Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemThe student experience of online interprofessional education in cancer sciences: a philosophical-empirical inquiry( 2023-11)This philosophical-empirical inquiry interprets the lived experiences of students from different health professions undertaking the wholly online Master of Cancer Sciences Course. Through a novel conceptual framework combining phenomenology, practice theory and moral philosophy as theoretical lenses, this research illuminates recent graduates’ experiences of being online, becoming into their (inter) professional identities and practices, and beholding, or giving attention to, their patients, colleagues, and learning peers, during the Course. This inquiry provides insights into how online interprofessional education (OIPE), as well as offering convenience, flexibility, and scale, can in fact provide deep, authentic, and even ontologically transformative learning experiences. Challenging the conception of technological enframement (Heidegger, 2010) and of presence and trust as being attenuated in an online context (Dreyfus, 2001a), this inquiry shows that synchronous and asynchronous online engagement can offer an effective and therapeutic co-teaching presence (Bluteau, 2020) and authentic peer learning. This inquiry reveals that the Course while claiming only to be multidisciplinary, not interprofessional (Lai-Kwon et al., 2023), demonstrated a student-centred approach, modelling elements of best practice interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP), and care (sorge) for the other, whether student or patient. Similarly, it reveals that wholly online education, as a practice arrangement bundle, with activities consisting of doings, sayings (Schatzki, 2002) and relatings (Kemmis, 2014), can provide a psychologically safe, yet challenging learning environment, that enables different health professions to learn with, from and about each other. This learning goes beyond the epistemological, ways of knowing and doing (Ryle, 1946) to the ontological, ways of being. Furthermore, it overlaps with the participants’ own clinical practice arrangement bundles (Schatzki, 2002), allowing them to apply learning into practice and practice into learning. In the context of cancer care and supportive and palliative care in particular, this inquiry reveals the unselfing (Murdoch, 1970) that genuine attention to the afflicted (Weil, 2009) requires, (in this context cancer patients, including those who are dying). What is more this beholding parallels the way teachers and learners were revealed and attended to each other, enabling them to ‘become who they are’ (Heidegger, 2010), through Online Dasein Mitsein, (being online with others).
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ItemThe Experience of School Participation for Professional Women( 2022)A significant body of contemporary education research and policy literature conveys connection between forms of parent participation and educational outcomes for children. Yet, the experience of professional women of participation in their child’s schooling remains relatively under-researched. This study focusses specifically on the nature of these women’s experiences, the factors that influence them to participate and schools’ treatment of professional women with regard to the contributions they might make. Attending to experience, the study used phenomenology to guide the investigation. The principal purpose of the study was to illuminate the lived experience of a group of professional women as participants in their child’s school. Individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with a group of professional women with school-aged children. Moustakas’ (1994) approach to phenomenological reduction and van Manen’s (1997) existential lifeworlds framework were used to guide the data analysis and determine the nature of the experience. The following themes emerged from the participants' stories: the experience of limited participation; the values of school participation; tensions around advocacy, expertise and power, the gendering of participation, and the perceived incompatibility of roles - the good mother and the good professional. Professional women sit at the nexus of competing demands and ideologies around motherhood alongside ideologies rooted in being a professional. The study found that the gendered nature of participatory practices marginalises the role that professional women can play in schools. These women also have knowledge and skills that could greatly benefit schools, however schools are not currently utilising this knowledge. In understanding what professional women with school-aged children experience, schools, teachers and policy makers may be better equipped to enhance the experience of participation and the value it could add to schools. Furthermore, they may become more fully aware of the ethico-politicial issues that attach to parent participation.