A physical education/environmental education nexus: Transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum for a sense of belonging

Physical education (PE) is a site that brings categories of difference under erasure, presenting a wicked problem for how a sense of belonging is cultivated for all learners to foster physical activity, health and wellbeing across the lifespan. This article explores how, we, as two teachers of PE, turned to postqualitative and ‘new’ materialist inquiry to generate a sense of belonging within a PE/environmental education nexus. Taking up Karen Barad’s agential realism and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizome, we conceptualise this PE/environmental education nexus as a transdisciplinary approach to curriculum that enacts a knowing/being/thinking/doing between, and across, borders, boundaries, categories, fields and practices. We then show how this nexus was actualised in our teaching practices through two vignettes. As transdisciplinary approaches to curriculum are grounded in the lived, embodied and embedded (micro) politics of location, individuals are imbued with affective obligation to enact affirmative patterns of relating moment-to-moment. This means that a sense of belonging is always imminent, invented and co-created, bringing attention to situated obligations to enact good relations with ourselves, each other and wider planetary systems.

Family dynamics in the context of serious illness

In considering cancer as an illness that affects not only the patient but their entire family, recent research offers further insight into the depth of this impact and the complexity of culture, specific family challenges, and the patient–carer dyad. This chapter offers a model of family-centred care to encourage an understanding of the impact of illness on the family, the family in the caregiver role, and the needs of family-based caregivers. From a clinical perspective, the authors offer a guide for assessing these families for interventions, including the use of open communication and information provision, the recognition of past patterns of relating, the encouragement of acceptance of support, discussions with the family as a whole, and support during unpreventable emotional suffering that families experience. Specific interventions described include preventive and supportive interventions, interventions that challenge dysfunction, and interventions with the family when a patient is dying. Family-centred care is challenging as a paradigm but a useful harness to improved quality of life, one that warrants the effort involved to ease the suffering of all.

Beliefs about voices in voice-hearers: the role of schema functioning

Background:Evidence is emerging that beliefs about voices are influenced by broader schematic beliefs about the self and others. Similarly, studies indicate that the relationship an individual has with their voice may mirror wider patterns of relating observed in social relationships, which may be influenced by schematic beliefs.Aims:This study examined associations between beliefs about voices and self and other schemas. Furthermore, associations between schemas and the perceived relationship between the hearer and their predominant voice were explored.Method:Forty-four voice-hearing participants were recruited across mental health services. Participants completed self-report measures of beliefs about voices, schema functioning, and relating between the hearer and their voice. Dimensions of voice experience, such as frequency and content, were assessed using a clinician-rated scale.Results:Beliefs about voices correlated with negative voice content and schemas. After controlling for negative voice content, schemas were estimated to predict between 1 and 17% of the variance in the six measured beliefs about voices; three of the associations reached statistical significance. Negative-self schema were the strongest predictors of beliefs about voices, whilst positive-self also showed potential relationships. Schemas also correlated with dimensions of relating between the hearer and their voice.Conclusions:In line with previous research, this study provides evidence that schemas, particularly self-schema, may be important in the development of beliefs about voices. This study offers preliminary findings to suggest that schemas are also associated with the perceived relationship between the hearer and their voice.

Attachment Style

Attachment style describes characteristic patterns of relating to close others and has important implications for psychotherapy. This chapter provides an original meta-analysis of 36 studies (3,158 patients) to determine the association of patient attachment with psychotherapy outcome. Patients with secure attachment pretreatment show better psychotherapy outcome than insecurely attached patients. Further, improvements in attachment security during therapy coincides with better treatment outcome. Moderator analyses suggest that those who experience low attachment security may find better treatment outcome in therapy that focuses on interpersonal interactions. The chapter closes with research limitations, training implications, diversity considerations, and therapeutic practices.

A qualitative examination of attachment-based concepts in probation supervision

Attachment theory is familiar to probation workers, with its broad messages that early care can leave a lasting legacy, and that patterns of relating can be repeated throughout the lifespan. Up close, however, attachment theory is complex, and research findings sometimes vague or contested. This empirical research examined the use of four key attachment-based concepts in generic probation practice over a period of six months. The concept of the probation officer as a potential secure base was a useful one, as was the idea that service users’ early attachment history could help to understand relationships and offending. Other concepts (the reflective function and attachment style) were less useful.

Dance Movement Therapy

Dance movement therapy is a pertinent therapeutic modality to regain the liveness of the intercommunication between mother and infant, and to foster the experience of wellbeing when their relationship has been muted by the mother’s postnatal depression, anxiety, or postpartum psychosis. The chapter cites models of dance movement therapy with mother–infant and documents previous studies. It describes the aesthetic processes and tools of dance that lead to enlivened physical narratives and shared joy that occur in the outpatient hospital group dance movement programme, with reference to published research and evaluation of the programme. Emerging patterns of relating are observed with individual mother–infant dyads in the dance movement individual programme in the acute psychiatric ward. The aesthetic experiences in both settings contribute to increasing cycles of improved responsiveness of mother and infant as seen in the expressive behaviours of their interaction.