Participation has been of ongoing interest in the field of action research and the New Health Promotion movement, but it is not without tensions and problems. This article presents the challenge of containing the conflicting demands of personal empowerment, practical advancement and theory building in a community-based participatory action research project 'Aspiring to Healthy Living in The Netherlands'. A Participatory Action Research (PAR) methodology was chosen because of its contribution to empowerment of the community of older people, which was one of the project goals. Besides that, the project aimed at the development of an intervention program for encouraging healthy living amongst older people in The Netherlands and contributing to the knowledge base on healthy living, by analyzing narratives from the participants. However, when time pressure rose, the empowerment goal started to collide with academic and practical aims, and the dialogue within the project team became obstructed leading to a return to the traditional routine of applied research and the accompanying power relationships, with implications for the learning in and about the project. This article starts with a short review of the literature on community participation in health research and the challenges of learning participatory action research, followed by a description of the PAR project and the process of participation, using the ladder of Pretty as a tool to highlight different levels of participation in different project stages. By using the theory of organizational learning developed by Argyris and Schön (Argyris, 1993; Argyris & Schön, 1978), insights will be provided into the attempts of a relatively inexperienced team to create a participatory and dialogic research project, and the problems in keeping reflection and learning going within a context of external pressure.
Een handboek heeft de pretentie van een andere orde te zijn dan een bundel met verschillende bijdragen en iets toe te voegen aan de bestaande literatuur op een bepaald terrein. Volgens het Wolters Nederlands Woordenboek is een handboek een boek waarin een beknopte samenvatting wordt gegeven van een tak van wetenschap. In die zin zou het zowel voor de beginneling die zich op een bepaald terrein snel wil inwerken een geschikt medium zijn, maar ook voor gevorderden die het als een soort naslagwerk kunnen gebruiken. Met dit in mijn achterhoofd heb ik het handboek gelezen.
Spiritual care is increasingly seen as a task of all health care professionals. This is challenging for chaplains working in health care, who hold spiritual care at the heart of their profession but don't feel rooted in a strong professional identity. In this article we discuss a participatory action research that aimed at strengthening the professional identity of health care chaplains by forming collaborative learning communities of chaplains and general practice mental health. The focus is on the 'boundary work' and how participatory action research contributes to this. Relational professionalism, Dialogical Self Theory and Boundary Theory are combined to interpret the complex relational-dialogical processes of negotiating one's identity within the relationships with diverse others: clients, mental health nurses and society. The result is a more articulated and at the same time flexible professional identity for healthcare chaplains. Participatory action research contributes to these boundary processes by stimulating reflection, explicating, eliciting or encouraging different voices and facilitating the dialogue between these professionals.
Action research in lifestyle research is no sinecure. Response to Kromme et al.: 'Changing together is learning together', a participatory action research project This is a reply to the contribution entitled: 'Learning together is changing together: A participatory action research project on the role of the internist in promoting a healthy lifestyle'. Here the authors highlight the complexity of facilitating participatory action research (PAR) in a clinical practice setting and reflect on the first three stages of their research through eight principles that could guide PAR, as described by Van Lieshout et al. (2017). As we developed these principles, we explain the principles of participation, reflexivity, contextuality and transformation in greater detail in relation to the context of this study. The authors made suggestions to change the five-phased model of PAR to get a better grip on the process. The authors rightly highlighted some limitations in the labeling of some phases. However, it is the reflexivity on the multiple perspectives that facilitators encounter and the relationships they engage with during the process, as well as acknowledging the iterative process of PAR, which needs to be embraced and experienced during the entire process of study.
The COVID-19 lockdown of Dutch long-term care facilities between March and May 2020 affected the quality of lives of residents and opposed professional and personal ethics of care. This article, based on 25 in-depth interviews with healthcare chaplains, gives insight into what moral challenges appeared for care professionals. Moral challenges were related to: 'family ruptures', 'residents' loneliness and despair', 'cold-hearted deaths' and 'response and responsibilities'. The findings illuminate the complexity of providing care during the lockdown and show variation in the impact of these ethical experiences, in which both moral distress and moral resilience occurred.
Recent developments in Dutch society and its healthcare system pose new challenges to humanist chaplaincy. Thus far, chaplaincy has been predominantly rooted in institutionalized religion, but it now has to serve a diversity of people who are increasingly secularized with personal ways of worldviewing. Moreover, chaplaincy is increasingly becoming a profession like many others, reducing the focus on its worldviewing competencies. The main question this article addresses is what this implies for the education of chaplains, more specifically for humanist chaplains who are educated on a Master's level course at the University of Humanistic Studies. Using the concepts of interprofessional learning communities (Stoll & Seashore Louis, 2007) and dialogical professionalism (Jacobs, 2010), two visions are put forward for developing the education of humanist chaplains that might also be relevant for other chaplaincy educational programs.
This article focuses on the moral values that teachers consider important for their teaching practice. First, we investigated the tensions experienced and questions raised by teacher's experience of the moral matters that arise in their profession. These moral tensions and questions arise in three different areas of interactions with pupil(s): (1) pupils' attitude, (2) class climate and (3) teachers' professional role.Second, we investigated the moral values that inform the narratives teachers construct to give meaning to their experiences. We conducted a qualitative content analysis that used three moral orientations—discipline, autonomy, and social commitment—as a theoretical framework. The moral values in the area of pupils' attitude concerned autonomy, discipline and social commitment. In the area of class climate, the moral values of discipline and social commitment were explicit in teachers' narratives. In investigating teachers' professional role, disciplinary moral values and a broad spectrum of the moral value of social commitment were found. Our findings also show that moral values are actualized in teaching practice in multiple ways.