Denise Kenney leading the students in exercises
To address the need to focus on developing communication skills for interacting with clients, Melanie Willson, Associate Director of the School of Nursing at UBC Okanagan, reached out to theatre professors Denise Kenney and Tracy Ross to work with first year nursing students in a class with lecturer, Maggie Weninger.
“This was originally inspired by a third-year student who took Tracy’s improv class as an elective,” says Willson. “I was excited by the links that she was making between the skills from improv and her communication with clients in clinical practice.”
Performance practice shines a light on human interaction and we are trained in the art of relational aesthetics, in all of its manifestations, explains Denise Kenney.
“This is what makes this collaboration such a good fit. It was also interesting that when faced with a class with ‘theatre people’ the students felt the same kind of nervousness that their patients might have entering an unfamiliar health care context,” she says.
Sometimes positioning something as ‘make believe’, such as drama or theatre, frees students up to take more risks and play/practice with less inhibitions.
Weninger says they actually use a lot of art and performance in nursing. “We call this ‘the art of nursing’ as they know it to be their relational practice.”
For the performance pieces in nursing, they use a lot of simulation, anywhere from low fidelity simulators (ie. simulated body parts) to high fidelity simulators, such as mannequins that can blink, breathe, have body sounds, etc., to actors who come in to play different roles, like actors who play patients with mental health illnesses.
“This is incredibly important for our students to practice in a safe space and try out different skills without being concerned that they will hurt someone or say the wrong thing,” Weninger adds.
Kenney and Ross applied performer training activities and improvisations to address interpersonal dynamics as they pertain to Non-Violent Communication and de-escalation techniques in a hands-on way that is safe, prior to them practicing it in ‘real life’ situations.
The Non-Violent Communication process involves four steps: observation; identify the feelings surrounding the situation; identify the needs that underly the feelings; and make or offer a request for the need.
“We collaborated with Nursing Professors Maggie Weninger and Melanie Willson to design a series of activities that helped students explore and practice, in an embodied, dialogical and interactive way, the dynamics of nurse/patient encounters,” Kenney notes.
These activities are grounded in performance training designed to explore mindfulness, observation, emotional and sensory literacy, subtext, improvisation, and consent.
Weninger notes that it was nice for students to get up and use their bodies vs sitting in the classroom. “Tracy, Denise, and I all noticed that they had the nervous giggles at first, but then really settled into it quickly. Most were very engaged and took it seriously, and a few of them asked me at the end of class if we were going to be doing this again!”
Kenney adds, “I think all involved learned something new from the collaboration.”
Nursing students Sara McCreght & Cheyanna Wolff exploring how to act out (and detect) subtext for a script.
Jenny Kwan, Devon Jennings & Davina Wilson with Tracy Ross and Denise Kenney (centre) talking about how body language can have an effect on our interactions