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Ara Research Week Kicks Off in a Sporting Style

21 October, 2020

Ara Institute of Canterbury Ltd began its two-week Research Week Event – ‘Growing Research Culture’ with staff presentations today.

The ‘Week’ is spread out across a series of days and times at both the Madras City campus and the Manawa campus in Christchurch’s Health Precinct, across 20 – 22 October and 27 – 29 October.

Sports Science graduate Alice Busbridge opened proceedings with her much-needed examination of “Running Demands of Provincial Women’s Rugby Union Matches in New Zealand”, a study that was published in the April 2020 edition of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning. Alice, who has formerly worked within the Crusader’s training programme, tracked female players in a provincial rugby team with portable GPS devices. This data informed an analysis, undertaken in collaboration with other researchers, of the comparative running profiles of different game positions based on 96 data points collected across seven games.

She concluded that her findings, which highlighted clear differences between the running demands of men’s and women’s rugby, would help coaches and conditioning experts to adapt training to best suit players in specific positions, and could inform the development of game tactics, based on information about how players are utilised. The GPS analysis has previously been instrumental in keeping teams free of soft-tissue injuries, as it can be used to calculate players’ acute versus chronic workloads and therefore their likelihood of sustaining injuries due to fatigue.

Julie Bowen-Withington then took the stage to share her PhD research on “Emerging Discourse Shaping Simulation as an Educational Platform in Undergraduate Nursing Education”. Julie has been with Ara for 15 years, imparting clinical skills to undergraduates as a Nursing Tutor. She has previously worked within the midwifery sector in New Zealand and Australia and received training in the UK. Julie, through her work with simulated learning tools, grew interested in the question of ‘why are certain things simulated’ in a learning context, and drew upon Foucauldian discourse analysis to examine the ‘power and knowledge’ implications of the growing use of high-fidelity simulation technology within nursing education.

Julie utilised Foucault’s epistemological approach to analyse texts, focus groups interviews and images in order to tease out the dominant discourses and to examine who is sustaining them. She hopes that her research will help to illuminate topics such as the standardisation of nursing education internationally, changes in the nexus of power within such education and the possibility of improved medical outcomes due to the reduction of error.

Art and Design lecturer Kim Lowe followed with her “East Meets West Down South – An Exploration of Mixed-Race Identity through Fine Art Prints and Paintings”, taking attendees on a personal journey through the history of her own mixed-race family and sharing how this had informed her art while also encouraging her to begin incorporating Māori imagery and cultural insights into her work.

Kim, a long-term print devotee who became the 2019 recipient of the ‘Olivia Spenser-Bower’ award at UC, has spent the last year focussing on her painting output.

 The lunch-time event culminated in Jean Cory-Wright’s presentation of her Masters’ thesis research upon “Emotions in Education – The Crucial Difference for the Future”. Originally from Cumbria, Jean has spent over 20 years at Ara and is a key member of the Outdoor Education and Sustainability school academic team. Jean demonstrated how learners’ emotional state and their understanding of that state, as well as how to deal with it, is vital to their success in taking in information and retaining it.

She labels this process as ‘education about, for and through emotions’, and has found that engaging the entire body and brain, from the nervous and limbic systems through to the cerebral cortex has had clear benefits for her students.

She elaborated upon how students can be taught to understand the physical components of their brain and nervous system, and clearly see how this generates emotions and thence responses to stimuli, such as learning. Jean ultimately found that teaching learners the state of their own internal meteorology helped them better weather the emotional storms created by neurotransmitter activity, and being able to appreciate what was going on inside themselves helped them to better formulate constructive internal interpretations. It also led to the development of more considered responses when engaging with others and helped students to grow overall ‘emotional intelligence’ and social skills such as empathy.