Proposal Title

Medical Engagement: Rhetorical Situations in Nurse Education, Narrative Therapy, and Telemental Health

Presenter Information

Yvonne R. Lee, Kent State University - Kent CampusFollow
Sommer Marie Sterud, Kent State University - Kent CampusFollow
Dawn M. Mellinger, Kent State University - Kent CampusFollow

Proposal Type

Panel Presentation

Location

Olscamp 203

Start Date

21-10-2017 11:15 AM

End Date

21-10-207 12:30 PM

Abstract

This panel offers research and theory focusing on diversity, co-authorship, and ethical considerations in the medical health field. Speakers present views on rhetorically situated medical documents as they engage with language in nurse education and mental health care. Interactive audience participation using Poll Everywhere technology is encouraged during the presentation.

Yvonne, Sommer, and Dawn met last year as all three began their doctoral journey. After entering the same cohort of the LRSP program at KSU, these three women have spent the last year commiserating, collaborating, and cultivating a friendship that is sure to last beyond the bounds of the program.

Proposal

This panel offers research and theory focusing on rhetorical diversity, co-authorship, and ethical considerations in the medical health field. Speakers present views on rhetorically situated medical documents as they are engaged in nurse education and mental health care. Panelists discuss various ways the rhetoric of the medical community positions itself as separate from and above those it serves. Using the work of Judy Segal, Ellen Barton, and Adele Clarke et al. as springboards for our discussions, we look at nurse education, narrative therapy, and telemental healthcare to examine our medical lives. To promote audience involvement, each speaker will open her presentation with questions audience members can answer using Poll Everywhere software, which automatically tallies and charts responses, hopefully prompting thoughtful discussion following the presentations.

Speaker #1 A Rhetorical Look at Language in Nurse Education

For many decades, the field of nursing has called for more flexible curricula that supports a diverse population, and it has struggled to overcome some of these barriers. Speaker One argues that in order for the field to address this call and to embrace diversity, nurse educators need to be able to better identify their biases and to work harder to overcome them. One way to do this is to pay attention to the words that are used in the education of future nurses, specifically, to notice how nurse educators use naming and metaphors to establish a foundation of shared knowledge and values. Without such reflexive abilities, true reform may never be accomplished. Perhaps calling attention to the metaphors used will help us better understand how nurses, student nurses, and nurse educators view their relationships, and making a concerted effort to “flip the script” may invite new faces into the field. With this in mind, Speaker One analyzes the rhetorical moves found in one collaboratively written, internal document of a midwestern health sciences college in order to determine how they represent themselves and others in their nursing program’s private, written discourse.

Speaker #2 A Rhetorical Look at Narrative Therapy

With its epistemology rooted in social constructivist concerns, Narrative Therapy (NT) asserts that people make meaning of their lives through stories. This form of therapy serves as a postmodern, poststructuralist alternative to the more positivist and formalist approaches in psychology. Unlike Narrative Medicine, which also relies on patient stories, Narrative Therapy is situated exclusively in the discipline of psychology and seeks to reframe a client’s narratives. The term “re-author” is used widely in the field to describe the act of re-seeing identity through storytelling. While the stories in Narrative Therapy come from the client, the re-authoring may not. Narrative therapy invites stories to be “performed” via “outsider witnesses” in the form of “definitional ceremonies.” In this way, NT has much to do with this year’s conference theme of collaboration. Audiences participating in the “definitional ceremony,” in effect, co-author the re-telling of the client’s trauma. While this process has had powerful results for some, it carries significant risk, such as a re-triggering of the traumatic event, an inaccurate or insensitive rendering of the narrative, among other possibilities. Speaker Two aims to examine the ethos of NT, in particular the “therapeutic documents” associated with the profession as these documents are commonly used in training manuals and narrative therapy workshops. These documents also carry ethical concerns, especially in terms of power dynamics between client and therapist.

Speaker #3 A Rhetorical Look at Telemental Health Care

The past two decades have seen an exponential rise in the prevalence and availability of telemental health care services. Defined as “the provision of mental health services using live, interactive video­ teleconferencing technology” (Kramer et al 2012), this type of medical care helps those who are geographically marginalized and those who are unwilling or unable to physically go to a mental health care facility. In the past 15 years, implementation of telemental health has seemed to follow more from need than from demonstrated efficacy, which begs the question of ethos in the patient-practitioner relationship as well as in the specific types of services and organizations that provide internet-based mental health care. Speaker Three offers a pragmatic look at the rhetorical issues of ethos in telemental health care and the endoxa of our mental health care community. It is based on research into competing arguments concerning the ethos of telemental health care assessments, procedures, and online security provisions.