Emotion is another one of the personal elements that is completely unintelligible, unless it’s placed in a narrative context. Emotion is not a biological certainty, or necessarily determined by culture. Emotion is a reaction to a turn in a person’s narrative which prompts them to some kind of response in relation to other people. In Gergen and Gergen’s words, emotion is a transient social role
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The title of Dr. Samuel LeBaron’s article is intriguing enough. The fact that the author quotes three separate poems in a journal called Academic Medicine makes it even more alluring.
The bulk of my work is wrapped up in teaching how stories can be useful in clinical situations. I believe that stories and storytelling make life better and more meaningful. I tend, though, to downplay narrative work that can’t explicitly help doctors, nurses, and administrators serve patients more effectively. I suppose that comes from a […]
One of the most important concepts of my training in storytelling is one of the most overlooked. The technical term is “The Space Between”. The idea is that one force alone is uninteresting, if not meaningless. It has to act with or against something else to be interesting and meaningful. This is a way of […]
In the next few months, I’m going to be doing some work around children, so I needed to get an updated TB test. Stuck in a small room with a clinician while she prepared the tuberculin, she asked me the usual pleasantry: “So, what do you do?” I told her briefly about how I work […]
Dr. Moira A. Stewart, writing in the 1995 Canadian Medical Association Journal, writes that although there had been reviews of data exploring the relation between communication and patient satisfaction,1 which linked communication with quality of care,2 and others exploring the theory of physician-patient communication or how medical education could incorporate these ideas, none specifically looked […]
Writing in the journal Humanities, Wendy Bowles addresses the question, How do nurse educators who enable Narrative Pedagogy experience Listening: knowing and connecting? This article discusses the education of nurses in light of the “Concernful Practices” framework for Narrative Pedagogy, and centers on its “Listening: knowing and connecting” element. Bowles specifically presents how “Listening as […]
