ABSTRACT
Childhoodnature encounters can flourish in the Anthropocene. Assembled theories supporting childhoodnature can produce sparks when knocked together. The chemical composition of all living things is composed of the shared building blocks of all life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur. Indeed, even beyond our own planet, recent research has demonstrated that humans and our galaxy share 97% of the same atoms. Indeed, we are all merely matter circulating with and through bodies, places, and time. This entanglement of matter can be known as sympoiesis. Making together or making with, sympoiesis is a philosophical, ontological, and epistemological concept that rejects notions of human exceptionalism. Rather it supports an entangled and relational view;beings forever adapting, changing, and evolving in relation with one another. Boundaries are blurred between bodies, what is being human and what is being nonhuman is no longer clear. Applying a sympoietic approach to outdoor encounters this chapter explores the doing of childhoodnature and its relationship with outdoor environment education (OEE). Childhoodnature as a concept explicitly recognises children as ecologically congruent to all entities who are currently manifesting liveability on a dying planet. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
In this time of Covid-19, life in healthcare has changed immeasurably. It has rapidly been injected with an 'all hands-on deck' approach, to facilitate the necessary adaptations required to reduce the spread of the virus and deliver frontline clinical care. Inevitably aspects of these changes have disrupted the delivery of medical education, notably clinical placements have been cancelled and social distancing guidelines prohibit face-to-face teaching. The training of future doctors is an essential part of this effort. Indeed, the emergence of a global health threat has underlined its continued importance. For medical educators and students alike, we have been presented with a challenge. Concurrently, this presents us with an impetus and opportunity for innovation. For some time now, a transformation in medical education has been called for, with an increasing recognition of the need to prepare students for the changing landscape of healthcare systems. This has included a focus on the use of technology-enhanced and self-directed learning. As a team of educators and clinicians in psychiatry, working in the School of Medicine and Medical Sciences (SMMS) in University College Dublin (UCD), we will share how we have responded. We outline the adaptations made to our 'Psychiatry' module and consider the influence this may have on its future delivery. These changes were informed by direct student input.