Challenges of multi-professional working within one English higher education institution: ‘we hit a giant’: is this a shared experience?

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses the process and outcome of an innovative qualitative research approach evidencing the lived experiences of a group of academics who were confronting what they felt at the time to be the indisputable extinction of their network. In an effort to provide a constructive response to the academics’ despondency and lack of agency, one colleague, Tom, suggested using a creative approach to enable individual voices to be heard, acknowledged and appropriately shared. Utilising this consideration, the findings from a collection of personal narrative reflections were thematically analysed, snipped and re-situated in order to create a poem telling and highlighting the elements academics considered were the key drivers for their frustrations and disillusionment.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional
• reflection
• therapeutic
• expressive
• innovative research methodology
• institutional development
• creative

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

[PLEASE TAKE THE OPPORTUNITY TO LISTEN TO THE POEM: ‘We hit a giant’

AND Please tell us how you felt when you read and heard this poem. Could this artistic methodology be a new useful way for you to collect data?]

Challenges of multi-professional working within one English Higher Education Institution: ‘We hit a giant.’ Is this a shared experience?