Resources
Keenan Whitesides and Dorottya B. Kacsoh will compile the Resources section for the Fall 2019 Issue.
Exploring How Racism Structures Canadian Physical Therapy Programs: Counter-Stories From Racialized Students
The authors of this study conducted in-depth interviews with racialized students or recent graduates of Master’s-level physical therapy programs in Canada. The students described their experiences of white culture, and how well-meaning fellow students simply weren’t aware of the institutionalized racism around them. In compelling quotes, the students detail their feelings of frustration and resignation based on repeated exposure to race-related stereotypes.
Exploring Excellence: Author Reflections on Educating Physical Therapists
In this issue’s Book Review, the authors of Educating Physical Therapists describe their “10-year journey” of discovery that produced the first definitive report on the state of American PT education in a half-century. They highlight aspects of their findings of particular interest to readers of JHR—for example, their recommendations for “integration of the humanities across the curriculum.”
Profiles in Professionalism with Nancy Kirsch
In our Fall 2019 installment of JHR’s “Profiles in Professionalism” series, we sit down with Dr. Nancy R. Kirsch—a thinker whose compassionate, prolific scholarship is recognized throughout the field of rehabilitation. In this interview, Dr. Kirsch explores how physical therapy has evolved, and the critical role the humanities play in developing caring and compassionate professionals.
Agency Restored, Dignity Preserved: Lessons Learned as an Art Historian About Enhancing Quality of Life for People With Dementia
“What started as a narrowly-focused mission to welcome people with dementia … into our museum for the first time evolved into a much broader and more profound project: to reinvent what agency within the museum would look and feel like for visitors living with dementia,” author Susan Shifrin notes in this compelling piece. She details her journey from that experience to founding ARTZ Philadelphia, a program that invites people with dementia to serve as mentors to program participants.
Profiles in Professionalism With Beth Skidmore
This installment of JHR’s interviews with industry innovators focuses on clinician, researcher, and educator Beth Skidmore, an award-winning Occupational Therapist whose gifts inspire a wide range of students. Beginning with her early days, detailing why she chose her field, to describing her current leadership roles, Dr. Skidmore offers a compelling picture of how professionalism develops and professionals reach enlightenment. “I think now professionalism means to me…grace and humility,” she notes.
Poet in Profile – Ted Kooser
Interpreting poems written by renowned poet Ted Kooser in a Nebraskan winter in 1998, his friend Amy Haddad highlights the beauty of the human spirit when faced with life-threatening challenges. Kooser wrote the poems on his two-mile walks before dawn as he recovered from surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for tongue and neck cancer in 1998. Compact and powerful, they show how one creative mind forged a bit of order in the “chaos” of recovery.
Editorial: The Healing Power of Seeing—and Being Seen
Part of our job as clinicians is to recognize that while our knowledge and skills are the tools to facilitate the body’s recovery from illness, it is our shared humanness, our presence, that supports the healing power of the soul. How we dance along those lines—recognizing where our role is to fix or simply be present—is the beautiful, sometimes haunting part of the rehabilitation landscape that the humanities can help us navigate.
‘Making Strange’: Exploring the Development of Students’ Capacity in Epistemic Reflexivity
Engaging in epistemic reflexivity, or the ability to question the ways in which we practice, and their association with organizational and social structures, is the key to gaining a clear perspective on the profession, according to these authors. How can students take a step back, and gain true insight into their professional world? This study employed a 7-step framework to introduce learners to the process of “making strange.”
Gathering on the Wrong Side of the Road: Critical Race Scholarship Across the Health Humanities
In a compelling response to our article, “Exploring How Racism Structures Canadian Physical Therapy Programs,” Dr. Bryan Mukandi offers an account of his critique of early drafts of the article, requested by the authors. He notes that his fear at the time was that the article “was an inadvertent reiteration of the idea that the inclusion of people of color in health disciplines is a matter of charity rather than justice.” Dr. Mukandi expresses the hope that more colleagues like these can gather with those “on the wrong side of the road” to foster dialogue and spur change.