Teaching physiotherapy students to “be content with a body that refuses to hold still”

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, physiotherapists have become concerned with cultural, economic, philosophical, political, and social questions and have been exploring more flexible ways of speaking about and practicing physiotherapy. While recognizing the need to embrace a broader range of perspectives, physiotherapy educators and other medical educators have been at a loss as to how to best achieve this. Drawing on two examples from South Africa and New Zealand, we seek to illustrate possibilities and barriers to teaching social sciences to physiotherapy students, specifically theories of embodiment as an alternative to the biopsychosocial model. We review each educator’s choice of embodiment theory in curriculum design and the role of the educator’s disciplinary background on teaching, learning, and assessing that learning. Against this background, we explore physiotherapy students’ experiences with theories of embodiment and possible transformative implications for their self-worth and/or professional practices. We suggest that students were able to explore physiotherapy’s relation to the body and the profession’s historical inattention toward the body as a philosophical/theoretical construct. From the lessons learned, some can perhaps be usefully passed onto others thinking of introducing a more diverse and inclusive approach of the body; one that we argue will be needed in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognitive dissonance
• cross disciplinary teaching
• education
• embodiment
• medical anthropology
• physiotherapy

Declarations of interest

The authors report no declarations of interest.

Notes

¹ The undergraduate BSc Physiotherapy program is a four year degree. The annual intake of students ranges between 45 and 60 students.

² It was in this context, the authors came into contact with each other and on discovering that we were both introducing notions of embodiment into 2011 curricula we came to this collaboration.

³ The course outline, lecture notes and class overheads have been developed as Open Educational Resources and made publically available through an OpenUCT grant (see: https://open.uct.ac.za).

⁴ Each submission was worth equal grades and students were informed that merely resubmitting their first draft unchanged would result in significant deductions, that is, their first submission was graded in a way that acknowledged their difficulties in writing essays as physiotherapy students, but their final submission was graded as a submission expected of an anthropology student.

⁵ All names are pseudonyms

⁶ Fieldnotes refer to various notes recorded by scientists during or after their observation of a specific phenomenon they are studying. They are particularly valued in descriptive sciences such as anthropology.