A phenomenological study of new doctors’ transition to practice, utilising participant-voiced poetry

Transition to practice can be a turbulent time for new doctors. It has been proposed transition is experienced non-linearly in physical, psychological, cultural and social domains. What is less well known, however, is whether transition within these domains can contribute to the experience of moral injury in new doctors. Further, the lived experience of doctors as they transition to practice is underexplored. Given this, we asked; how do newly qualified doctors experience transition from medical school to practice? One-to-one phenomenological interviews with 7 recently qualified UK doctors were undertaken. Findings were analysed using Ajjawi and Higgs’ framework of hermeneutic analysis. Following identification of secondary concepts, participant-voiced research poems were crafted by the research team, re-displaying participant words chronologically to convey meaning and deepen analysis. 4 themes were identified: (1) The nature of transition to practice; (2) The influence of community; (3) The influence of personal beliefs and values; and (4) The impact of unrealistic undergraduate experience. Transition to practice was viewed mostly negatively, with interpersonal support difficult to access given the 4-month nature of rotations. Participants describe relying on strong personal beliefs and values, often rooted in an ‘ethic of caring’ to cope. Yet, in the fraught landscape of the NHS, an ethic of caring can also prove troublesome and predispose to moral injury as trainees work within a fragmented system misaligned with personal values. The disjointed nature of postgraduate training requires review, with focus on individual resilience redirected to tackle systemic health-service issues.

Thanks, Buddy: The Personal Aspects of Public Sex Sites

Traditional models of public sex among men continue to construct public sex sites as anonymous and impersonal. Humphreys's (1970) work established public sex sites as settings for quick, emotionally detached sex among men. According to his findings, most of the men do not identify as gay or bisexual. Recently, social historians argue that these sites provided for gay and bisexual men settings that promoted the recognition of their emerging sexual identities and communities prior to the Stonewall Riots. In this dissertation, I problematize the anonymous and impersonal assumptions of the earlier models and argue that public sex sites continue to serve gay and bisexual men by allowing these men a place to congregate with others like themselves. In face-to-face interviews with 30 gay, queer, and bisexually identified men, I ask questions that explore the interpersonal relationships that originated in public sex sites. I explore the ways that men who use public sex sites establish an ethic of caring and create a sense of community among one another. In my methods chapter, I continue the discussion addressing the role that sexual identity and “erotic subjectivity” of the researcher functions in research. Also, I address how relying on institutional review board's approval affects sexually charged research and maintains the silence surrounding sexuality.

More Than Just Academics

This chapter addresses how the authors, two former elementary school teachers, discovered that their students needed lessons in how to treat fellow students with respect and kindness. Now working in teacher preparation, the authors reflect on the importance of actively teaching kindness. They argue that teaching children to be thoughtful, kind, and considerate is every bit as vital as teaching them the three Rs—Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. From experience, they know that helping children develop an ethic of caring for others is not learned from lecture or posted rules. Rather, it is learned from observation and with encounters of what kindness looks and feels like. In their college classrooms, they share these stories as a way to help young teachers understand that once they are in a classroom of their own, they will be education the whole child.

Kinship across Species: Learning to Care for Nonhuman Others

This essay responds to Donna J. Haraway's (2016) provocation to ‘stay with the trouble’ of learning to live well with nonhumans as kin, through practice-based approaches to learning to care for nonhuman others. The cases examine the promotion of care for trees through mobile game apps for forest conservation, and kinship relations with city farm animals in Kentish Town, London. The cases are analysed with a view to how they articulate care practices as a means of making kin. Two concepts are proposed, ‘learning from’ and ‘facing’ the Other, which are thickened through discussions of how caring takes place in each case in relation to a particular category of nonhuman other: animated tree and urban farm animal. Thus while attendant to situations of care involving a specific nonhuman subject, the cases also broker thinking on learning from and facing (the) other kinds of trees and animals, and the interspecies dynamics of which they are a part. The intersectional implications of the practice sites and participants are elaborated, to complexify and affirm situated but also reflexive approaches to caring. In doing this, the authors attend to their own positionalities, seeking to diversify Western-based ecofeminist engagements with caring, while asking what their research can do for the nonhuman other. They formulate and apply a collaborative methodological approach to the case studies, developed through cultivating attentiveness to the nonhuman subject of research. The authors consider in particular how attentiveness to the nonhuman other can facilitate practices of knowing that further a non-anthropocentric and non-innocent ethic of caring. By further interconnecting situations of caring for nonhuman animals and plants, the authors advocate for practices of care that antagonise how species boundaries are drawn and explore the implications for learning to care for nonhumans as kin.

“I Worry about My Community”: African American Women Utilizing Communal Notions of Citizenship in the Social Studies Classroom

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>This qualitative multiple case study utilizes a Black feminist ethic of caring (Collins, 2009; Thompson, 1998) to explore how three African American women social studies teachers draw on their personal and community knowledge to conceptualize and teach the construct of citizenship to their students of color. Instead of conveying traditional notions of citizenship that value blind patriotism to the nation-state and individualism, they instead chose to teach citizenship as relational and centered on uplifting their cultural community. This study hopes to shed light on how critical notions of citizenship may be presented and utilized in classrooms.</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>