmed as a learner, and at these times did this educator notice and try to help you? Document your reflections.

HUMANIZING PEDAGOGY

Immediacy

At a basic level, the word humanizing means making things friendlier, more understandable, and “easier for humans to relate to and appreciate” (Vocabulary.com Dictionary, n.d.). Similarly, the word pedagogy refers to “activities of educating or instructing; activities that impart knowledge or skill” (Vocabulary.com Dictionary, n.d.). These definitions establish that humanistic pedagogy features educational activities grounded in friendliness and relatability.

In learning environments, educators describe friendly, relatable activities as expressions of immediacy. In the 1960s, social psychologist Albert Mehrabian defined the construct of immediacy as an affective expression of emotional attachment, feelings of liking, and experiencing a sense of psychological closeness with another person (Melrose, Park, & Perry, 2013). Verbally, educators express immediacy by sharing personal examples, engaging in humour, asking questions, initiating conversations, addressing learners by name, praising learners’ work, and encouraging learners to express their opinions (Gorham, 1988).

Non-verbally, immediacy is expressed by manifestations of high affect such as maintaining eye contact, leaning closer, touching, smiling, maintaining a relaxed body posture, and attending to the voice inflections of the speaker (Andersen, 1979). In higher and continuing education today, these expressions of immediacy between learners and educators continue to contribute significantly to student learning (Violanti, Kelly, Garland, & Christen, 2018).

Expressions of immediacy between educators and learners, and within learning groups, establish the foundation for humanizing pedagogy in any setting. In areas of clinical practice, new graduate nurses felt more satisfied with their jobs when their preceptors expressed immediacy by communicating an openness to their ideas and a sense of caring about their well-being (Lalonde & Hall, 2016; Quek & Shorey, 2018). In technology-rich online and blended classroom settings, higher-education nutrition students experienced a sense of closeness, community, and belonging within their class groups when educators encouraged open expression of opinions and provided opportunities for relationship building (Haar, 2018). In postgraduate e-learning classrooms, in which learners were separated geographically and temporally, nursing students highly valued interactions in which their educators acknowledged both who they were as individuals and their personal and professional responsibilities (Walkem, 2014). In staff development settings, dental hygienists were encouraged to strengthen their verbal and non-verbal immediacy skills in order to portray positivity and caring with patients (Dalonges & Fried, 2016).

Although educators might not have influence over the extent to which curricula and practice settings foster immediacy, there are always opportunities to integrate warmth and immediacy into interpersonal relationships with and among learners. The following strategy invites reflection on the construct of immediacy.

A STRATEGY TO TRY

Communicating with Immediacy

Think of your first experience in the setting where you currently teach or would like to teach. Did anyone communicate friendliness and seem to be open to getting to know you? As you reflect on those first few days in a new situation with so much to learn, how did those around you help you to feel welcome? Do you remember a particularly welcoming smile or someone who addressed you by name? Somebody who stopped what she or he was doing to listen to your question? Perhaps another person who shared a humorous anecdote or spoke with a gentle tone? Would those gestures (and how they made you feel) fit with the definition of immediacy as feeling a sense of psychological closeness to another person?

How can you affirm immediacy in your own teaching practice? Which approaches to verbal and non-verbal communication might help to reassure learners that you are open to and genuinely interested in supporting and guiding them toward success? How could you communicate this if you were teaching in an online learning milieu?

Praxis

Adult educator and philosopher Paulo Friere (1970) added to our understanding of humanizing pedagogies with his view of learners as co-creators of knowledge rather than recipients of information. Friere viewed education as a mutual process of critical consciousness in which educators and learners share a radical philosophy that actively challenges oppression, injustice, inequity, and societal conditions in the world around them. He defined this process of reflecting critically, and then acting to transform existing structures, as praxis.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Friere (1970) argued against traditional banking approaches in which learners are perceived as empty accounts that need to be filled by educators. Banking approaches are characterized by educators who tell students what to do, what to learn, and what to think, and they seldom provide opportunities for learners to offer input, suggestions, or feedback about their education (Salazar, 2013).

In contrast, Friere (1970) called for educators to consider learners’ unique abilities, backgrounds, languages, and interests rather than treating all learners the same. Known for his work to empower oppressed adults in impoverished communities through literacy education, Friere asserted that hierarchies of power exist between educators and learners. He advocated for democratic relationships, critical examination of existing and accepted assumptions, and collaborative problem-posing dialogue in educational activities.

Praxis, with its emphasis on critical reflection followed by challenge and action, extends the notion of humanizing pedagogies beyond approaches that are friendly, relatable, and rich in demonstrations of immediacy. In health professions education, required disciplinary knowledge, technical skills, and competency-based curricula can reduce, however inadvertently, learning to a series of measurable skills and behaviours (Halman, Baker, & Ng, 2017). In turn, this narrow curricular focus potentially deflects educators’ attention away from humanistic pedagogies designed to foster caring, compassionate, and socially responsible health-care providers.

Educational activities geared to questioning and critiquing existing power relations and assumptions, particularly those that could be complicit in perpetuating inequitable and unjust social conditions, might not be supported at system and structural levels (Halman et al., 2017). However, when educators do find ways to integrate the critical reflection inherent in praxis into their teaching, they communicate a willingness to recognize and value learners’ perceptions, lived experiences, and questions. Whether learners are novices beginning careers in their chosen professions or expert professionals advancing their knowledge, they need to feel valued and welcomed for who they are. The next strategy suggests a way to value learners for their “fresh views.”

A STRATEGY TO TRY

Welcome Fresh Views

In their discussion of critical consciousness as a humanizing pedagogy, Halman et al. (2017) suggest that educators can communicate to learners that they are valued by naming their perspectives as fresh views. When learners are new to an area or topic in health care, they look at practices that others might take for granted with new and fresh perspectives. Inviting learners to express these perceptions (and to critically question the information and practices that they observe) creates a welcoming safe space where knowledge can be exchanged rather than transmitted in a one-way direction.

In clinical practice, novice practitioners might think that they do not have enough knowledge to express their points of view or question existing practices. Knowing that their views have value because they provide new and fresh perspectives can be empowering. Similarly, expert practitioners in new situations can be reluctant to disclose their ideas and critical questions in case disclosure negatively influences their careers. Here again, when instructional activities clearly stipulate t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Chapter 1. Celebrating Human Connections in Teaching
• Chapter 2. Valuing Cultural Influences
• Chapter 3. Enhancing Relationships Among Educators and Learners
• Chapter 4. Infusing Curricula with Humanity
• Chapter 5. Maintaining Humanity in Technology-Rich Environments
• Chapter 6. Maintaining Motivation in Teaching