Caring and the Graduate Student: A Phenomenological Study

Given the increasing numbers of adult learners on university campuses, both as undergraduates and graduates, an understanding of adult learning processes is relevant—indeed essential—to the university's response to this student group. While educators have attempted to understand learners in terms of developmental stages, learning styles, and contextual factors, less attention has focused on the dynamics of helping relationships that attend learning or the importance of caring in the learning process. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to explore and explicate the experience of caring as it relates to graduate education from the perspective of the graduate student. The connection between caring relationships and learning was confirmed. Seven components of the caring were identified. Implications for the university center on attention to relationship skills and the creation of a campus community in which caring relationships are encouraged and nurtured.     

The Creative Medical Student: A Descriptive Study

Biographical study distinguished high from low creative medical students by broken homelife, greater preference for movies, modern music, serious books, bridge playing and creative hobbies. High creatives seek challenge, academic or research careers, verbal and imaginative expression. Low creatives have higher motivation, better academic grades, more economic and family interests, are often oldest children and head for general practice. Independent, original explorations characterize high creativity while traditional, authoritative explanations satisfy the less creative. Fricke's Opinion, Attitude and Interest Survey made the creativity identification. Factor analysis related OAIS Scores, Omnibus Personality Inventory and Medical College Admission Test scores to cross check with biography data. A motivational Index is suggested as a predictor of supportive value to the creativity score.     

The Medical School Curate: An Examination of Student Need

The intense and encompassing nature of medical education can be overwhelming at times. The impact that this effect has on a student can be mitigated if adequately trained, spiritually focused advisors are available and present within the campus setting. This article presents real case examples of, and recommendations for, the role of medical school chaplaincies and why those chaplaincies should be a part of the culture of medical education.     

Medical Student Burnout: Interdisciplinary Exploration and Analysis

Burnout—a stress-related syndrome characterized by exhaustion, depersonalization, and a diminished sense of accomplishment—is a common phenomenon among medical students with significant potential consequences for student health, professionalism, and patient care. This essay proposes that the epidemic of medical student burnout can be attributed to a technocratic paradigm that fails to value medical students as persons with human needs and limitations. After briefly reviewing the literature on medical student burnout, the author uses two theories to elucidate potential causes: unsatisfactory aspects of the learning environment and a feeling one’s efforts are meaningless or irrelevant. Cultural factors also facilitate burnout in medical students immersed in a clinical environment that cultivates excessive detachment from patient and self, impairing self-care, damaging a sense of self, and impeding the development of a mature, well-integrated professional identity. The ethical implications of medical student burnout are also addressed. Finally, this paper suggests possible preventive and remediative strategies such as optimizing the learning environment as well as narrative approaches that promise enhancement of both individual and institutional well-being.     

医学人文教育的关怀哲学基点探究

医学人文教育固然以提倡患者的自主存在性突破了医学技术主义形态,但若对患者自主地位的过度强调则会使其陷入二律背反的困境,于此之上的关怀哲学探究则把患者视为处于具体情境中的特殊他人,如此便能建立并维持医学人文情境中的医患和谐.透过耕犁“以患者自主为核心的医学教育限度”、“以关怀为始点的医学哲学诠解”与“关怀哲学在医学人文中的教育张力”三重意涵来突显关怀哲学在医学人文教育中的本位复归,期使医学教育能够透过关怀哲学的融汇从而在医疗临床过程中达成其效力显现的人文基点.     

医学与非医学大学生对遗体捐献认知的比较研究

考查医学与非医学大学生关于遗体捐献认知的差异.对9所高校在校生发放问卷进行调查,并进行统计学分析.结果显示,医学生比非医学大学生对遗体捐献知识掌握更为准确,其信息途径主要来源于学校教育;医学生对待遗体捐献事业的关注度和赞成度也更高.但是两类学生的捐献意愿并无差别,影响因素亦无较大差别.     

Caring: A Pluralist Account

In this paper, I argue that care ethics should be understood as a form of value pluralism. Writers on the ethics of care tend not explicitly to address issues in the theory of value, although much of what has been written about care ethics may be taken to suggest that it endorses some form of value monism. I argue against this conception of care ethics by showing that the practical reality of caregiving is more accurately represented by a pluralist account of value. Practices of care are plausibly guided by a number of distinct and potentially conflicting values. These include quality of life, autonomy, dignity, personal development, and the value of nurturant relationships. Whilst caring takes each of these values to be important in its own right, they are not always jointly realisable, and carers are sometimes forced to promote one such value at the expense of another. The possibility of conflict between values is, of course, precisely what a pluralist conception of value tells us to expect. In this respect, then, value pluralism more faithfully reflects the reality of caregiving than does value monism, and care ethicists ought for this reason to endorse it.     

The Development and Manifestation of Altruistic Caring: A Qualitative Inquiry

Qualitative, phenomenological research provides rich information about the constructive, life span perspectives of the manifestation and development of altruism. Using an interpretive phenomenological approach, this study investigated altruism as described by 34 older persons in a continuing care retirement community. The findings identified 13 overarching, common, emergent themes related to this construct. Implications are provided for helping professionals.     

The International Student: Female Circumcision Issues

The authors describe the process and practice of female circumcision, the impact it may have on circumcised female international college students, and some counseling strategies for the college counselor.     

The Student Guided Functional Assessment Interview: An Analysis of Student and Teacher Agreement

Functional assessment strategies are used to guide the treatment of problem behavior with individuals who have severe disabilities. Also, researchers have extended functional assessment applications to individuals with emotional and behavioral disabilities. One such extension is the use of students as informants in the functional assessment process. The present study assessed an interview tool designed to elicit information directly from students regarding their problem behaviors. We examined agreement between students and their teachers. Results showed high agreement on the causes and functions of problem behavior with mixed agreement on support plan recommendations.     

A Poetic Path from Melancholy to Mourning: Robert Lowell's Elegies as Case Study

This essay builds on a previous one in this journal (Cole, 2005) that details how reading elegiac poetry, the poetry of mourning, may be a pastoral resource for complicated grief or what is classically termed melancholia. A study of elegies by poet Robert Lowell (1917–1977), which depict a progression from melancholia to more “typical” mourning, demonstrates how thinking and writing in elegiac terms may offer a similar resource, whether for one's own melancholia or that of persons in one's care. Allan Hugh Cole, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Pastoral Care at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary.     

Caring for the Care-Giver: The Benefit of a Peer Supervision Group

I presented the following case to my leader-led peer supervisiongroup twice as the case evolved over the course of one year. During my firstmeetings with Mr. and Mrs. M we discussed a prenatal diagnosis of a skeletaldysplasia at thirty-three weeks of pregnancy and the option of a third trimesterpregnancy termination. One year later I presented follow-up on the outcome ofthe affected pregnancy, a new pregnancy, and Mrs. M's suicide. Although bothsegments of the case were completed by the time I presented, my peersupervision group was invaluable. With the encouragement and support of groupmembers, I could openly express and process my sadness and grief for the M'ssituation and the loss of Mrs. M's life.     

Environmental Dilemmas: The Resolutions of Student Activists

This article describes a qualitative investigation of 20 student activists' resolutions to environmental dilemmas. Participants responded to an oral interview asking them to resolve 6 dilemmas involving the natural environment and to give justifications for their resolutions. Several major themes emerged. First, participants tended to be concerned with maintaining human self-determination and tolerating human diversity. They also resolved dilemmas by reference to 3rd parties, and attributions of responsibility and sacrifice were made according to several patterns. Both humans and nonhumans were considered in resolutions, and resolutions reflected concerns with procedural justice and fairness and context-based value hierarchies. These themes are discussed in terms of the difficulty of resolving such dilemmas and implications for studying values and moral choices in the environmental context.